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Asus ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro Review: Welcome to Wi-Fi 8
Wi-Fi 8 hasn't fully arrived, and we're even further out from Wi-Fi 8-compatible devices to come out in the real world. But I've already gotten a taste of the future of wireless connectivity.
I tried out Asus's first quad-band Wi-Fi 8 gaming router, ahead of the final certification of the latest Wi-Fi standard. The router is based on the latest draft spec of Wi-Fi 8, so it will be updated as the standard approaches final certification. The only way I could test the benefits of Wi-Fi 8 was to connect together two of these bad boys.
After a couple of weeks of testing, there’s no denying the Asus ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro is an impressive bit of kit with many extras you don’t get from other manufacturers, including a year of NordVPN service. The firmware has also been surprisingly reliable for me, unlike first-generation Wi-Fi 7 Asus systems, which took several updates to reach stability. But most folks shouldn’t be thinking about Wi-Fi 8 yet, and this router costs $900, a hefty early adopter tax.
The Asus ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro is enormous, with eight adjustable but permanently affixed antennas. It’s around 14 inches square and 9 inches tall with the antennas and looks like a giant dead mecha spider. It doesn’t fit comfortably in any of the usual spots I have my router, and it makes absolutely no attempt to blend in. It does look cool, though, with a translucent window that shows off some internal components and a big Aura RGB ROG logo offering seven color lighting effects.
There are advantages to all this real estate. The advanced thermal design, with multiple heatsinks and channels for airflow, allows the router to operate at top performance reliably over the long term without a noisy fan. It remained silent and cool to the touch throughout my month of testing. There’s also space for a generous array of ports, including a 10Gbps WAN/LAN, a 10 Gbps LAN, four 2.5Gbps (one WAN/LAN), one 1Gbps LAN, a USB 3.2 Gen1, and a USB 2.0 port. You can even use link aggregation on the two 10 Gbps ports (y’know, just in case you need a 20 Gbps conduit).
Inside, you’ll find Broadcom’s BCM 6718 Wi-Fi chip, featuring a 2.6GHz quad-core processor, 256 MB of Flash memory, and 2 GB of DDR4 RAM. This is a quad-band router, so you have the usual 2.4 and 5 GHz bands, alongside two 6 GHz bands. I don’t want to drown you in spec soup here, but these are all 4 x 4 with OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access), 4096-QAM, and maximum-width channels, so we’re talking theoretical top speeds of 1.3 Gbps for the 2.4 GHz band, 5.6 Gbps for the 5 GHz band, and 11.5 Gbps for each of the 6 GHz bands. If you need explanations of the jargon and why each of these specs matter, you’ll find them in my detailed guide to how to buy a router. Just know that this router is at the top of the game.
Of course, you never get maximum speeds in real life, but the speed of the Asus ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro does not disappoint. You can reasonably expect up to 3 Gbps in the same room, around 1 Gbps through a wall, and I was still able to pull 350 Mbps at the bottom of my thick-walled old home’s garden. Comparing my upgrade pick of the best Wi-Fi routers, the tri-band Wi-Fi 7 Asus RT-BE96U, the GT-BN98 Pro proved slightly faster at all distances and longer-range across the board on every band. It also has an extra 6 GHz band, perfect for wireless backhaul if you want to use AiMesh (Asus’s mesh networking functionality) to create a mesh with another Asus router.
Multi-Link Operation (MLO), enabling you to connect devices on multiple bands simultaneously, seems to be maturing since its buggy debut with Wi-Fi 7. It enabled close-range speeds close to 5 Gbps in my tests, but that's using a second Asus ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro as a client (most Wi-Fi 8 devices, when they arrive, won't manage that).
Bear in mind that I can’t test the Automated Frequency Coordination (AFC) support yet, which cross-checks with licensed services in the area so your router can boost power