Asus is back with its latest high-end gaming WiFi router, and once again the company is insisting on triggering the arachnophobes and sentient-robot-phobes among us with its multi-legged design. The Asus ROG Rapture GT-BE19000AI even has an ominous name and of course it now comes with AI.
The latest addition to Asus‘ best gaming router roster is a continuation of a long-running line of models that has sported the same eight-legged… sorry, eight-antennae design. The latest version brings a host of AI capabilities to the party, just to provide that extra reassuring personal touch to this mechanical monster.
As far back as 2016, I reviewed one of the earliest Asus Rapture routers for another website, and although Asus has lightened the look with this new white model, it still has the same distinctive dystopian design overall. Honestly, flip the aerials round on these routers and they are genuinely unnerving to look at, like the next evolution in Boston Dynamics robots, but smaller and creepier.
We got hands on with the Asus ROG Rapture GT-BE19000AI at the CES 2025 trade show where it was being unveiled, alongside a host of other new tech, like the AMD RX 9070 XT and Nvidia RTX 5090. As well as looking a bit creepy, this thing is also huge – hand for scale, below – but that size is used to good effect, with the router housing six Ethernet ports. Two of these are 10Gbit capable (and they can be aggregated together for a single 20Gbit connection) while the other four are rated to 2.5Gbit.
Meanwhile, it’s the WiFi capabilities of this router that is the real heart of its power. Its eight antennae combine to provide a total of 19Gbps of throughput including access to the latest WiFi 7 (802.11be) 320MHz channels in the 6GHz band, with 4096-QAM.
Further elevating this latest Rapture router above its predecessors and most other gaming routers, though, is its built-in NPU, which it can use to provide features like “AI-powered triple-level game acceleration with ROG AI Game Booster” which apparently “optimizes real-time routes to reduce ping, jitter, and packet loss.” It can also be used to provide intelligent ad and tracker blocking plus AI noise detection which “improves WiFi stability by identifying interference and offering network insights.”
The Asus ROG Rapture GT-BE19000AI price and release date haven’t yet been revealed but its predecessor, the Asus ROG Rapture GT-BE98 Pro costs over $600, so you can expect this device to demand a similarly lofty price.
For more from the CES 2025 show floor, check our CES news hub, including Asus’ new mini PC with an RTX 5090 and the now official Lenovo Legion Go 2 gaming handheld.