Asus’ latest gaming WiFi router looks terrifying and comes with built-in AI technology

Asus is back with its latest cutting-edge products Gaming wifi routerand once again the company is determined to stir up the arachnophobia and sentient robot phobias among us with its multi-legged design. The Asus ROG Rapture GT-BE19000AI has an ominous name and of course now comes with AI.

Latest addition to Asus‘ Best router for gaming The list is a continuation of a long line of models that feature the same eight-legged design…sorry, eight-antenna design. The latest version introduces a host of AI capabilities to the party, just to provide that reassuring extra personal touch to this mechanical beast.

Back in 2016, I reviewed one of the older Asus Rapture routers Another siteAlthough Asus has toned down the look with this new white model, it still has the same overall distressed design. Honestly, flip the antennas on these routers over and they’re really unnerving to look at, like the next evolution in Boston Dynamics robots, only smaller and scarier.

We got our hands on the Asus ROG Rapture GT-BE19000AI at the CES 2025 trade show where it was unveiled, alongside a host of other new tech, such as AMD RX 9070 XT and Nvidia RTX 5090. In addition to looking a bit intimidating, this thing is also huge — in terms of size, below — but that size is used to good effect, as the router has six Ethernet ports. Two of them are capable of 10GbE (and can be grouped together for a single 20GbE connection) while the other four are rated at 2.5GbE.

Meanwhile, this router’s WiFi capabilities are the real heart of its power. Its eight antennas combine to provide a total of 19 Gbps of throughput including access to the latest 320MHz WiFi 7 (802.11be) channels in the 6GHz band, with 4096-QAM.

However, what further elevates the latest Rapture router above its predecessors and most other gaming routers is the built-in NPU, which can be used to provide features like “accelerate AI-powered 3-level gaming with the ROG AI Game Booster,” which apparently “works.” It optimizes routes in real-time to reduce ping, jitter, and packet loss. It can also be used to provide intelligent blocking of ads and trackers as well as AI noise detection that “improves WiFi stability by identifying interference and providing network insights.”

The price and release date of the Asus ROG Rapture GT-BE19000AI has not yet been revealed but its predecessor, the Asus ROG Rapture GT-BE98 Pro Costs over $600so you can expect this device to command a similarly hefty price.

For more from CES 2025, visit our website CES News Center, including the new Asus Mini PC with RTX 5090 And official now Lenovo Legion Go 2 Mobile games.