There has been a lot of great items discussed over the last few months, including some amazing TV options all the way down to what’s hot in gaming.In case you missed it, you can check out or 2017 Holiday Tech Gift Guide here and see what we narrowed everything down to this year. We broke this year’s guide down into TVs, gaming, hard drives, action cams, headphones, and gaming routers to keep things simple and easy to follow.
Speaking of routers, this year we came across two of our favorite routers who both won Editors’ Choice in various categories. Both of these routers have gone above and beyond to deliver a strong and reliable network covering a great distance and delivering lightning fast speeds to a large number of devices.
The first of these routers was Netgear’s Nighthawk X10 AD7200 router, which proves to be the winning choice for dedicated gamers and power users alike. The single unit covering as much as a 3000 sq ft bubble spanning three floors of space that we tested it in. The price isn’t for the week of heart as you will be dishing out generally $400-$450 for this router, but you won’t believe your speed tests once it is all set up. It also features two USB 3.0 ports for network storage and features Plex Media Server built-in. It is a strong router for strong tasks and can even be extended using Netgear’s Nighthawk Mesh extensions (although we haven’t tested that option out just yet).
Perfect for gamers looking to reduce their latency as low as you can get and maximize their throughput potential. This is also what makes it a perfect option for those looking to run 4K solutions all around the home (TVs, cameras and everything else you want to throw at it). You can read our review on the Nighthawk X10 here to see what else this bad boy has to offer.
The second of these routers dives into the world of mesh routing, with the ability to cover larger areas with speedy connectivity, all packaged under a single SSID (optional). Zyxel’s Multy X mesh routing system also took home the prize of Editors’ Choice due to a number of reasons, including user friendliness of its initial setup and the app that controls everything, mesh performance, distance and design. They look really nice allowing them to blend well into your home while delivering a large umbrella of coverage throughout. Setup takes only a few minutes to run you through everything and the app that controls it all keeps settings down to the basics, making it perfect for beginner and novice users (those looking for deeper/advanced network options might want to lean toward the Nighthawk solutions).
It is an AC3000 setup that provides strong speeds to all of your devices and we couldn’t slow it down by adding around 20 hungry devices to it. You can expand onto the network with additional routers to help spread the bubble with and cover additional areas with, but as is you already have up to 5000 sq ft with the two units alone to get started with.
Continued use of the system allowed us to make our decision at awarding it Editor’s Choice for mesh networking since we couldn’t bog it down. We never had to reboot anything and devices connected to it were really brought to life. It may not be as fast as Netgear Nighthawk X10 mentioned above, but it comes pretty darn close (since there aren’t any devices yet that support the Nighthawk’s 802.11ad standard anyway). The Zyxel solution also covers a much larger area and is made for those simply looking for a reliable network with solid access to the internet. You can read our review on it here.
A number of wonderful items took home our Editors’ Choice award this year, all thanks to their unique design, delivery and quality of service provided. We can obviously be quite strict about what we attach that award to because it truly does label an item as being one of our absolute favorites.
You can check out some of the other winners by visiting the following links that will take you to our main stories for each, so that you can learn more about them and the strengths that earned their way.
- 1MORE’s Quad Driver In-Ear Headphones
- LG’s B7A Series OLED 4K TVs
- Seagate’s Expansion 8TB Desktop External USB 3.0 Hard Drive
- Western’s Digital 4TB USB 3.0 My Passport Black External Drive
- Meural 27-inch IPS Digital Canvas Frame
Finally, you can’t forget Samsung’s 960 EVO Series nVME M.2 SSDs which have taken the market by force, delivering some of the fastest transfer rates available for consumer/commercial SSD. Offering read speeds of up to 3,200 MB/s (nearly 6.5x the speed of a normal SATA SSD) and write speeds of up to 1,500 MB/s, these drives took the prize without much competition. Of course 2018 should result in a busy push for nVME by all of the other companies, but for 2017, Samsung wins with little to no contest. Like Netgear’s router above, these aren’t as affordable as some of the other options, however you will indeed get what you paid for.
