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he Netgear R6300 WiFi Router is for a high-standards, low-ego type of user: it's not something you can show off aesthetically, but a powerhouse for a robust, fast home network, both for now and tomorrow.

It's not quite as fast as the Asus in most benchmarks, and it doesn't offer as many features as the Asus does. The performance gaps, however, are not huge.

Although the Netgear R6300 supports the latest 802.11ac standard (in draft form); an odd design, and surprisingly underwhelming performance running in 11ac mode does not make this router one of Netgear's best.

The R6300 is quite a beast of a router, and it certainly gives a promise of things to come. While we score it highly, we'd hold off on purchasing anything 802.11ac until client chips are more widespread — by then, there'll likely be something even better around.

The Netgear R6300 is the second 11ac wireless router to market, and while far from reaching gigabit speeds its wireless offers relatively solid performance.

Netgear's R6300 is a cream-of-the-crop dual-band wireless router that supports the 802.11ac standard. It's a great overall unit that will work well in any networking environment. Team it up with client devices that support 802.11ac, and it will supply wireless speeds that are noticeably faster than...

It provides a comprehensive feature set and easy installation. Problematically, it's very expensive, and frankly, even if it's compatible with future 802.11ac hardware, we wouldn't recommend investing in any such hardware at this time just on the back of that.

We come back to the key questions in the intro: will you see the performance benefit of switching to 802.11ac? Yes, 802.11ac to 802.11ac is incredible. But should you buy now? Arguably not until prices drop and 802.11ac devices and USB dongles become widely available.

If you are trying to decide between the R6300 and Buffalo's WZR-D1800H purely on the basis of their draft 11ac capability, it's largely a toss-up ... Buyers like flexibility and features and the R6300 handily beats Buffalo on both counts.