The Nighthawk XR1000 is the latest router from networking giant Netgear. It is a premium product targeted at gamers, so it costs a bit more than a standard router, but boasts more features. The good news is that it packs the latest technology into its airplane-inspired form, including support for the new Wi-Fi 6 standard.

Even the best routers are not traditionally heavy, but when you take the XR1000 Nighthawk out of the box, you can feel its lack of weight. It's as if Netgear forgot to include built-in electronics, powered by the fresh air of space and tiny screws.

But there is something there: a triple-core processor running at 1.5 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 256 MB flash storage; Wi-Fi 6 is on board, with a theoretical maximum speed of 4.8 GBps on the 5 GHz band, and beamforming (both channels), The four aerials are plugged in well spaced so there is no crowding.

On the front are buttons for turning Wi-Fi on and off and for WPS. The status LEDs are arranged in a V-shape along the apex of the faceted surface, and if you squint your eyes and are particularly charitable, it might look like an F117 Nighthawk. Perhaps, following Pyotr Ufimtsev's theory of edges, it would be difficult to spot on radar, but in fact the whole thing is black with dark red accents, flat and wide, just right to be placed on a shelf and forgotten.

On the back are the usual connectors: five Gigabit Ethernet sockets (one WAN, four LAN), a USB 3.0 port, an on/off switch, a power socket, and a small reset button. This assortment of ports seems a bit mean, but if you want more or faster ports, just look at the RT-AX88U or XR700. However, since this router is marketed as a gaming router, it is designed to do one thing: connect to the Internet as quickly as possible to your PC and connect wirelessly. Happily, it does this quite well. [Setup is relatively simple, using a username and password printed on the router, a QR code, and the Netgear app on your smartphone. Included in the box is a comically large quick-start card in multiple languages.

The router runs Duma OS 3, an OS designed for gaming routers; perhaps it is the XR1000's slow processor, but it is slow to respond, spinning around for nearly 10 seconds upon first login and displaying a 4 or 5 second "please wait" message every time I switched menu options. The Nighthawk AX80, which does not use Duma, is much more responsive, but it has a quad-core 1.8 GHz CPU. It also takes longer to update settings, but this may be a feature of Wi-Fi routers as a whole, not just this model.

If you have a .cfg file from a previous router, you can upload it and immediately clone the previous access point (although this failed every time we tried it), but even if you do it manually, the setup requires you to enter some passwords, enter the router's It's just a matter of deciding which of the features you want to use.

Smart Connect is supported, and the 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks appear as a single network, with the router software refereeing and contesting which band the device will use. By default, it is turned off, and Wi-Fi 6 features such as OFDMA are also turned off. If you want to use separate bands, you can name them individually, set unique passwords, and set whether they should be hidden or not.

Security is handled by Netgear Armor with BitDefender, as is the case with all recent Netgear Nighthawk (and Orbi Mesh) routers; there is a one-month free trial, but after that it is $69.99 per year USD.

We hate this. I feel like I'm being held to ransom after spending a fortune on a name brand, high quality router. It's a nice router. It would be a shame if anything happened to it."

This router is not safe without it, either. After all, its Wi-Fi is encrypted with WPA3; Netgear's Armor is a comprehensive package, but its app protects an unlimited number of mobile devices, adds an encrypted VPN with 200MB of data transfer per day, and allows remote locking and wiping of protected devices (except Apple-made ) that can be remotely locked and wiped, and notifications about suspicious devices attempting to join the network. If you're serious about network security, it's a good thing to have. Still, we've been happily gaming with our Nighthawk router for years and have had no problems.

One thing the router marketing is particularly eager to tell you is that ping will decrease. In fact, we saw little difference from our regular AX80 router. Perhaps those who have replaced older routers or routers of a different brand might see more of a difference.

Duma OS has clever GeoFilter software built in to find the closest or fastest game server, which many gamers have found useful. This feature would be more useful for console users, as they generally do not have much say in how they connect, as they can generally choose their servers. Nevertheless, it is a feature that I would rather have, in case it might one day be useful.

Regarding performance, copying a 7GB video file to a networked SSD via a 5GHz Wi-Fi 6 connection with a 2x2 client yielded speeds similar to a wired connection, peaking at over 100MB/sec but dropping to 1MB/sec - this router To get the most out of it, you need the fastest 4x4 160MHz network card.

For such a speed-focused router, we would have liked to see more advanced hardware features such as 2.5Gb Ethernet ports and multiple USBs, but we have to admit that this is a pretty nifty model. While the transfer speeds we saw were not much better than a wired connection, the ability to achieve a theoretical 4.8 Gbps over Wi-Fi is not negligible, and the stability of the connection in a suburban house from the 90s was excellent, with perfect signal even 30 meters away through the wall!

Other nets.

Other Netgear products, especially the XR700 and RT-AX88U, have better physical ports, so we tend to look to them over this product. Still, if you are looking for a high-speed wireless Internet gateway with some future-proofing and are not blessed with a multi-gigabit fiber connection or an elaborate home Ethernet network, this is a good choice.