Review: Asus ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro
Wi-Fi 8 hasn’t fully arrived, and we’re even further out from Wi-Fi 8-compatible devices to come out in the real world. But I’ve already gotten a taste of the future of wireless connectivity.
I tried out Asus’s first quad-band Wi-Fi 8 gaming router, ahead of the final certification of the latest Wi-Fi standard. The router is based on the latest draft spec of Wi-Fi 8, so it will be updated as the standard approaches final certification. The only way I could test the benefits of Wi-Fi 8 was to connect together two of these bad boys.
After a couple of weeks of testing, there’s no denying the Asus ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro is an impressive bit of kit with many extras you don’t get from other manufacturers, including a year of NordVPN service. The firmware has also been surprisingly reliable for me, unlike first-generation Wi-Fi 7 Asus systems, which took several updates to reach stability. But most folks shouldn’t be thinking about Wi-Fi 8 yet, and this router costs $900, a hefty early adopter tax.
Bigger and Better
The Asus ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro is enormous, with eight adjustable but permanently affixed antennas. It’s around 14 inches square and 9 inches tall with the antennas and looks like a giant dead mecha spider. It doesn’t fit comfortably in any of the usual spots I have my router, and it makes absolutely no attempt to blend in. It does look cool, though, with a translucent window that shows off some internal components and a big Aura RGB ROG logo offering seven color lighting effects.
There are advantages to all this real estate. The advanced thermal design, with multiple heatsinks and channels for airflow, allows the router to operate at top performance reliably over the long term without a noisy fan. It remained silent and cool to the touch throughout my month of testing. There’s also space for a generous array of ports, including a 10Gbps WAN/LAN, a 10 Gbps LAN, four 2.5Gbps (one WAN/LAN), one 1Gbps LAN, a USB 3.2 Gen1, and a USB 2.0 port. You can even use link aggregation on the two 10 Gbps ports (y’know, just in case you need a 20 Gbps conduit).
Inside, you’ll find Broadcom’s BCM 6718 Wi-Fi chip, featuring a 2.6GHz quad-core processor, 256 MB of Flash memory, and 2 GB of DDR4 RAM. This is a quad-band router, so you have the usual 2.4 and 5 GHz bands, alongside two 6 GHz bands. I don’t want to drown you in spec soup here, but these are all 4 x 4 with OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access), 4096-QAM, and maximum-width channels, so we’re talking theoretical top speeds of 1.3 Gbps for the 2.4 GHz band, 5.6 Gbps for the 5 GHz band, and 11.5 Gbps for each of the 6 GHz bands. If you need explanations of the jargon and why each of these specs matter, you’ll find them in my detailed guide to how to buy a router. Just know that this router is at the top of the game.
Further and Faster
Of course, you never get maximum speeds in real life, but the speed of the Asus ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro does not disappoint. You can reasonably expect up to 3 Gbps in the same room, around 1 Gbps through a wall, and I was still able to pull 350 Mbps at the bottom of my thick-walled old home’s garden. Comparing my upgrade pick of the best Wi-Fi routers, the tri-band Wi-Fi 7 Asus RT-BE96U, the GT-BN98 Pro proved slightly faster at all distances and longer-range across the board on every band. It also has an extra 6 GHz band, perfect for wireless backhaul if you want to use AiMesh (Asus’s mesh networking functionality) to create a mesh with another Asus router.
Multi-Link Operation (MLO), enabling you to connect devices on multiple bands simultaneously, seems to be maturing since its buggy debut with Wi-Fi 7. It enabled close-range speeds close to 5 Gbps in my tests, but that’s using a second Asus ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro as a client (most Wi-Fi 8 devices, when they arrive, won’t manage that).
Bear in mind that I can’t test the Automated Frequency Coordination (AFC) support yet, which cross-checks with licensed services in the area so your router can boost power for increased range and coverage on the 6 GHz band. It is available in the US and will be in the UK soon, but not every country allows it, and your mileage will vary depending on your local licensees.
Wi-Fi 8 isn’t primarily about higher speeds. It aims to improve stability and reliability with a raft of features that compensate for local interference and reduce latency for important tasks like gaming. The Asus ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro boasts adaptive Quality of Experience and device optimization, automatically recognizing gaming devices and streams and giving them priority.
With four gamers online in my home, from two gaming PCs, a MacBook, and a PS5, it was smooth and plain-sailing all the way. There’s a Game Boost mode that employs AI to ensure stable connectivity and low latency for gaming streams, GTNet optimizes your server connections and keeps ping and packet loss to a minimum, and there’s a mobile gaming mode. You are still at the mercy of your internet connection and online servers, but this is as much as you can do right now on the home side of things.
Added Value
Asus is always among my top brands for routers and mesh systems, in no small part because the company eschews the subscription model and offers a ton of additional value through features and services that other manufacturers want to charge you a monthly fee for. That includes robust security software, in-depth parental controls, and VPN support (you can redeem a year of NordVPN service with this router). There’s also real-time traffic monitoring and a traffic analyzer.
The extras continue with USB for mobile network tethering, file sharing, or media streaming. You can set up as many networks as you want (IoT, Guest, Gaming), all with their own specific settings. Bands are split by default, but you can combine them and use band steering. You can also set up adaptive device or activity prioritization. The mobile app is as full-featured as they come, and you can dig even deeper via the web interface. Chances are good that, however you want to configure your network, you can do it with the Asus WRT6.0 firmware.
One of the most pleasant surprises with the Asus ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro is the stability. When I tested early Wi-Fi 7 routers from Asus, I ran into all kinds of weird issues and glitches, and it took a while for firmware updates to shake them out. This router competes out of the box, and the Wi-Fi 8 spec finalization, further firmware updates, and AFC rollout will improve it further.
It’s obviously early days for Wi-Fi 8, and most folks don’t need to spend anything like this money on a router. You can find many cheaper alternatives in my best routers and best mesh systems guides. The only other Wi-Fi 8 router I’ve tested is the TP-Link Archer 8 Ultra, but it’s not available Stateside because TP-Link still hasn’t secured a Conditional Approval from the FCC to sell new systems in the US (Asus has). In any case, the Asus ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro outperformed it in my tests.
You could save around $300 and go for the still excellent Asus RT-BE96U, or save $200 with my current pick for the best gaming router, the quad-band Wi-Fi 7 Asus ROG Rapture GT-BE98 Pro, which is almost identical. But, and I’m surprised to find myself saying this, if gaming is the thing in your home and you have the money, the Asus ROG Rapture GT-BN98 Pro is worth buying—even now. It will give you slightly better performance today, and far better performance in the future as you upgrade to Wi-Fi 8 devices (especially if AFC is available to you).