Netgear has introduced the Nighthawk Pro XR500 gaming Wi-Fi router and Nighthawk Pro Gaming SX10 10G/Multi-Gig LAN Switch GS810EMX at the CES 2018. Powered by Duma OS, the former is a $300 beast for those who take play time seriously.
Flaunting an all black exterior and a design that reminds one of Razer products, it features four external antennas with quad-stream skills, a pair of USB 3.0 ports, a dual core 1.7GHz processor and MU-MIMO technology. But it seems lacking in the gigabit Ethernet ports department, with just four of them.
The XR500 runs at 800Mbps on 2.4GHz, or alternately, at 1733Mbps on 5GHz. One of the highlights of this router is its geofilter which ensures you’re not burdened by laggy players far outside your locality. The software dashboard enables users to keep tabs on bandwidth consumption, and servers can be whitelisted or blacklisted.
The router is capable of streaming simultaneously to multiple devices at once, enabling a group of gamers to play together without affecting each other’s performance. Netgear has also included the necessary tools to allow users to detect which devices (if any) are gulping too much bandwidth and causing lags within a game.
Once this is done, maximum upload and download speeds can be set for all the devices within the concerned network in order to correct for the imbalance. The XR500 even boasts of a gaming VPN to protect users’ identities and prevent DDoS cyber attacks. Speaking of the LAN Switch mentioned above, it’s priced at $300 too.
It shows off two auto-adaptive 10 Gigabit/Multi-Gigabit ports. It gets along with a bunch of Internet connected devices thanks to its options of 100Mbps, 1Gbps, 2.5Gbps, 5Gbps and 10Gbps connectivity speeds.