TP-LINK Archer C7 V2 vs Asus RT-AC5300

The Archer C7 allows you to use one guest network per WiFi band. You can choose when these guest networks are activated and you can also configure the maximum amount of bandwidth that guests can use.

The TP-Link Archer V2 offers great value for the money for most people who are looking to buy a wireless router. It is faster and covers the same area faster than routers that cost twice or three times as much, While it's not the best performant router under all circumstances, the jump in price to get the best router for a certain scenario would not be proportional to the added performance.

At short range (around 11 ft) it provides 200Mbps-160Mbps depending on the line of vision, thickness of walls, etc. While on long range (around 43 ft) it provides 175Mbps-72Mbps depending on the line of vision, thickness of walls, materials the walls are made, etc.

Blue lights in front of the panel indicate status of power, wired and wireless connections.

It has four Gigabit ethernet ports, supports USB file sharing and media streaming through two USB 2.0 ports, has parental controls for an increased degree of control, and has support for guest networks.

The Archer C7 allows you to access both 2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFi bands, which has the benefit of improving performance but also makes it easier to escape any interference from any neighbours' WiFi.

With the RT-AC5300 you get three separate WiFi bands, one 2.4 GHz and two 5 GHz bands. The additional 5 GHz band helps to lower congestion, because both 5 GHz bands can split the load between each other.

It's a device that delivers theoretical throughput speeds of up to 3.1 Gbps across both bands. It's capable of moving up to 1 Gbps in the 2.4 GHz band and 2.1 Gbps on 5 GHz bands. In real life testing at close range of 3 feet, RT-AC5300 delivers throughput of 661.6 Mbps. To maximize the router's speed it uses 1024-QAM which boosts the routers performance by 25% when compared to the more commonly used 256-QAM modulation scheme.

This router offers game-enhancement options such as Multi-User Multiple Input, Multiple Output (MU-MIMO), 4X4 data transmissions, and a wealth of management settings. MU-MIMO offers simultaneous rather than sequential streaming and 4x4 data transmission gives four individual streams to deliver and receive data.

If you have multiple devices using a lot of traffic at the same time, the ASUS RT-AC5300 can handle all of them simultaneously without sacrificing performance.