Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
I had a bit of a shock and awe moment with the AX12 router, as I find it a very good product. Of course, looks are trivial and if you will can be argued, not that important. But if you need to place your router where it is visible, well this is among the best-looking routers without being a Christmas tree based on RGB LEDs as well. Features wise the router as well ticks all the boxes, AX WIFI6 was hugely strong on this unit, both 2.4 and 5 GHz bands at 5 meters showed performance I have never been able to measure before. At 15 meters through a steel-reinforced concrete floor, all things get fairly equal again. Much to my surprise, the AX12 is not based on the DumaOS GUI we've seen in previous Nighthawk models. As such it lacks some features that you probably never use anyway, like packet prioritization and such. The underlying OS does seem to be DumOS, however, revamped and professionalized. The software is very advanced and offers all you need really. We had no issues setting up the router for WAN and WIFI and thanks to the OS software combined with that quad-core SoC we can only conclude this product is totally solid. The WIFI performance is pretty baffling when you enable AX WIFI6, that said, of course, your clients also need to be AX compatible. Currently, that is limited towards a few laptops and many X570 AMD chipset based motherboards. Future WIFI enabled motherboard and products obviously are going to be AX enabled as well. So with this router you'll be well prepared. In my office on a single 5 GHz, WIFI link I was able to (quite easily) reach 500 MBit/s over the office 500 MBit/s WAN link, that was over WIFI. So yes, this is solid, really solid. Remember we recently moved into a new space the building seems to be much harder on anything Wi-Fi due to coated isolation materials, steel-reinforced floors, etc. In retrospect, that is a good environment to test in as it is a more worst-case scenario. In your household, the ranges and numbers might be much better, and then if you live in the city with 40 other access point nearby, it might be worse. This is what makes proper Wi-fi testing so incredibly difficult. You can also create a cage of Farraday and test inside it, that's perfect for static measurements, but completely useless relative seen for real-world performance. So I do hope you can see the complications with Wi-Fi testing as the results in your house can be much better, but also worse.
Overall performance
Overall wired throughput is good, for LAN to LAN measurements we topped 940 Mbit/sec on 1 Gigabit Ethernet and 4.76 Gbps on the 5 GigE link. That's serious stuff as that is almost 600 MB/sec. However herein also is a problem to be found, a single 5 GigE jack, what can you use it for? Well nothing much, however, any fast storage device connected to the router by USB 3.0 will be able to get accessed at full speed. We've been hovering close to 250 MB/sec with a USB 3.1 Flash storage device. Again, these routers need multiple 5 GigE or faster jack to make the most sense and to get that MultiGigE infrastructure completed in your household or office. The AX12 is loaded with features and configuration is easy, you can easily tweak virtually any aspect of your connection. The reality is also that you don’t actually need much bandwidth for gaming, streaming video and such however is a different thing. You get features like a private network, VPN options, server routing options and strong diagnostic and monitoring options powered by this quad-core CPU core product. It's good in features and aesthetics, really really good even. And albeit perf differs here and there, every little corner inside my house did get coverage. These advanced routers are getting firmware updates pretty actively, and that's great in these vulnerable times where everything connected is prey that is hunted. Now, I like the admin interface, which does offer extremely advanced network settings.
Energy consumption
The one soar topic for the AX12 is power consumption - it is reasonable at best as far as I am concerned, at almost 13 running to 15 Watts continuous and under hefty throughput load that number can rise towards 25 Watts. With your household devices online 24/7 these days your power bill will result at an additional 30 bucks per year just for that router (depending on local rates). If you continuously heavily stress the router that could run towards 50 bucks per year.
Price
Routers are increasingly more expensive whenever there's a 'Gaming' label on there and the Nighthawk series does fit that bill, so yes the router is priced 399,- USD/EUR. In the year 2019 that is a lot of money, but again this is a flagship AX router with a premium SoC as well as a (single) 5 GigE Ethernet jack. It would be nice though if routers like these would get all ports based on Multi-GigE switch functionality, as there the tech would really advance faster.
Concluding
Aside from the somewhat high power consumption and my personal desire to see all Gigabit jacks replaced with all 5 Gigabit or better jacks, there's little left to complain really. Perhaps some mesh functionality like ASUS offers would be nice, and then arguably important or not, added online protection and gaming extra features.
That said, this AX6000 ready product is one of the best routers I have ever tested. With normal WIFI ranges and AX clients, the performance simply is breathtaking. In all other respects, WAN-LAN WAN-WIFI and LAN-LAN the numbers also run close to its theoretical highest values. The Netgear Nighthawk AX12 router truly is a premium product that delivers at all fronts. It is also the first for Netgear with that 5 Gigabit jack, which was a good move to make. But we do need more of them on the router (and some affordable 10 GigE Ethernet switches on the market would help to adopt and adapt Multi-GigE as a technology. The software interface is revamped from the gaming DumaOS, it offers everything you need and brings loads of extra functionality towards the router. That can be something as simple as port forwarding, but even automatic firmware updates so you don’t have to spend time checking for updates or bothering to install them. So in closing, 399 USD/EUR is a serious chunk of money for a router. I'd argue that this is one of the best AX ready routers your money can get you, with included 5 Gigabit jack plus under that hood, powerful hardware. Perhaps the fact that it looks like an unnamed spaceship from Star Wars does help a little. We can only bring it home with a top pick award, what a nice product!
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