Asus RT-AX57 Go review: Small, but surprisingly powerful | Expert Reviews

Asus RT-AX57 Go portable router review: Performance

The RT-AX57 Go’s small size and low power requirements are great for portability, but what do they mean for Wi-Fi range and connection speeds? To find out, I installed the router in the study at the front of my home and connected an Asustor AS3304T NAS appliance to the LAN port. I then connected my test laptop to the router’s 5GHz Wi-Fi 6 network, carried the laptop around to various rooms in my home and measured upload and download speeds when copying files to and from the NAS.

It’s worth mentioning that Asus ships its routers with the 5GHz channel width set to a maximum of 80MHz, rather than the full 160MHz supported by Wi-Fi 6. This reduces radio interference, but it also limits the bandwidth of the wireless network, which is why most other router manufacturers use the 160MHz setting by default. For my tests, I manually enabled the 160MHz option in the management interface.

Here are the results I saw, along with speeds from the other abovementioned routers for context:

As you can see, the RT-AX57 Go performs very creditably, especially considering its size and price. It easily outpaced all previous portable routers we’ve tested, providing strong coverage even in areas where Netgear’s and TP-Link’s pocket-sized hotspots couldn’t provide a signal at all.

The RT-AX57 Go beat some full-sized routers, too, with higher top speeds than the venerable Linksys MR7350 and stronger overall performance than the D-Link R32 Eagle Pro AI. The only router in this price range that more or less kept up in all locations was Asus’ own RT-AX59U.

These impressive numbers do come with a few caveats. First, note that the 2×2 MIMO connection between the router and the test laptop fully maxes out the RT-AX57 Go’s wireless hardware: there’s no surplus capacity, as with routers that support 3×3 or 4×4 MIMO. That means general performance will be dragged down if several clients want to use the wireless network at the same time.

Remember, too, that wired networking support is limited. The RT-AX57 Go offers only a single gigabit LAN port, and while you can use an external switch to connect multiple devices, they will all have to share the bandwidth of the host port. By contrast, the RT-AX59U has three separate gigabit Ethernet sockets.

These issues may be immaterial if you’re just planning to use the RT-AX57 Go as a pop-up hotspot, but they limit the router’s ability to grow with your needs. Again, though, AiMesh gives you options for building out your network if you need to.