The Asus ROG Rapture GT-BE19000 router has all you may need for your gaming setup, but it will require all you have in your wallet. This high-end networking device comes at the price of some gaming PCs and consoles.
At €760, the ROG Rapture GT-BE19000 should, and does, carry the latest and greatest features available for the consumer market. From Wi-Fi 7 to 10GbE, this bad boy got you covered, assuming you can afford its exorbitant price. Having to compete with much cheaper products that do the job just fine, the new ROG Rapture will have a hard time convincing all but the most well-heeled.
With cost out of the way, what does this beast bring for those who can afford it? Aside from the aggressive gamer look and RGB, you get support for the latest Wi-Fi 7 which debuts the 6GHz band, 10GbE LAN, plus all the fancy mesh, VPN, and QoS features. Those who prefer wireless connection can combine the older 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands with the new 6GHz to have a fast and/or long-distance link.
However, the best reliable high-speed solution remains the wired 10Gb/s Ethernet port. With the ROG Rapture GT-BE19000, you get two of these, usable as you wish, alongside four 2.5GbE ports to hook up your other devices. You also find two USB ports plus one 1GbE LAN, just in case you didn’t have enough of these.
Regarding software features, you have the usual mesh mode, access point, repeater, and bridge, coupled with gaming-specific ones such as packet prioritisation and port forwarding. The most useful of the bunch will probably be the integrated VPN allowing you to use a single account for all your machines. All of this is powered by a 2.5GHz quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM.
It goes without saying that your entire setup should be planned accordingly to take advantage of the capabilities no offer here. For example, you will need a modern motherboard with Wi-Fi 7 or preferably a 10GbE LAN card since even the best models still max at 5GbE, with most just recently upgrading to 2.5GbE. Next, you need proper cabling capable of handling these speeds, which is not a given especially if you have long cable runs. Lastly, your Internet connection must be fast enough to leverage the available local bandwidth. A tall order seeing how many regions still max out at 1Gb/s fibre.
However, that doesn’t mean such local speeds are meaningless. If you own a fancy NAS system or run your own Steam caching server, 10GbE will do wonders for you. The same is true if you work with high-resolution raw videos, because you can directly edit via the network. That said, there’s not much here that that cheaper routers can’t do. If you have the means, this is as good as it gets for gaming routers.
