Netgear Nighthawk AC1900 (R7000) vs TP-LINK Archer C5

This AC1900 router tops out at a theoretical 1.9 Gbps of throughput. In real life testing at 5 feet the router’s throughput is 616.8Mbps over the 5 GHz band and 121.6Mbps over the 2.4GHz band. At 140 feet it maintains combined throughput of 252.4 Mbps.

To achieve this result, it uses beamforming technology, which means that the router determines where the device is located and focuses a better signal towards that specific device.

To make greater use of the powerful component hardware, owners can easily flash any of the popular third-party firmwares like TomatoUSB, DD-WRT, AsusWRT and more using the existing upgrade page in the stock web-based control panel.

The Nighthawk achieves file transfer rates of 231.2 Mbps over USB 3.0 and 224 Mbps over USB 2.0. This means that you can connect an external hard disk drive to this router and share a 2 GB file over a Wi-Fi network in just over a minute.

Nighthawk offers two different types of traffic prioritization tools. Traffic that is sent out by the user can be prioritized for gaming, while incoming traffic can be prioritized for improved video streaming.

This dual-band router has a combined throughput of up to 1.2 Gbps over its both bands. Realistically, its average throughput at short distance is 315 Mbps. So you’ll have enough throughput to stream HD movies, as well as play online games and browse websites without any problems.

With one Gigabit WAN port and four Gigabit LAN ports, you can connect up to four devices with Ethernet cables for the fastest network speed possible.

The two USB 2.0 ports makes it easier for you to share printers, files, and media with other devices trough your home network or via the ftp server while away from home.