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Nighthawk R7800 vs R8500
I originally had a R7000. I loved it, but wanted a little more firepower. I had some BestBuy giftcards laying around, enough for the R8500 which I purchased. But, I have the option to exchange the ...
In my option the R8500 is just a slightly beefed up R8000 and not worth the price difference. If you are mostly concerned with “futureproofing” yourself, the Qualcomm-based R7800 is your best bet. Why do I say that?
When looking at MU-MIMO, Broadcom (hardware in R8500) is playing catchup big time. Qualcomm Networking (R7800 hardware) put in 7 years of research with their MU-MIMO product portfolio, plus 4 years of that 7 was hardware prototype development and testing before any of their MU-MIMO products got to market.
There is beta firmware for the R8500 going around. I have not tested it myself with MU-MIMO devices, but I have heard from those that have it and it far from fully baked, but barely “half baked” when it comes to MU-MIMO.
For now, it you have 4 or more non-MU-MIMO (SU-MIMO) devices connecting to the 5GHz radio at once, the R8500 (or R8000) make more sense with the two 5GH radios to balance the traffic.
Another factor you might want to consider is power usage. The Broadcom platform routers use much more power than the Qualcomm alternatives/equivalents. Qualcomm just has better power management.
There are few more differences I could find:
- The R8500 supports 1024-QAM, but this is non-standard, therefore you will be hard-pressed to find anything now or in the future that will support it, except another R8500.
- The R7800 supports 160 MHz channels. The R8500 supports only 80 MHz channels. There is no device out there that supports a 160 MHz channel but since it is standardized, it is possible that one may become available in the future. 160 MHz is a wide channel, however. Eating up so much spectrum may be considered greedy, much like using 40 MHz in the 2.4 GHz band.
The R7800 uses Qualcomm Wi-Fi chips, which seem to do a better job at MU-MIMO than the Broadcom chips used in the R8500. But it's still pretty early for MU-MIMO.
So, which one is more future proof? I would say the R7800, but the R8500 may have more usable throughput with its two 5 GHz radios. Are you buying for the future or are you buying for now? Technology advances so quickly that you shouldn't pay top dollar for something that will only be useful very far into the future. As old as it is, the R7000 is still the best bang-for-the-buck router. Anything above it I consider halo products that very few will people be able to leverage to their fullest.
These are all interesting points. Given the R7800 is roughly $100 cheaper.
I was trying to get the R7000 to penetrate through a brick wall out to my back patio. It did the job on 2.4 GHz, but barely. I got an R8000, and was a hell of a lot worse than the R7000. I then swapped the R8000 for the R8500. It's a LOT better now, and I better penetration than the R7000.
I can pull my maximum cable connection bandwidth outside (60MBPS) no problem, on 5 GHz.
The R7000, the 5 GHz was unusable, the 2.4 netted me around 25 mbps.
The R8000, all bands were useless.
Am I buying for futureproofing? Yes and no. I suppose your right in terms of technology being obsolete within a year, and paying $350ish is insane for something that isn't even futureproof as you said.
More important to me, would be signal range/penetration. I wonder how the R7800 fares up against the R8500? I understand all wifi has its theoretical distance limit due to FCC standards, however some routers penetrate better than others. Do these Active Antennas in R8500 help ever so slightly?
The answer to this would probably sway me in to returning the R8500, getting $100 back, and buying a R7800...
Edit: When you say Broadcom has a half baked MU-MIMO solution, is that something fixable through firmware upgrade? or is that uncertain at this point
bigblueshock wrote:Edit: When you say Broadcom has a half baked MU-MIMO solution, is that something fixable through firmware upgrade? or is that uncertain at this point
It should be fixable with firmware updates that integrate better drivers once Broadcom gets them out to OEM's like Netgear. However, testing has shown the Broadcom MU-MIMO 5G drivers perform about the same the Quantenna Q1000 solution 5G MU-MIMO enabled drivers do with MU-MIMO clients in the mix. In otherwords; like crap.
The R7500(v1) shipped in September 2014 as being marketed as "MU-MIMO Ready/Capable" like the R8500 is being. Yet Netgear put the R7500v1 as their End of Life product list a few months ago before incorporating the MU-MIMO enabled Quantenna 5G drivers on that unit's firmware. If you want a key feature like MU-MIMO, you are best to get a product that has it "baked in" and working out of the box then keeping your fingers crossed that it will work and work acceptably.
Also, keep in mind that MU-MIMO is about network capacity and not network speed.