ASUS Blue Cave review: Different looks, great performer!

ASUS Blue Cave is a wireless router that looks different from most routers on the market, and it includes an Intel processor, instead of Broadcom, Qualcomm, or MediaTek, as you usually find on many other routers. Its technical specifications are promising, and it is also integrated with Amazon's Alexa voice assistant and task automation services like IFTT (If This, Then That). We were lucky to be the first people in the world to test and review this product. If you are curious to know how well it performs and whether it is a good fit for you, read this detailed review:

ASUS Blue Cave AC2600: Who is it good for?

ASUS Blue Cave is an excellent choice for the following types of users:

• People that want a good looking home networking device, instead of a traditional router filled with external antennas
• Users who want the best security for their smart home devices
• People who desire high-speed WiFi
• Users who want advanced firmware that offers complete control
• People who want task automation services from their wireless router, through IFTT
• Users who want to control their home network using the Alexa voice assistant
• People who desire an advanced mobile app from which they can personalize almost everything the router has to offer

Pros and cons

There are many great things about the ASUS Blue Cave:

• Top-notch performance on both WiFi bands
• Excellent security features that secure your smart home
• Modern hardware that can handle many clients and simultaneous connections
• Advanced smartphone app for administering your wireless router
• Great multi-lingual support and easily accessible Help documentation
• A great offer to secure up to four devices with Trend Micro antivirus products, for free, for one year

Cons:

• The WiFi network starts two minutes later than the wireless router
• It is not clear that you can use the smartphone app from anywhere on the internet, even though it works, if you pay attention to its configuration
• You cannot mount it on walls

Verdict

ASUS Blue Cave AC2600 is one of the first wireless routers to feature an Intel processor and wireless chipset. Some people might assume that it will not work all that well because it features an Intel processor, and the company has little experience in the smart home space. Luckily, that is not the case. ASUS Blue Cave impressed us with its unusual design, excellent speed potential on WiFi, its very fast USB 3.0 port, and the wealth of features that it packs in its firmware. ASUS has efficient built-in security, useful parental controls, and integration with Amazon Alexa and IFTT. If you are looking for your next wireless router, you should consider buying ASUS Blue Cave AC2600. It is an excellent choice that we highly recommend to our readers.

Unboxing the ASUS Blue Cave AC2600 wireless router

The packaging used for the ASUS Blue Cave wireless router is different from the one used for most ASUS routers. It comes in a square box, through which you can see the center of the device. On the sides, you can see pictures of this router and plenty of data about its features and hardware specifications. When you open the box, you find inside two other boxes. One of the contains the wireless router, and the other has the user documentation and all the accessories. Inside the packaging you find the following elements: the Blue Cave wireless router, a network cable, the power adapter, the warranty, the quick setup guide, and a leaflet with a great offer from Trend Micro that allows you to get 1 year of free antivirus protection on four devices (Windows, iOS or Android). The unboxing experience for ASUS Blue Cave is a pleasant one. The packaging is worthy of a premium device, and ASUS has bundled a nice surprise: an offer to secure four devices with antivirus products from Trend Micro, for one year. Please note that it isn't clear to us whether this offer is valid in all countries where ASUS Blue Cave is sold, or in just a few.

Hardware specifications and design

According to ASUS, Blue Cave has a multi-core Intel Lantiq PXB4395EL (GRX350) processor running at 1.2 GHz, 512 MB of RAM and 128 MB of storage space for the firmware. When you check the firmware of this router, it reports that it has a processor with three cores, while the ASUS website mentions two cores. We did a bit of research, and it seems that two cores are used for WiFi, and the third is used for other features like IPTV. ASUS Blue Cave offers support for all the modern networking standards, including 802.11ac Wave 2, and can provide 4x4 MU-MIMO wireless connections. To provide this, it has four internal antennas. The maximum theoretical bandwidth is of 800 Mbps for the 2.4 GHz band and 1734 Mbps for the 5 GHz band. That is a total of 2534 Mbps, a little less than the 2600 Mbps promised in the product naming. All the buttons and ports are on the back side of the device, alongside the vents for the cooling system. It has the following: the Power button, the Power jack, the Reset button, one USB 3.0 port, four Ethernet ports working at 1 Gbps, the WAN port, and the WPS button. The design of this device is discreet and relatively pleasant. However, some people might not like it and compare it to a mini-washing machine or a speaker. One small downside is that ASUS Blue Cave is made to be placed on furniture in your home. It is not designed to be placed on walls, and it has no system for mounting it on walls. As for size, it has 6.29 x 6.29 x 1.49 inches or 160 x 160 x 80 mm in Width, Depth, and Height. The weight is 1.76 lb or 800 grams. If you would like to learn more about the official specifications of this wireless router, go to this page: ASUS Blue Cave specifications.

Setting up and using the ASUS Blue Cave AC2600 wireless router

Setting up the ASUS Blue Cave is the same as other wireless routers. After you plug into the powerline, connect it to the internet and one computer, you can set it up in a web browser. The setup wizard looks different than that of other ASUS routers, even though it works the same. You have to enter a username and password for administering the wireless router (an excellent security precaution), and then the router detects the type of your internet connection and asks for the connection details. Once that is done, you get to set the name and password for the two wireless networks that are broadcast by ASUS Blue Cave. One new step is that ASUS Blue Cave automatically checks for new firmware and installs it during the quick setup. After the firmware update is performed and ASUS Blue Cave reboots, you are shown a summary of your settings. Now it is time to load the administration user interface. It is the same as on other ASUS routers, meaning that it is well organized, easy to use and available in a total of 19 languages. Few manufacturers of wireless routers offer such great multilingual support. One neat little aspect is that you can configure the brightness of the LED in the middle of the ASUS Blue Cave, straight from the home address of the user interface. All the settings are split into logical sections and finding your way is easy. You can configure everything that matters about your wireless router in detail, and advanced users will be pleased with this fact. Also, the user documentation is well done and accessible. One neat trick is to move the mouse cursor over a setting you do not understand, and a question mark is shown. Click on it, and you see information explaining that setting. One less positive aspect that we noticed is that some settings require a reboot. While the ASUS Blue Cave takes about two minutes to restart, the wireless network does not restart as soon as the reboot is done. You have to wait another minute or two until it comes back online. During this time, the firmware displays a message saying "Wireless is setting…" We consider this a minor issue that should be fixed in future firmware updates. Modern wireless routers tend to have mobile apps for remote controlling your network with ease. ASUS has a mobile app for this router and all its other routers. It is easy to connect it to the Blue Cave and administer the network. Through recent updates, the app is capable of working from anywhere on the internet, with the help of the DDNS feature, or through a relay server, depending on where you are on the internet. Unfortunately, this is not very obvious, as ASUS has a different approach when compared to other vendors that use a cloud account. We connected about fifteen devices to the network managed by ASUS Blue Cave, including desktop PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, one wireless printer, two smart plugs, one smart bulb, and an Xbox One console. We enjoyed fast download speeds, good signal strength, easy file sharing, and stable connections. ASUS Blue Cave offers a good wireless networking experience, worthy of the ASUS brand, and other great routers that were manufactured by this company. If you would like to learn more about the real-life performance of this wireless router and our benchmarks, read the next page of this review.

Wireless network performance

Before sharing the data from our measurements, let's take a look at the apartment that was used in our testing and how it is set up. You can see that the router is placed in the living room. With most wireless routers, the signal strength is not that high in places like the Kitchen and the Medium balcony. Our testing was done using a fast 1 Gigabit Internet connection that is capable of uploads on the internet of up to 500 Mbps. We used an HP Spectre 13 laptop for all our measurements and several software tools. To get a better perspective of the performance offered by ASUS Blue Cave, we compared it to TP-Link Archer C2600, and the older ASUS RT-AC3200. We analyzed the 2.4 GHz band first and measured the signal strength with inSSIDer. You can see below how the signal strength evolved from room to room. ASUS Blue Cave was not the best at this metric, but it performed well in most rooms. Next, we used SpeedTest to measure how fast the internet connection offered by this router is when using 2.4 GHz wireless network. ASUS Blue Cave impressed us with excellent download speeds across all rooms. The upload speeds were just as impressive, which is something you do not often see when testing a wireless router. Continuing our measurements on the 2.4 GHz wireless network, we used the PassMark Performance test to transfer data between two computers connected to the network. ASUS Blue Cave surprised us once again with excellent performance. The same story was repeated when measuring the upload speed. Our testing has shown that ASUS Blue Cave delivers excellent speed on the 2.4 GHz wireless band. For the next set of measurements, we analyzed the performance of the 5GHz wireless band. First, we looked at the evolution of the signal strength, from room to room. This time, ASUS Blue Cave was the best performer of the bunch. Then, we ran SpeedTest to see how fast the internet connection is when using the 5GHz band. To view the maximum potential of this router, we used the world's only PCI-Express network card with support for 4x4 MU-MIMO: ASUS PCE-AC88. When we used this network card, we obtained a maximum speed of 741.54 Mbps for the download and 491.10 Mbps for the upload. Impressive by any standards. To get back to earth, and everyday devices people use, we took our HP Spectre 13 laptop and measured the download speed with SpeedTest, in every room of our test apartment. ASUS Blue Cave was not the fastest in all rooms, but it delivered excellent download speed in all rooms. When measuring the upload speed, the speeds achieved were even higher. For the last measurements on the 5GHz wireless network, we used the PassMark Performance test to transfer data between two computers connected to the network. ASUS Blue Cave was excellent in all rooms, except the one furthest from the router. When measuring the upload speed, we had great results one more time, with the same room being the exception. ASUS Blue Cave is capable of delivering high-speed wireless network connections, on the 5 GHz band, especially if you have modern devices with support for the latest WiFi standards.

Wired network performance

To test the quality of the wired Ethernet connection, we used a desktop PC, equipped with an Intel Core i5 4460 processor, running at 3.20GHz, 16GB of RAM and a very fast Samsung 850 Pro 512GB SSD, and a Lenovo IdeaCentre 610s mini PC. We measured the speed of the internet connection when using a 1 Gbps Ethernet cable, using SpeedTest. ASUS Blue Cave had no problems in achieving the maximum potential of our internet connection. NOTE: The TP-LINK Archer C2600 router delivers only 140.47 Mbps for the upload speed because, when we tested this router, our internet connection was capped at 200 Mbps for the upload speed. The same cap was valid when we tested the ASUS RT-AC3200. Then, we ran a network transfer between the two computers, using the PassMark Performance test. ASUS Blue Cave delivered speeds that were close to 1 Gbps both for the download and the upload. The Ethernet ports on the ASUS Blue Cave truly work at 1 Gbps, both for the download and the upload.

USB performance

We connected a portable SSD drive to the ASUS Blue Cave, through the USB 3.0 port and then we used LAN SpeedTest Lite to transfer data to and from it and measure the speed. As you can see below, the USB 3.0 port on the ASUS Blue Cave is amazingly fast, reaching 437.28 Mbps for the download speed. Users will be delighted with the speed potential of the USB 3.0 port on the ASUS Blue Cave. It is just excellent.

Extra features

ASUS Blue Cave AC2600 is part of a new wave of wireless routers that are integrated with Amazon's Alexa voice assistant and IFTT (If This, Then That) - a service that automates tasks that might otherwise be repetitive or unable to talk to each other. With the help of these services, you can do things like "Alexa, ask ASUS ROUTER to upgrade the firmware" or get an email when your child gets home and connects his or her smartphone to the home WiFi. Security is a significant feature in ASUS Blue Cave, and it is all provided by the AiProtection module, which includes several tools and options:

• A comprehensive Router Security Assessment tool which verifies whether your router's settings are secure. When it finds problems, it proactively informs you and takes you where you need to fix things.
• Malicious Sites Blocking - an efficient cloud-based module that blocks malicious websites on all the devices that are connected to your network.
• Two-Way IPS - an improved two-way intrusion prevention system that protects all your network from spam, DDoS attacks, network attacks and more. Additionally, it also scans the packets that are sent from your network to the internet.
• Infected Device Prevention and Blocking - if your network devices get infected, and they become zombies in malware networks, they are automatically blocked by your router, and you are informed about this problem so that you can fix things.
• Parental Controls - some of the best you will find on wireless routers, with cloud-based filters for internet content, that do not need manual maintenance based on user-created block lists. You can also use them to schedule how much time your child's devices are allowed online every day.

The ASUS Blue Cave wireless router also includes many other features that you can find on other ASUS routers too:

• Guest Network - you can enable up to three wireless networks for each band, with individual security and access settings.
• Adaptive QoS - an intelligent QoS (Quality of Service) tool that you can use to analyze and prioritize network traffic efficiently.
• Traffic Analyzer - offers visual traffic statistics which give you a clear picture of how your network is used and by which devices.
• USB Applications - apps that are designed to work with all kinds of devices that you can connect to the router using USB: external hard disks, printers, and 3G or 4G dongles or modems.
• AiCloud 2.0 - a mobile app that keeps you connected to your data wherever and whenever you have an Internet connection. With it, you can access the folders shared in your home network from your Android or iOS smartphone or via a personalized URL
• IPv6 - modern support for IPv6 addresses that will soon become the norm, replacing IPv4.
• VPN - you can set the router to work as a VPN server, and you can also use it to turn your network-connected devices into VPN-enabled clients, without additional VPN software required.
• Network Tools - for analyzing the network and identifying what's wrong. They are useful when you need to troubleshoot problems.
• Dual WAN - excellent for both small businesses and professionals who require always-on Internet connections. You can also use a dual WAN to improve the quality of your internet connection and get the best possible performance.
• DDNS - a service that allows you to connect to the router from the internet, even if your internet provider gives you a dynamic public IP address.

The ASUS Router mobile app for Android and iOS is another useful feature. With it, you can configure most of the features found on this router, straight from your smartphone or tablet. Through recent updates, ASUS has added the possibility of using it from anywhere on the internet, to remotely manage your home network. The ASUS Blue Cave wireless router packs many premium features and tools that will be useful to its users. Some of them are aimed at families, others at professionals, and many of them are useful to any user who wants security in their smart home.

What is your opinion about ASUS Blue Cave AC2600?

You have arrived at the end of our review, and you know our opinion about the ASUS Blue Cave AC2600 wireless router and how it performed in our testing. Did our review convince you to purchase it? If you already have it, please share your experience in a comment below.