XD6 is neither the fastest nor the cheapest ZenWifi mesh router, but it is still worthy of your consideration.

ASUS ZenWifi XD6 dual-band Wi-Fi 6 mesh router, now available in 2 pieces, priced at US$380.

Last year, ASUS ZenWifi AX won a place in our list of best mesh routers after passing our speed test, offering near-top performance at a price of $450-expensive, yes, but still more Wi-Fi support -Fi 6 has a few hundred high-power tri-band mesh routers. Asus subsequently launched the ZenWifi Mini priced at $300. This is a weaker but cheaper system. It abandons the tri-band design, but retains the support for Wi-Fi 6 and adds a third to the combination. Two expanders.

Now, there is a new ZenWifi in the city-ASUS ZenWifi XD6. The price of the two-pack is 380 US dollars, plus an AX5400 router and a satellite extender, its figure is closer to the full-power AX6600 ZenWifi AX (now also known as XT8), but it adheres to the dual-band design AX1800 ZenWifi Mini. This dual-band design means that it has no additional 5GHz band that can be used exclusively for wireless backhaul for system transmission between routers and satellites, but the sturdy AX5400 construction means that it can still reach the highest speed close to last year’s triple-band ZenWifi XT8 compared to.

In other words, XD6 is the awkward middle child in the ZenWifi mesh router family, and the old ZenWifi XT8 is often priced as low as $400, so it is difficult to see a lot of value here. Nevertheless, when I tested the system, the performance was relatively strong, the average speed was fast, and the range was powerful enough to cover most medium-sized households without the need for a second extender. I recommend waiting for XD6 to grow into its own best-selling product, but if you devote yourself to Wi-Fi 6 and consider upgrading to a mesh network, this is still a system worth considering.

Use the ASUS router app to easily set up XD6. I was up and running in less than 10 minutes.

Like most ASUS routers, you can set up XD6 using the ASUS router app on your Android or iOS device. In doing so, you will find simplified step-by-step instructions to get your system up and running in minutes, plus easy access to router settings and functions. The combination of application-based functions is also relatively powerful, including common settings for guest network and parental control, as well as access to advanced settings such as DNS adjustment and port forwarding. There is also a fully functional quality of service engine, with just a few taps, you can prioritize the traffic of a specific device.

As for the XD6 devices themselves, they are smaller than last year's XT8 models, are sturdy to the touch, and look inconspicuous due to the harmless white plastic construction. Apart from the subtle glitter of the Asus logo, the design has nothing to show off, but they will blend perfectly with most home decorations, and no matter where you choose to put them, they won't take up much space.

Every ZenWifi XD6 device is the same and can be used as the main router or extender for your network. Each comes with three spare Ethernet ports.

Every XD6 device is also the same, so you can use one of them as a router or extender. Flip one over and you will find the power port and three spare Gigabit Ethernet jacks and the WAN port used to connect the modem to the router. Keep in mind that the WAN port is not a multi-interface jack like XT8, and two ports cannot be aggregated together, so XD6 will not be able to process incoming wired speeds of more than 1Gbps faster. The 2.5Gbps connection supported by XT8 is a good future-oriented connection, so I won't blame anyone for skipping XD6 and spending money for XT8 for this reason.

XD6 also doesn't have any USB ports. This is not uncommon in mesh routers, but if you want to connect a printer or external storage device to your network, it can be a bit cumbersome.

Using the router in the living room and the extender in the master bedroom, ZenWifi XD6 was able to push my 300Mbps fiber optic Internet connection to the maximum value of my entire house.

I tested each of my routers in 1,300 square feet. The ft. shotgun house in Louisville, Kentucky, has a 300Mbps fiber optic Internet connection. Admittedly, this is a small space for testing mesh routers, but by running a large number of speed tests over multiple days, I can still compare the performance of each router in a real-world environment. In the case of XD6, the performance is mostly quite strong.

I first tested a single device without an expander. The speeds of four of the five test rooms were very consistent, and the average download speed of each test room was about 375Mbps. This is as fast as my home network without upgrading to a faster plan. In the fifth room, at the back bathroom of the router at the other end of the house, my average speed dropped to 137Mbps. Almost every single point router I tested tried to maintain a strong signal in that room, so this is still a good result. In fact, the overall average download speed in my entire home is 326Mbps, and the XD6 produced the best speed I saw from a mesh router in a single device test.

Without extenders at all, a single ZenWifi XD6 device (blue) managed to outperform a single Netgear Orbi AX6000 device (red), which is impressive.

One caveat: Wi-Fi has made significant improvements in the past few years, and so has my test equipment. I'm currently running my test on a laptop that supports Wi-Fi 6, which is not accessible when I test many other top mesh routers (including ZenWifi XT8) in 2020. I plan to retest all my top picks in this category, but until then I want to be conservative with my comparisons.

However, I believe ZenWifi XD6 is a powerful hardware. One reason: I was able to re-run my speed test using the AX6000 version of Netgear Orbi, which is a beautiful tri-band mesh router and our best choice for performance. In this case, Orbi completed my single-device test with an overall average speed of 309 Mbps. The speed of the back bathroom has dropped to 101 Mbps, and my master bedroom has dropped slightly-this is an XD6 that I have not seen at all. .

In other words, the XD6 completely beat the Orbi AX6000 in this test, which is a bit surprising because the system has better specifications and costs several hundred dollars. Continue to bend, XD6.

A single device is one thing, but once the grid takes effect, how does XD6 overlap with Orbi? let's see.

With the single device test in the can, it's time to let the extender work and see the performance of the grid. For each system I tested, I connected the main router to the modem in the living room, and then set up an extender in the main bedroom of my house, which is located at the back of the house. The real test here is to see how the extender improves the speed of the dead zone in the rear bathroom, and to take a closer look at how my speed is maintained when I walk around with the laptop in my hand.

Before scrolling to a chart showing how all the systems I tested stack up, another quick warning. Like I said, I recently upgraded to a new laptop for testing. So far, I have only used it to run full tests on two Wi-Fi 6 mesh routers: XD6 and Orbi AX6000. (I also used it to test three non-branded Wi-Fi 5 mesh routers. You can read all the relevant information here.)

The remaining models listed were tested before I owned that new test laptop, so I ran a Wi-Fi 6 speed test with the iPhone 12 Pro-this is a different device but the same 802.11ax support . I don’t think this difference will have much impact on the results, but it’s worth noting that I added an asterisk next to the names of the systems tested on the iPhone in the table below. Again, once I can re-run the tests for these systems and other systems (including Nest Wifi and the tri-band ZenWifi XT8) with a new laptop, I will update this article.

understood? OK. Let's look at another chart.

Connect a router and an extender to a Wi-Fi 6 client device (Lenovo ThinkPad laptop or iPhone 12 Pro, indicated by an asterisk), and the XD6 maintains its own performance and is more like a tri-band router than a dual-band router. -band one, even surpasses the three-band Eero Pro 6. Another very strong result.

You are viewing the average download speed of six different Wi-Fi 6 mesh routers in each room of my house, all of which are connected to Wi-Fi 6 client devices. The king belongs to the king, and the Netgear Orbi AX6000 leads with an overall average speed of 367Mbps. In second place is the Arris Surfboard Max AX6600, with an overall average speed of 350Mbps. This is a powerful model. Due to the inconsistency with the previous generation of Wi-Fi 5 devices, it is not one of my first choices. The bronze medal is XD6, its overall average speed is 336Mbps, and it stays above 300Mbps in every room in my house. This is great for dual-band systems, and better than triple-band Eero Pro 6. 

You should also pay attention to the gap between XD6 and the other two dual-band systems listed here, TP-Link Deco X20 and Eero 6. XD6 provides more powerful performance than when connected to Wi-Fi 6 devices in range through an extender.

When connected to a Wi-Fi 5 device, the XD6 is a bit unstable, and the speed from one room to another is inconsistent.

Wi-Fi 6 is great, but most of us still use a lot of devices that support 802.11ac or Wi-Fi 5 at home. Thanks to Wi-Fi 6, devices like this can still connect to Wi-Fi 6 routers for backward compatibility, but they usually see maximum speeds up to 30% slower. Moreover, because Wi-Fi 6 devices use new Wi-Fi features (such as OFDMA and 1024QAM) to connect more efficiently, Wi-Fi 5 devices that lack these features may also experience other performance degradation.

This is why I ran two speed tests, one on Wi-Fi 6 devices and another on previous generation Wi-Fi 5 devices (especially my previous speed test laptop, the 2015 Dell XPS 13 ). As shown in the figure above, the results are a bit different this time.

First, the speed is generally slow, which is not surprising considering that Wi-Fi 5 is not as fast as Wi-Fi 6. Nevertheless, Netgear Orbi AX6000 still tops the list with the same stable and stable speed. Consistent, although overall it is about 20% slower. Followed by last year's tri-band ZenWifi XT8, followed by Arris Surfboard Max AX6600 (although there are inconsistencies between different rounds of testing) and Eero Pro 6 averages are still very high. It is worth noting that all four models are tri-band mesh routers, which makes sense-without Wi-Fi 6, the third backhaul frequency band will be strengthened and shined.

This brings us to XD6-the orange bar in the image above. It was tested throughout the place and ranked fifth on average, providing extremely fast speeds in the living room, but speeds below 200Mbps in the kitchen and corridor bathrooms, and then bounced behind the house. 

Each point in these graphs represents a speed test result. On the left, the speed of the download to the Wi-Fi 5 device. On the right is the download speed of devices that support Wi-Fi 6. Wi-Fi 5 tests are all over the map, and when testing with the same Wi-Fi, I haven’t seen the results of other top tested mesh routers-Fi 5 devices.

The average only tells part of the story-if you want to take a closer look, look at the scatter plots, they show the results of each individual speed test I ran with the XD6. The Wi-Fi 5 test is on the left, and you can clearly see how different the tests are. Most of the reason is because I ran half of the test near the router in the living room, and the other half had a new connection in the back bathroom away from the router. For example, when I start to connect up close, I see that the speed in the kitchen is much faster, but when I start to connect from a distance and work forward, the grid in the kitchen is much slower, probably because of it Confused whether to route my connection through the extender. At the same time, the hallway bathroom and the master bedroom are significantly faster, with front and back connections.

You can see a similar split in Wi-Fi 6 data, but the severity is much lower. In these tests, the speed of the second half of my house is the same, but please pay attention to the results of the split speed between the living room and the kitchen. The lower set of speeds in each room comes from a back-to-front test-when I reach the front of the house after starting the connection at a long distance, the speed is usually lower than when I started the connection at a short distance, probably because of the grid Let me connect through the extender longer than it should.

This inconsistency in speed is exactly what you don't want in mesh routers. Although my connection has never been completely shaken, it is still a noteworthy issue, especially because it is down from what we saw on the XT8. It is also worth noting that the overall Wi-Fi 5 download average of XD6 is basically the same as that of TP-Link Deco X20 at 232Mbps, which is only slightly ahead of Nest Wifi's average of 222Mbps. If you want great performance but don't want to spend more than $250 or so, then these two are good budget choices.

If ASUS ZenWifi XD6 is a second-class, then it is a second-class with excellent performance. When it beat the more expensive Netgear Orbi AX6000 in my single-device test, it weighed more than it, and when I added the mesh to the equation with an extender, it behaved more like a fancy Three-frequency model instead of dual-frequency model. Band model, it is. I would even say that XD6 is the most powerful dual-band mesh router I have tested so far.

However, I did not see the same advantages of Wi-Fi 5 devices, which is worth noting, because devices like this may still account for most of the gadgets in our homes. This will change over time, and maybe XD6 will also improve over time. Currently, it is difficult to recommend at full price, especially when the well-received tri-band models such as Eero Pro 6 and Asus’ own ZenWifi XT8 are slightly more expensive.