Recommend the NETGEAR Nighthawk X6 (R8000-100NAS)?

I currently run OpenWrt 18.04.x on a NETGEAR Nighthawk X4 ( R7800-100NAS). I was a TP-LINK fan for a very long time but took a risk on the NETGEAR R7800 because of recommendations from this community. I have been very happy with the performance of the NETGEAR R7800 with OpenWRT.

I'm ready to upgrade to OpenWrt 19.07.1. I usually purchase a new(er) router when I upgrade so that if something goes wrong I can quickly fall back to something I know works. I been reading about the NETGEAR Nighthawk X6 (R8000-100NAS) and their seems to be some mixed reviews. Some comments even recommend staying with the R7800. Granted the reviews use the stock NETGEAR firmware.

Would you recommend the NETGEAR R8000 or should I stick with the NETGEAR R7800?

I'm very new to these two products, but have been researching them myself lately.
I believe the naming convention is misleading.
Unless I am confused, the R7800 is actually newer, and has better specs.

R7800 advantages per specs:
About 2 years newer
CPU: 1.7 Ghz vs 1Ghz
RAM: 512MB vs 256MB
potentially better support too, qualcomm vs broadcom

I think the only advantage of the R8000 is having tri-band (two 5Ghz bands).

Anyway, hopefully I am not completely wrong in this analysis :slight_smile:.
My opinion though, keep the R7800 - maybe wait to make sure 19.07.1 is stable, and then backup and upgrade.
All that being said, I have an R8000 because it was the best deal I found at the time... if you want one, I'd be happy to trade :laughing:.

Cheers!
DeadEnd

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R7800 wins hands down, I would never consider an R8000 unless you really need the tri band.

I am running 19.07 on my R7800 (my own build) without a problem but it is only lightly used.

If you do not want to make your own build for the R7800 you can use hnyman's or Kong's have tried both and also working very well, but hnyman's was missing WireGuard (he has it now) and Kong was missing Policy based routing (he has the VPN bypass)

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Thanks for the confirmation.
I got the R8000 for $40 I think... thought it was a great deal.
It has been a few weeks now, and I think after doing more research it was just an okay deal.
I had a lot of trouble getting the WiFi to be stable, but I think that was user error in setup :man_shrugging:.

Either way, I was upgrading from a TEW-673GRU... but to be honest I just did the 19.07.1 upgrade on that router too and set it up as my backup because the thing is just so darn reliable. Had it for a long time and it just works. I only upgraded to the R8000 because I had to do an EXTROOT on the TEW-673FRU because it didn't have any room for packages, but yesterday I found out about a FAT-squashfs image and that gave it the needed space. So now I'm keeping it... just in case ;-).

  • DeadEnd

Even if tri band is required it might be better to use two R7800 for that.

is 2.4 ghz unstable on the r8000 ? on all builds ?

I switched to an R7800 shortly after troubleshooting the R8000.
I didn't spend too much time on it as it has a broadcom chip and it seems they are more of a use at your own risk chip for OpenWRT... it worked but the R7800 is much more stable.

All that said... it's been 2 years since I touched it... I restored it to stock and sold it. Haven't looked at one since. Could be the support is better now :man_shrugging: .

Cheers!
DeadEnd