Description
Netgear Nighthawk AX12 For 4BHK House/Flats
The broad point of view is that this is a dual-band router that supports the latest and fastest version of Wi-Fi and plenty of customization options, especially if you want to use the thing to manage access to networked storage. With a multi-language LAN/WAN port supporting inbound speeds of up to 5Gbps and the option to combine two single gig Ethernet jacks for combined inbound wired speeds of up to 2Gbps, this router takes some of the common network bottlenecks and right crashes through them.
In other words, I think this router is probably overkilled for most people – and the jiggling SmartConnect feature, which only guided me from one range to the next while I was moving around my house, gives me some downtime before I’d recommend it to the rest of you. But if you’re after speed — and an end to those pesky jams — you’ll find plenty to like in the Nighthawk’s cockpit.
Netgear Nighthawk AX12 Design
With its eight antennas hidden inside a neat array of foldable wings, the RAX120 looks more like a router than something Kylo Ren might teleport across the galaxy within. Or maybe it’s the Dark Helmet router you’ll be using aboard Spaceball One, if only because it can double as a prop during playtime with its spaceball action figures. I might date myself, but my point is that the thing looks futuristic (if not a bit aggressive, which seems to be the trend in high-end router design these days). You’ll discover a quick selection of Ethernet sockets, including a WAN port, a multi gig port, and four gigabit LAN ports. You can connect two LAN ports to the same server and combine their speeds to support transfer rates of up to 2Gbps, or just use this multi gig port to see speeds of up to 5Gbps. This multifunction port and total LAN ports can operate in WAN mode, which means this router will be able to keep up if your incoming internet speeds are over 1Gbps.
That’s a lot of flexibility, and it opens up a whole new world of wired networking. Just know that those faster connections won’t do anything to speed up the slow incoming signal. They’re a great piece of future-proofing, and great if you’re planning to connect your router to a local server to transfer files between computers on your network – but if you’re just looking to get online, they win. It won’t make much of a difference anytime soon.
Netgear Nighthawk AX12 Speed And Performance
In our own lab, connecting each router to a local server and then downloading files wirelessly to a 2×2 laptop with Wi-Fi 6 from various distances, we clocked the RAX120 with a maximum speed of 1,263Mbps over a 5GHz distance preserver. Speeds dropped to about 818Mbps when we increased the distance from 5 feet to 75 feet.
Those are impressive numbers — each a few hundred megabytes per second faster than you’ll see with pretty much any Wi-Fi 5 router — but they’re not quite as fast as the fastest Wi-Fi 6 router we’ve tested so far, the TP-Link Archer AX6000. This device scored speeds of 1,524 Mbps at 5 feet and 869 Mbps at 75 feet in the same test, and also held speeds above 1,000 Mbps at an average distance of 37.5 feet. The RAX120 didn’t – which indicates that TP-Link might offer a better range, too.
Netgear Nighthawk AX12 Hardware
As for the internals, here’s a quick hardware summary:
- 64-bit quad-core 2.2 GHz processor.
- 2.4GHz AX: 4×4 (transmit/send), 1024 QAM, 20/40MHz.
- 5GHz AX: 8×8 (send/send), 1024 QAM, 20/40/80/160MHz.
- 8 antennas, up to 12 Wi-Fi streams.
- 2 USB 3.0 (storage only).
- Dimensions: 12.2 x 7.48 x 1.77 inches (310 x 190 x 45 mm).
- Weight: 3 pounds (1364 grams).4
Netgear Nighthawk AX12 Pros & Cons
Pros
- Significantly faster than similar Wi-Fi 5 routers.
- LAN aggregation and multi gig socket options support incoming speeds of up to 5Gbps.
- Good VPN option via Nighthawk web interface.
Cons
- Band Routing via SmartConnect.
- Top speeds are slightly lower than the fastest-tested Wi-Fi 6 router, which costs less.
