Nearly two years after being announced at CES 2020, TP-Link’s latest gaming-ready Archer GX90 Wi-Fi 6 router is finally available to purchase at a very competitive price of $249.
What makes the TP-Link Archer GX90 unique? Well, it’s a triband Wi-Fi 6 router with a dedicated band to handle all your gaming traffic. The claim is that this dedicated lane will prevent slowdowns, lags, or delays that theoretically gives competitive gamers an advantage.
As an AX6600 router, the Archer supports the Wi-Fi 6 standard, and it comes with a dedicated band that delivers 4.8Mbps speeds on the router’s Game Band. The dedicated band relies on HE160 technology to achieve this speed and helps to reduce interference with traffic on other bands.
With the triband design, you’re getting a 2.4GHz band, a 5GHz band, and a 5GHz gaming band. DFS, or dynamic frequency selection, is also supported by this router. DFS allows the bands to be coupled together, which would boost the data transfer speeds up to 6,579Mbps.
Also supported is a 2.5GHz WAN port, as well as two USB ports and three gigabit Ethernet LAN ports.
This TP-Link gaming router also adds some useful tools specifically for gaming, including a Game Accelerator that automatically detects and optimizes your game streams, a Game Statistics feature that delivers real-time latency and game duration reports in a simple UI, and a Game Protector feature that helps to keep your accounts protected.
The company says the router is powered by a quad-core 1.5GHz processor to help keep your wireless network running smoothly, and setup is easy with TP-Link’s Tether app. You can also connect additional units together to create a whole-home mesh Wi-Fi network. This can be a particularly useful feature for gamers who rely on mobile rigs, like gaming laptops, to play in different areas in the home.
The design of the Archer GX90 is very gaming forward, with a flat base and a set of eight antennas that rise upward, a configuration that makes the router look like an inverted octopus.
The router is cloaked in black with red accents. The Archer GX90 is a follow-up to TP-Link’s Archer C5400X router, which tops out with Wi-Fi 5 support. The company also announced new Wi-Fi 6E routers at CES 2021 that are coming later this year.
