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The ASUS ROG Rapture GT-BE98 is an imposing piece of hardware, bristling with external antennae. This is certainly not a shy and retiring router design. There's a “gaming window” on top, which doesn't seem to perform any function other than aesthetics.
The ASUS router is bristling with wired networking ports too. One edge sports seven Ethernet ports. Two are WAN connections running at 2.5Gbit and 10Gbit speeds. There are three 2.5Gbit LAN ports, a single 10Gbit LAN port, and curiously one Gigabit Ethernet connection too.
One another edge, next to the power connection and switch, can be found two USB ports. One is Gen 3.2 Gen1 and another 2.0 speed. These can be used for storage sharing across the network.
Aside from offering fast WiFi 7 wireless networking, the Asus router can also form the hub of a mesh network with outher ASUS ROG Rapture GT-BE98 routers, for huge spatial coverage as well as high performance.
MSI Vector 16 HX AI A2XWIG Laptop
Our main WiFi 7 testing was performed with the MSI Vector 16 HX AI A2XWIG laptop. This is a powerful gaming system based around a potent Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX with 24 cores. Eight of these are Performance cores running at up to 5.4GHz, while the remaining 16 are Efficiency cores with a 4.6GHz Turbo mode.
This is backed by 32GB of DDR5 memory. The graphics acceleration is top notch too, in the shape of an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Laptop GPU, sporting 16GB of GDDR7 frame buffer. There's a 1TB NVMe SSD. The most significant thing for our testing here is the Intel Killer BE WiFi 7 wireless networking, although there's 2.5Gbit wired LAN on offer too.
Acer Swift 14 AI WiFi 7 Laptop
We also tested WiFi 7 wireless networking with an Acer Swift 14 AI notebook, based around a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus Oryon X1P-64-100 CPU. This is a ten-core processor running at up to 3.4GHz across all cores, although without a single-core boost frequency (you need the X1P-66-100 for that). Our sample was supplied with 16GB of LPDDR5x memory and a 1TB SSD.
Although this is an ARM-based laptop, it can still run Windows 11 and our standard WiFi testing software, iPerf3. It's a solid choice for road warriors who need to spend days away from a reliable power source, thanks to a 26-hour battery life.
