Someone killed the head crab, turned it upside down, hollowed out its contents, and replaced it with something a hundred times worse: a Wi-Fi 6E router, the Asus ROG Rapture GT-AXE16000's eight external antennas used to saturate your home with Internet. I just hope I'm not blessed with the best face for radio.

Anyway. If you really like routers (what's wrong with that?), you may have already read the TP-Link Archer AX6000 review on this site. That's not true. This is big. And from a price of $600/£570, you'd expect it to perform as well.

Asus' ridiculous ROG Rapture GT-AXE16000 router deserves to be kept in plain sight. The antenna screws off, but can be moved around for a better signal. This is not really necessary, but PC Gamer's test house is modern, quite small, and the walls are thin, so the signal overflowed.

There is a large glossy panel at the top that allows you to see right up to your nose when you reach around the back to unplug the cable. This panel is translucent and lights up when the router is active, creating a rather aggressive illumination pattern with lots of logos, but happily it can also be turned off. The mechanical spider at the end of "Wild Wild West" or the reaper in "Mass Effect" or something industrial from the Necron dynasty in "Warhammer 40K" come to mind. The temptation to set it up upside down, give it a giggle, and name it is immense.

This cable goes all the way around (four more are hidden inside), and the cables necessary for this cable to work must snake between them. The Ethernet cable is in two sections, with the four Gigabit ports and WAN on the left side of the leg and the two 10GB ports on the right.

Yes, 10 gig ports. This router, as a network hub, is not going to make any sacrifices. The connection to the outside world is via a 2.5Gb socket, so it can suck data out of a high-speed fiber connection without missing a beat (at the time of this writing, the fastest connection available near PC Gamer's test area is 1.3Gbps). 10 Gig is a lot of data to exchange. It can be used for backbone cabling when the network is in two locations or for connecting high-speed network storage, but it is probably overcapitalized for today's home networks, especially when broadband connections have not yet reached that level. Two Gigabit ports could be aggregated. [2.4 GHz, two 5 GHz, and a 6 GHz for special 6E devices. If you add up all the speeds, you get a figure of 16,000 Mbps. This is a very large number, and to take advantage of it all, many devices would need to be connected and operating at once. It also supports Asus' AIMesh system extender, which allows for gaming in a country mansion.

Indeed, with this much wireless bandwidth, it would outperform all but the most luxurious home Internet connections. It's certainly a showstopper: 10-gig cable enthusiasts who like to transfer 8K video files. Maybe for gamers. [If high frame rates are important to you for the latest online shooter games, you'll get the same results with something cheaper.

The 600 Mbps fiber optic connection and the 5 GHz Wi-Fi connection did not slow down until we were far enough away from the router to get to 500 Mbps. It is not this router that bottlenecks the system, but more likely the Wi-Fi chip in older devices or attempts to use Wi-Fi from much farther down the road.

In general, router setup has improved markedly over the past few years and is becoming somewhat standardized, and the ROG Rapture is really easy. Underneath the router's massive body is a QR code, which when scanned with the Asus app prompts you to set up a network name and password. Entering your broadband account details is the final bit of the puzzle.

ROG Rapture has strong parental controls, the popular Trend Micro anti-malware and QoS package, plus a firewall, guest network, ability to connect drives and printers for sharing, Samba, and media server, Time Machine compatibility, and several other excellent software features. All run on a 2GHz quad-core CPU, 2GB of DDR4, and 256GB of storage, almost like a PC itself.

Honestly, I don't need this router. But you might want it. This ROG Rapture is big and expensive, but there is no denying that it is fast and powerful.

It is hard to envision a situation where this router would be the best choice. Perhaps a shared house where three gaming laptops struggle with numerous tablets streaming 4K movies from a high-speed fiber connection, or the home of a server enthusiast determined to transfer data as fast as possible. If you finally get one, the feeling of being able to flatter yourself about getting the most out of your fiber-optic Internet connection may be worth the expense.