Dissected: The ASUS RT-AC87U 802.11ac Wireless Router

Our friends at PC DIY have dissected and detailed the latest 802.11ac routers: RT-AC87U (and related RT-AC87R available in Best Buy, USA). It might look closer to a G-series laptop than your average router, but it seems the design begets performance as these are the worlds first routers with 4-antenna, 4-stream design with beam-forming that can max wireless throughput at a combined (2.4GHz+5GHz) 2334Mbps, and world’s fastest 5GHz at 1743 Mbps.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxwy2uidCJo[/video]

This best bit is, arguably, applicable to most of our homes or offices that daily connect dozens of wireless devices - everyone's smartphones,  tablets, a few laptops and PCs - to a single wireless access point. Instead of limiting everything to the slowest device, The RT-AC87U can connect at their respective best speeds. Here's how it does it:

"RT-AC87U is the 1st router to support multi-user MIMO technology for up to 2 times greater performance than single-user MIMO when streaming or transferring data in multi-device environments. While single-user MIMO routers communicate with one client at a time, multi-user MIMO router communicates with 2 MU-MIMO enabled clients simultaneously to better utilize the router’s capacity and reduce the client’s waiting time."

At 45W it uses less power than the average competitor (yes, despite the performance advantage!), and there's even thermal testing too! But (!!) at ROG we're still missing the all important answer: can you overclock it to go even fasterrrr?