ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AC2900 Review

Conclusion

One of the hardest things to do in any technology design is to provide a solution which is just as suitable for those who don’t fully understand what they are doing and wish to do the bare minimum as it is to those who wish to micromanage every single element, make every decision, and customise it with the knowledge of an expert. With the ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AC2900 we think the designers have perfectly balanced these two competing ethos’ and managed to bring something to the market which truly is all things to all people. It is as friendly and easy to use as a blanket, but as deep and complex as particle physics, without either of these disparate user groups feeling their experience has been compromised by the needs of the other.

Networking is definitely a dark art and one into which most of us haven’t really delved. Let us, for a moment, illustrate this difficulty of simple but labyrinthine with two examples that might make it clearer to the average user how well ASUS have solved this problem. Even with the advent of UEFI when you press the delete key to enter the BIOS of your motherboard you’re presented with a huge amount of opaque options, nearly none of which are remotely explained either in the UEFI or the manual. You know what you’re doing or you don’t but in either case the motherboard wont help you. Similarly if you go into the options in your browser, for example Firefox, there are some fairly easy to follow things to change, but if you type about:config into the address bar you’re suddenly presented with a raft of things that might as well be written in Klingon for all the help they give about what they do. Designing a product which can take the user from the ease of changing their wireless password through port forwarding to even voice control is something very few have successfully pulled of, but the ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AC2900 manages it with aplomb.

We really can’t overstate how fantastic the software is and the people behind it deserve plenty of plaudits for blending an incredibly powerful feature set into a user friendly package. We think it’s been so successful that it could be the inspiration for many people to increase their knowledge and dip their toes into the complex waters of networking setup. After all, we’re all enthusiasts and want to be able to know how our hardware works and control the bits we’d like to work in a certain way. Until now that’s usually required a year at college to learn, but the Rapture software is laid out well enough you could learn it by tinkering in the evenings, with the security that you would have to try really hard to break something irreparably.

Of course having the ability to tweak within an inch of its life is meaningless if the hardware you’re tweaking isn’t up to snuff, but the ROG Rapture is everything you would expect from a Republic of Gamers branded product. With a 1.8 GHz dual-core supplying the performance, and 512MB of RAM, there is plenty of hardware moving things along. The GT-AC2900 supports, as its name implies, all of the IEEE 802.11 formats from 802.11a through to 802.11AC and even the 1024QAM 5 GHz band which supplies a beefy 2167 Mbps of bandwidth. There are three external antenna along with an internal one giving you full WiFi coverage amongst even the largest offices or homes, letting you place the Rapture in the most convenient location and not compromise your transfer speeds. Additionally there are umpteen filter options letting you control exactly what traffic is available to be accessed, as well as controlling the access limits of individual devices. The ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AC2900 is also fully GeForce NOW certified which lets you dedicate 90% of bandwidth to cloud gaming, streaming games from powerful gaming rigs onto non-gaming rigs without undue fuss. Cloud gaming is still a new technology with some wrinkles to iron out, but it’s nice to know you’re already on board that train if it’s something that interests you.

The enormous amount of bandwidth combined to a strong signal and some of the best software it’s been our pleasure to experience is all wrapped up in an extremely attractive product. It’s time to ditch that creaky, over-heating lump of plastic supplied by your service provider and enjoy the benefits a powerful dedicated Router can bring, and the ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AC2900 wins our OC3D Gamers Choice Award.

  

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