Synology RT1900ac Router Review

Final Thoughts
Synology did a pretty risky thing coming into the router market. We already know the big players in the space and it is hard to compete with brands that people have been using for years. Synology to their credit had a secret weapon, which is user experience. We of course know Synology for their NAS devices and their DiskStation Manager operating system, which makes using Synology’s NAS devices so easy. With their first router Synology wanted to bring this ease of use as well. The RT1900ac runs on the Synology Router Manager (SRM) which is much like their DSM operating system. After using it for the past few weeks I have to say it is the best router management experience I’ve had in a long time. Everything is easy to find, easy to configure and setup took about 3 minutes!

Now you can have great software, but you need hardware to back it up. Synology has put together a fully-featured router as well. You wireless AC1900 connectivity, three MIMO antennas that use beam forming technology, four LAN ports, a WAN port, SD card slot, and a USB 3.0 port. Taking a look at our tests throughput was around 945 Mbps on the wired connection and 278 Mbps and 90 Mbps on the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz bands respectively. USB 3.0 and SD Card we pretty good for reads, but write performance was a little disappointing. Having the USB port means you can easily add storage, a printer, and more. Synology has a media server addon for SRM so you can totally turn it into your home media server with a USB 3.0 hard drive or large capacity flash drive.

The design of the RT1900ac is not anything to write home about, we’ve seen some pretty attractive routers out there in the past few years. For me that is not a big deal, this router sits behind my monitors anyways. I do like it has a built-in stand and the secondary stand sets it almost vertical, saving you a lot of space.

At the end of the day this is totally a router I can recommend to anyone and for Synology’s first router I am very impressed. Another thing you can’t argue with is the price, right now you can pick up this router for $149.99 at my favorite online retailer.

Overall ThinkComputers gives the Synology RT1900ac Router a 9 out of 10 score and our Recommended Award!

rating9 10 small TC award recommended small

Pros:
– Good overall performance
– Synology Router Manager is awesome!
– USB 3.0 and SD card storage
– Easy to setup
– Price

Cons:
– Write storage performance could be better
– Overall design is kind of plain

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