NetGear Nighthawk X10 As A High-End Home Router

Written by Michael Larabel in Peripherals on 22 April 2017 at 12:00 PM EDT. Page 1 of 2. 40 Comments.

The past number of weeks I've been able to test the Nighthawk X10 router as my main home/office router and it's been working out great. This router is powered by a 1.7GHz quad-core processor and its wireless connectivity is great, but those interested in the device, it will set you back $450 USD.

The Nighthawk X10 from NetGear offers not only 802.11ac but also 802.11ad: the newer wireless standard using the 60GHz spectrum and aims to deliver multi-gigabit speeds for short distances. Like I, you probably don't have any 802.11ad devices yet, but even for 802.11ac, the Nighthawk X10 is mighty fast. The X10 is one of the few consumer routers on the market having four ARM cores and considering they are clocked at 1.7GHz, the router is quite competent for many devices on the network as well as 4K streaming, etc. The X10 has 512MB of DDR3 RAM.

For those using wired connections, the Nighthawk X10 has six Gigabit Ethernet ports plus a Gigabit WAN port. There are also two USB 3.0 ports on the router with support for running a Plex media server if desired.

This NetGear Nighthawk X10 is advertised as being able to support 20+ devices, but I've been using it with ~80+ devices fine. The devices range from the 60 or so systems in the basement server room being powered on/off daily via WoL when needed for benchmarking, many IoT products on WiFi (Nest Protects, Nest Cams, etc), several smart TVs / Fire TVs / Roku, laptops, and more. It's been a mix of wired and wireless devices.

The Nighthawk X10's administrative web interface is similar to other NetGear routers, albeit with more features.


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