Asus ROG Rapture GT-BE98 Quad-band WiFi 7 AiMesh Spelrouter

Excellent Router, old Router approx 500mbs, this new Router 1100mbs!

Best change I ever made.

Purchased this following reviews, good router and easy to install and use. Speed has increase across the whole network and connections are very stable. Good for gaming also streaming

Excellent router easy to setup and very fast very good

Great router. Very fast and powerful and perfect for gamers and more. Speeds are unimaginable. A little bit expensive for average persons but like every other new technology it’s understandable. I recommend the new router Rapture-BE98 with trust 👍😎

I would only consider buying an Asus router and I have had a few in the past, the RT-AC68U, the RT-AC86U, the RT-AX82U and the RT-AX86U. Now I have the GT-BE98. Asus routers are highly configurable and operate an outstanding mesh system, called AiMesh, which makes whole home WiFi a breeze.

No review would be complete without talking about the price. This router has just about everything and you pay for that. No one is forced to buy a top of the range router, so anyone buying the BE98 it is a volunteer to the price-tag, so I am not going criticise the price, as there is a whole range of Asus routers to fit most incomes.

After using the GT-BE98 for a couple of weeks, I would call it a mixed bag. Physically, it is big, very big and no amount of styling is going to detract from it looking imposing. Yes, it does look like an upside-down cybernetic giant spider! With the size comes the power consumption. Not really a criticism, because if you are going to spend a large amount of money on router like this, you are probably not going to be put off by the fact that it uses over 20 watts of electricity just to be idle and goes above that when under a load.

Features are just vast, you get WiFi 7, which hopefully adds a bit of future-proofing, you get a 10Gb LAN port, a 10Gb WAN port, 4 x 2.5Gb LAN ports and just one 1Gb LAN port. The LAN ports are fast, very fast, to a point that I noticed a difference when web browsing on my PC coming from the RT-AX86U to the RT-BE98. The array of features in the firmware is nothing short of staggering, as is the case with every Asus router I have owned.

WiFi does not seem to have much more reach over my AX router, but it is faster and access to files on my NAS appears much quicker. It should be noted that I have not tried WiFi 7 clients yet, so that will (hopefully) impress even more. When at a distance from the router and the WiFi signal is weak, it does carry more data and speedtests do show solid performance, so the signal does not travel much further, but is useful for further, which does equate to greater range.

I have the router setup on a wired 2.5Gb LAN connection for an AiMesh system with my RT-AX86U as a node. My previous AiMesh system was with the RT-AX86U as the router and the RT-AX82U as the node and that was perfect and stable for several years, but was starting to fall over, with buffering and other glitches appearing, where there were no hints of problem previously. It was ready for a re-set and if I was doing that, it would be with a new router.

As you might expect with a recently released router, there are some issues that hopefully Asus will iron out. Before adding any settings, there was the obligatory firmware update and I manually added the settings that had worked so well in my previous AiMesh setup.

The first issue I encountered was on the first day. The router disconnected already connected wireless clients, denying them internet access. My Alexa had a red circle and said it was having trouble connecting to the internet. My phone’s WiFi connection stopped and I needed to provide the password again, which was apparently not correct, albeit, it was correct previously. I re-booted the router, that problem solved the issue, the phone re-connected without alteration of the password. Using the Asus router app, I felt it prudent to schedule a daily re-boot, to iron out any similar issues for the next few months.

The next issue was with an AiMesh node, the 5GHz band did not appear from the node. Re-boots and a bit of Googling the issue got me past this one (essentially, had to stop using 160MHz bandwidth on the 5GHz channels). I am going to guess that my two AX routers played together so well because they had the same WiFi, perhaps mixing a WiFi 7 router, with an AX node might be a potential cause? Time will tell.

The Guest Pro network was the next issue. Despite being setup to appear on all the AiMesh nodes, it would only appear on the main router.

As times goes no, I will update this review with any issues or improvements, as they arise.

In summary, excellent fast performance, but stability does need some work.

Range could be better on radios why are the radios bot strong for long range through walls… and around house

Very disappointed, i have had nothing but problems, constant disconnects, to get 6ghz you have to be virtually sitting on the router, also when trying to configure either via ip address or through the App is a nightmare, hard resets, new firmware doesn’t make a difference, I’ve had to turn logging off and turn of the QOS service(which is a joke) no more adaptive. Thinking of sending it back and sticking with my RT-BE88U.

Not recommended! Expensive and does not work! Read online about it - many people have same issues but Asus does nothing about. Waiting on replay from my provider, if nothing good - this thing is going back where is come from!

I can't connect it I've tried everything and still nothing

Useless. Works well briefly but then randomly drops signal. Appalling range. Don't buy