What is the difference between a router and a gaming router? Where is the line drawn? You can give a router a name that should only be said in the graveliest endings of Christian Bale's Batman's ridiculous voice (seriously, try it yourself), or you can style it like the important level of ornamentation in Doom Eternal, where you get hit in the eye if you get too close You can do that, but it's not just an ornament. You can do so, but it must not be mere window dressing. It needs to be powerful where it counts.

A reliable gaming router needs hardware to back up its bluster with action. It needs scorching Ethernet speeds, it needs an internal processing package that doesn't stop at the critical moment, and it needs Wi-Fi powerful enough to generate health warnings. As expected, the Nighthawk XR500 delivers all of these things. Considering its high price, this is a good job.

Qualcomm's QCA9984 Wi-Fi chipset makes good use of dual-band 802.11ac bits. While it is unlikely to be used with the four onboard Gigabit Ethernet ports, we found the Wi-Fi to be one of the most powerful 802.11ac packages we've brought into our test environment. Even in an awkward corner of the house, the Nighthawk XR500's signal, transmitted via four amplified antennas, was certainly better than the three-node Netgear Orbi mesh network it replaced. But it couldn't be. I could put numbers on signal strength, throughput, etc., but your environment will be very different from mine. However, Wi-Fi 6 is fast, more than fast enough for gaming. However, it is not Wi-Fi 6. For a device that still retains its high price two years after its release, it is not unreasonable to look to Netgear's Nighthawk AX12, for example. The XR500's processing is also in Qualcomm's hands, and Netgear has chosen to use a package that is sufficiently over-engineered to ensure sufficient overhead. In other words, a dual-core processor running at 1.7 GHz backed up by 512 MB of RAM. Too few routers at this level waste too much on RAM and CPU.

I can't say for sure that this is perfect, as the CPU was sometimes at 100% on the interface. But never once when I tried to really load it up with multiple video streams or file transfers, or when I added a USB-connected network drive to the mix and pushed it too.

For the price, the hardware performance is adequate; even for a router just past its second birthday, this thing punches well above its weight. But that's not the best part of the Nighthawk XR500: it's powered by NetDuma's excellent DumaOS platform, each little slice of which makes quality-of-life networking super-simple. There is a pinpoint geofilter that allows you to set your location, the distance from which you are willing to accept long title game servers, and the devices you want to fit into that filter. A very useful feature, but not very applicable to the majority of PC games that have a choice of servers. Nevertheless, by specifying the confusingly named Spectator Mode, at least some of the geofilter functionality can be applied to PCs. QoS is the big issue here, and it is impeccable. With a simple click-and-drag interface, you can assign bandwidth to devices that need it and remove bandwidth from devices that don't. It takes only seconds to give a gaming PC the brain space of a router and place smart bulbs at the end of the queue where they belong, and it seemed to work flawlessly in our load tests. There is also a configurable anti-buffer bloat feature that works in conjunction with the XR500's high priority packet detection feature to prioritize gaming traffic over anything else. Super Neat.

The protein-packed power extends to regular router functions as well. You'll find network monitoring that gives you a live view of which devices are getting greedy at any given moment, and a device manager that actually makes a lot of sense. Hybrid VPN integration is also there, along with basically every standard router feature you can think of, allowing you to specify which devices use the VPN of your choice; it would be remiss to say that the Nighthawk XR500 is feature-rich. Not everything is rosy. In theory, new apps, called R-Apps, can be added to give the router new features. Theoretically, a new app called R-App could be added to give the router new functionality. As if to taunt me, there is even an attractive component called the "R-App Store" installed. But more control on top of ultimate control is probably not such a bad deal. So, does this meet the brief? Yes, of course it does. It's great. If you're looking for a Wi-Fi 6 router instead of an 802.11ac router in this Best Gaming Routers guide, I won't judge you. Because it's a wise choice. But the XR500's ass can certainly cash the checks its pointed exterior is writing.