“Netgear Nighthawk RAXE500 Review: Is it Worth the High Price Tag for a 6GHz Router?”

If you’ve been following my series of reviews of Wi-Fi 6E supported Wi-Fi routers over the past few weeks, you’ll know that devices that support this new Wi-Fi standard are quite expensive. Last week we looked at the cheapest, namely the only Wi-Fi 6E router from TP-Link’s range: the Archer AX-75. With this you get support for the 6GHz band with a relatively low budget. However, with this router you will not get the most out of this new frequency band, even in ideal circumstances. This device is limited in its throughput because it is only equipped with 1GBit/s ports. The ASUS ROG Rapture AXE16000 we reviewed previously was at the other end of the spectrum, with its dual 10Gbit/s ports, double-walled rgb mirror artwork, eight ruggedly designed antennas, and two 5GHz chipsets.

Today we take a look at Netgear’s flagship Wi-Fi 6E: the Nighthawk RAXE500. With that router, Netgear is slightly less violent than ASUS, except with the price, because it does not lie. At about 550 euros at the time of writing, the RAXE500 is not much cheaper than the AXE16000, which currently costs more than 566 euros. The RAXE500 is a (true) triband router with a relatively large number of Ethernet ports (six), including a 2.5 GBit/s connection, a double USB3 port and a design to fly under the radar. Surely this should be a dot on the radar for people looking for a very sturdy 6GHz router without all the frills that the competition offers? To measure is to know, so in this article we take a look at the RAXE500 inside and out, then let the internal fan roar in our Wi-Fi test setup.