One of the most important pieces of technology in any home or small office today is a Wi-Fi 7 router, and while the ASUS TUF Gaming BE9400 is marketed as an affordable premium gaming router, after a month of hard testing we believe it is one of the best whole-of-home and small office networking investments on the market right now.

Forget the standard-issue router that Telstra, Optus or TPG Vodafone ships with your broadband plan.

When we tested the BE9400 it was selling on Amazon Australia for $257, which is remarkable when compared with a similar-performing Netgear Wi-Fi 7 router that will set you back close to $1,000.

Why Pay Double for a ROG Badge?

The BE9400 sits below ASUS’ Republic of Gamers (ROG) routers, which sell for nearly double the Amazon retail price, and that raises an obvious question, what is the real difference between a great gaming router and a great whole-of-home or office router?

The answer, based on our testing, is not much that matters to most households.

TUF, short for The Ultimate Force, is ASUS’ no-frills performance brand.

You lose the RGB lighting and some top-end hardware headroom of the ROG range, but you keep the networking engineering that counts, and the same gaming feature set including Mobile Game Mode, Open NAT and traffic prioritisation.

Real-World Testing

For the past month we have run six people and dozens of devices on the BE9400, including simultaneous streaming of the World Cup to multiple TV screens and a projector, over an NBN HFC connection delivering more than 700Mbps into our office. It never missed a beat.

In a second test we deployed it in a three-storey house with an AiMesh extender on every floor, and it handled everything thrown at it, including nightly 4K streaming to TVs and PCs, with no dropouts and no buffering.

Out of the box the router was easy to configure via the ASUS Router mobile app, which works across multiple ASUS routers and extenders and gives you one-tap control over prioritisation, parental controls, guest networks and security scanning.

Serious Hardware Under the Hood

At the heart of the BE9400 is a tri-band Wi-Fi 7 chipset delivering combined speeds of up to 9,400Mbps, split across the 6GHz band at up to 5,764Mbps, the 5GHz band at up to 2,882Mbps and the 2.4GHz band at up to 688Mbps. Driving it all is a 1.5GHz quad-core processor with 1GB of DDR4 memory, specs you would normally expect at a much higher price point.

The router uses ultra-wide 320MHz channels in the 6GHz band, 4096-QAM modulation and Multi-Link Operation, or MLO, which intelligently combines and switches between all three bands simultaneously to deliver the stable, low-latency connection that gamers crave and that video conference callers and streamers benefit from just as much.

Six external antennas deliver rated coverage of around 230 square metres, enough for most Australian homes, and if that is not enough, Wi-Fi 7 enhanced AiMesh support means the BE9400 can be paired with other compatible ASUS routers and extenders to blanket larger homes or multi-storey offices, exactly as we did in our three-storey test.

Wired Connectivity and Extras

On the back you get four 2.5GbE ports, one WAN and three LAN, with the first LAN port designated as a dedicated gaming port that automatically prioritises whatever is plugged into it. For a small office, those multi-gig ports make the BE9400 a genuine alternative to far more expensive business networking gear, providing responsive wired performance for desktop PCs, NAS drives or consoles.

There is also a USB 3.0 port that can turn a portable hard drive into shared network storage, or host a 4G or 5G dongle for mobile broadband failover if your NBN connection goes down, a feature small businesses will appreciate.

Security Without Subscriptions

Where the BE9400 really punches above its price is security. ASUS bundles its commercial-grade AiProtection suite free for the life of the router, with no ongoing subscription fees, at a time when rivals including Netgear and TP-Link are increasingly pushing consumers towards paid security plans.

AiProtection delivers malicious site blocking, two-way intrusion prevention and infected device quarantine, while Smart Home Master lets you spin up dedicated SSIDs for smart home devices, kids’ devices and VPN traffic, keeping potentially vulnerable IoT gear walled off from the rest of your network. The router also supports up to 30 VPN client configurations including the fast WireGuard protocol, again with nothing extra to pay.

Our Verdict

Built to TUF durability standards with a dual-heatsink design and wall-mount option, the BE9400 delivered rock-solid stability across a month of heavy multi-user testing.

At $257 this is not just an excellent gaming router, it is arguably the best-value Wi-Fi 7 router in Australia for anyone wanting to future-proof a busy home or small office network. Against $1,000-plus premium rivals, and against the basic routers the telcos hand out, it is a no-brainer.

RATING: 9/10