And when stacked up against the overpriced Netgear XR1000, it’s hands down a much better alternative.

If you’re on the market for a reliable Wi-Fi 6 (gaming) mesh-ready router, the TUF-AX5400 is an excellent choice.

What is the ASUS TUF Gaming AX5400 Dual Band Gaming Router?
As the title suggests, we have another router to review, with a few special features added so we can include the word “gaming” in the product title, target that lucrative market, and probably charge a few extra pounds. Hot on the heels of our review of the TP-Link Archer GX90 Gaming Router, which did well for its price, but with gaming features that weren’t very useful unless you’re a high-level gamer, we have the ASUS TUF Gaming AX5400 Dual Band Gaming Router.

Currently available at what seems like an incredibly low price, the TUF-AX5400 offers dual-band 6 Wi-Fi with speeds up to 4804Mbps, a 1.5GHz tri-core CPU, a dedicated gaming port, AiMesh compatibility, VPN support, 3-step port forwarding and more. Read on to see how this very reasonably priced router performs in our review…

What about the design and connections?
Beautiful, timeless, elegant. These are words you might use to describe works of art, even high-end speakers, but they’re words you certainly couldn’t use to describe routers. There seems to be a secret competition between router manufacturers to design the ugliest router possible, and if it’s a gaming router or a router supporting the new WiFi 6, then it’s even worse, with massive antennas and probably some unnecessary colors.

The TUF-AX5400 isn’t the ugliest we’ve seen, especially when compared to the massive TP-Link Archer GX90, but it’s not really something you’d want to show off. It’s a fairly compact router, measuring only 280mm x 180mm and 60mm high, all black with 6 antennas on the side and back and an overall design that looks quite menacing to it (if you’re a Stargate fan you’ll know what we mean! ) It also features ASUS Aura RGB lighting, which means you can change the large LED light on top of the router to the color of your choice, not sure why you would do that, but if it’s going to be near your PC, at least you can get the colors to match.

As for the connections, which are all on the back, we have 4 Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports, one of which is the dedicated gaming port, 1 Gigabit Ethernet WAN port and a USB 3.2 port. The power, connection, reset and WPS buttons are also present. On the front we have a row of 8 status lights.

Specifications

ASUS TUF-AX5400

• Wi-Fi Standard: Wi-Fi 6 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax
• Wi-Fi Speeds: 4804 (5GHz 11ax) + 574Mbps (2.4GHz 11ax)
• Antennas: 6 external antennas
• Wi-Fi Capacity: Tri-band
• Wi-Fi Features: OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access), BSS Coloring, MIMO
• Working Modes: Router Mode, Access Point Mode
• Processor: 1.5 GHz Tri-core CPU
• Ethernet Ports: 4 x Gigabit LAN Ports and 1 x Gigabit WAN port
• Wi-Fi Encryption: WPA/WPA2-Personal/WPA3-Personal, WPA/WPA2-Enterprise, WPS Support
• Mesh Features: AiMesh
• Security: AiProtection Pro with full router security, malicious site blocking and infected device prevention and blocking