Engenius Speed Test Vs Ubiquti, Meraki, Ruckus - Part 3
**ASRock Razer Edition Tai Chi B550 Motherboard Review and Wireless Technology Grudge Match**
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### ASRock Razer Edition Tai Chi B550 Motherboard
The video begins with an exciting introduction to the ASRock Razer edition of the Tai Chi B550 motherboard, designed for AM4 builds. This motherboard is highlighted as a strong choice for enthusiasts, offering impressive features such as 16 power phases and robust power delivery capable of supporting high-end processors like the AMD Ryzen 5950X down to the 3600X. Its rear connectivity includes multiple USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, a Type-C connector, Killer Ethernet for reliable gaming network performance, and Wi-Fi support.
The motherboard also features PCIe 4.0 across all slots, reinforced for durability, ensuring compatibility with the latest generation of GPUs. Additionally, it includes two 30-pin power connectors, a 10 Gigabit Type C front-panel connection, and Razer Synapse 3 software integrated directly into the BIOS. This integration allows seamless control over Razer RGB accessories, making it a versatile choice for any build.
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### Ultimate Grudge Match in Wireless Technology
The second half of the video delves into a detailed comparison of wireless technology products, focusing on Ubiquity, Ingenius, Cisco, and Meraki access points. The discussion begins with personal anecdotes about transitioning from early adoption of Cisco gear to exploring alternatives due to firmware issues and subscription models.
Ubiquity is praised for its reliability and features but criticized for occasional overheating and firmware missteps. The conversation then shifts to Ingenius, which has impressed the reviewer with its Wi-Fi 6 AX support and robust performance in testing environments, despite some initial setup challenges.
Testing was conducted using a custom-built Faraday cage, eliminating external interference for precise benchmarking. Various devices were tested, including Apple iPhones, iPads, Microsoft Surfaces, and Android phones, alongside an Intel Wi-Fi 6 adapter. The results highlight the superior performance of Ingenius access points in terms of speed and client handling.
The video also touches on the limitations of Ubiquity's AC HD model, which lacks Wi-Fi 6 support, and the challenges faced with the Wi-Fi 6 Light from Unified, particularly its tendency to favor the 2.4 GHz band over 5 GHz. Meraki's 8x8 device is noted for density rather than speed, making it ideal for high-client environments.
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### Key Takeaways
The article concludes by emphasizing the value and performance of Ingenius access points, despite minor software hiccups. The discussion underscores the importance of reliable hardware and robust software integration in wireless networking solutions, particularly for users with extensive device setups.
Readers are encouraged to explore the detailed performance tables and benchmarks provided, which offer a comprehensive view of each product's strengths and weaknesses. The reviewer expresses optimism about Ingenius' potential to disrupt traditional market leaders like Cisco, highlighting their solid hardware and improving software ecosystem.
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This article captures the essence of both the ASRock Razer edition Tai Chi B550 motherboard and the in-depth wireless technology comparison, ensuring that all details from the transcription are fully explored without condensation.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis video is brought to you by asrock and the new razer edition of the tai chi b550 now if you're looking at am4 for your next build b550 is a good choice it's got lots of features 16 power phases it's got all the power delivery you could need from the 5950x all the way down to the uh 3600x this motherboard has lots of rear connectivity including lots of usb 3 5 gigabit and 10 gigabit only two usb 2 ports got the type c we got the killer nick and the killer wifi so you've got you know killer networking for uh that for your gaming if you're if you're looking for that we've also got pci express 4 pc express 4 across the board uh you have the reinforced slots and all the connectivity here that you could ever need you got two 30 pin connectors get the 10 gigabit type c for your front panel connection and you've got razer's software that's synapse 3 built right into the motherboard so the motherboard goes with all of your razer rgb accessories whatever you're looking to do for your build chances are this board is going to support it and be sure to check out the razer edition of the b550 tai chi razor thanks asrock and on with the video it's time for the ultimate grudge match in wireless technology i don't know about ultimate grudge match this is actually really tricky if you follow the channel at all you know that i've recently reviewed uh you know a bevy of gear from ingenius and i've been a long super long long time user of ubiquity access points and gear i mean i'm a pro user it's a different use case than a pure commercial use or campus use or something like that where you usually go for density meaning that you have a lot of wireless clients and not a lot of access points as an early adopter i've got a lot of wireless devices everything from computers to laptops sure yeah that's fine but even my home automation system is wireless and my kitchen lighting and the alarm panel parts of it i mean even before wireless mesh networks were a thing i was picking up used and refurbished you know cisco gear way back in the day because it was way better than anything that you could get commercially i mean all of the consumer stuff was basically crap it was all the same it was all terrible it's like oh let me flash ddwrt on this piece of garbage it's still a piece of garbage consumer crap it's just crap but you know the cisco stuff you're going to buy and it was insanely expensive ubiquity was the first real contender to attack that middle of the market it's more expensive than the cheap stuff but it's almost as good but not quite as good as the more expensive stuff and over the last 10 years ubiquity has really taken over the universe but you know they've had some missteps uh certain models that would overheat and be weird i've lamented about bad botched firmware upgrades on this channel and other podcasts it's just occasionally not a pleasant experience that led me to seek out other brands and a genius is one such brand where their models sort of caught me by surprise with how good they were at least the new ones wi-fi 6ax you know something i'm still kind of waiting on ubiquity for to do really well and stellar performance we'll talk more about that in a second well it's time for that longer term ingenious evaluation and my thoughts and benchmark tests not just against ubiquity but also go the cisco c 911 9115 and the meraki mr55 which is an 8x8 solution that's a yeah it's kind of like the commercial equivalent of that asus spider router thing except it's actually commercial grade not basically still residential grade so a lot of what i'm going to be talking about is kind of subjective it's kind of just my own personal experience but don't worry i have real world-ish benchmarks or at least benchmarks that i could control thanks to some of our patrons they also bought the bullet and picked up some gear to retrofit their homes and offices and i can include some of their thoughts and their perspectives in this video so i'll sort of weave that in with the stuff that i'm going to talk about so first let's talk about features now a lot of this i've already covered in our prior videos so check those out for more info but here's where we are here's where we landed basically with setups like the meraki setups it is extremely nice killer in fact it's decent hardware but the software can really be hit and miss a lot of the time they'll finish the hardware and then rush it out before the software is really done you get to basically pay for a subscription or your network stops working in order to get updated software in about the middle of the device lifecycle cycles when it's really good i mean well okay your network will kind of keep working but things like client handoff and roaming those suddenly stop working and other things suddenly stop working so this subscription it slowly bleeds you dry and as wireless clients evolve and software changes you know people do need to be paid to keep working on software updates for these access points on the one hand the initial software from day one from meraki really isn't the best so maybe you're not getting what you pay for from day one i don't really know what to think about the subscription model instinctually i think the instruction subscription model is not good but i could kind of see the argument that well things change and you need to keep paying the programmers now ubiquity uses the same equipment for cloud managed via cloud key device on premises manage and there is no subscription and the devices are usually a little bit better than half baked when they're first released but it can be hit and miss for example those android voip phones that i always love to go to those basically represent an abject failure of ubiquity you know it's like hey we're going to do android phones and it's going to be this great view ip system i can see the dream no follow through another more recent example of that is and there was supposed to be a warranty and if you look at the product listing it seems to imply that there's a manufacturer's warranty but ubiquitously says no no this is a third-party seller so you don't get any warranty so they would not honor the warranty to deal with that but you know they're still third-party sellers that ubiquity is not shutting down on amazon so be sure that you understand what that means for your warranty i expect ubiquity to do better now to be sure ubiquity is not at feature parity with meraki meraki has way more stuff and in genius well they're not a feature parody with ubiquity there are several features in integration that ubiquity has that i wish ingenius had for one it's trivial to run a management app locally versus in the cloud with ubiquity same hardware same configuration that just finds it on the network with ingenious you can do that but you can get access points and other hardware that has different firmware that's designed for local management now ingenius supports all the common things that i wanted to do though so it's not like you're really short on features things like guest networks with a captive portal no problem the take you to a default web page which is great if you want to show guests your network local resources everything from hey you can print to these printers here's the plex media server here's some links to some other internal resources you can do all that with a captive portal it works great on ingenious multiple ss ids that map to different vlans that's also really well supported i tested the security of that as best i could it seems to be pretty robust you can also do mix a mix of wpa enterprise and wpa authentication so you can for example have per user encryption keys on your wireless network which is pretty awesome they support external systolic servers radio servers for authentication mac filtering client rate limiting quality of service so on and so forth that's really nice those are it's good to see that for me the killer features were good wireless handoff and good 802.11 ax support and nothing really compares to that especially with their like 3x3 and 4x4 solutions as i decided to put them to the test i thought it would be like hey let's just benchmark them so introducing my walk-in faraday cage now there's a story behind this and that's going to have to be in another video but i have a walk-in faraday cage basically this is an all-metal bunker it's a cozy out of the way place and it's ideal for doing wireless testing it's just over 100 feet long and the metal walls and ceiling and foil lined floor means that there are no stray radio waves there's not even cell phone coverage in here because well it's basically a metal faraday cage which is kind of nuts so for the tests i set up a basic file server 10 gigabit and our 10 gigabit ingenious switch i pref 3 for the clients that support it and i did some other informal testing for the wireless clients i used a bunch of different things use an apple iphone at last gen ipad pro a microsoft surface some other clients with the intel wi-fi six adapter and so on and so forth i tested it with a galaxy s9 plus android phone and several other you know sort of portable battery operated clients like that the numbers that i'm about to show you are the best numbers out of five runs so i also um tested with the asrock razer motherboard that has the killer wireless nix which is also a wi-fi six and it was not horribly broken it was it was decent it wasn't as fast as the other stuff i'm about to show you so i'm just going to leave that out it's not part of our benchmark numbers but just so you know i tested something other than the intel client now testing here is a little bit of a pain i'm not going to really get super deep into the reasons but i tried to test with both wi-fi 5 and wi-fi six that's 802.11 ac and 802.11 ax uh i tried to make sure that we always used both bands as well 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz so here we are now if you look at this we've got our cisco catalyst switch and our meraki that's kind of the baseline performance here ruckus ubiquity and uh you know our actual ingenious access point the apple devices do really well pretty much across the board overall the ingenious device is fast although in some cases it really just eeks out a very very small win a very small margin but remember the ubiquity ac hd is not technically 802.11ax so it's a little bit of a speed disadvantage there and we'll talk more about the ac hd light in a second now you need to take these results with a bit of a grain of salt because there are a lot of variables in here clients may not support or want to use both 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz at the same time the roaming and handoff can also affect throughput as the client is trying to use one radio on the wireless network card to probe and see if other access points are available while the you know another radio is busy so it's really hard to set up a test protocol where the results were consistent within a few percentage points across a series of runs there's also the channel width setting which i tried to set to 80 megahertz everywhere that i could a lot of the time out of the box these devices are going to be configured for 20 or 40 megahertz channel width which is gonna hurt your throughput testing i also wanted to include the unified wi-fi six light for this comparison that's only a two by two solution but i had trouble keeping it going that it kept wanting to go to the 2.4 gigahertz band and stay out of the 5 gigahertz band which is kind of crap when it did work i could get it to 810 megabit for the apple devices which is not bad still slower than the ingenius but disabling the 2.4 gigahertz band to try to force it into 5 gigahertz made it worse so i'm gonna have to revisit that in the future because this video has already been far too long in the making the meraki as i said before it's an eight by eight device and so i'll just point that out because that's ridiculous obviously it's meant for density not speed because the speed here isn't great so perhaps these classes this class of device is less desirable than it once was because it's not a speed demon but i'm sure that you can pack on a lot more devices than these other devices in any case i look forward to doing a lot more of this kind of testing if you want to see it it's clear that in ingenious partnership with uh seneo i think that's how you say it the taiwanese company as a communications company so far has produced really solid reliable hardware there may yet be more disruption here uh you know the way that the old guard like cisco was previously disrupted i really think they're on to something because the hardware the hardware really is solid and the places where i've had trouble has been more on the software side once i've gotten them set up there's not really any complaints that i have and sure if you watch the older videos it's like i had to jump through some hoops to get the ingenious stuff set up but for all the features that i've tried and the management portal and all that kind of stuff it's been solid and reliable you know kind of impressively so like more more than i expected i also didn't expect the the ingenious access points to perform as well as they did versus the other access points of course i did expect to include the the a uh ubiquity ac6 light the light access point that's wi-fi six it's a two by two solution i don't know what the deal was there i went through a couple of different firmwares we're just i'm gonna have to revisit that something wasn't right there and i don't wanna i mean 810 megabits not bad but i don't want to publish those numbers because um it needs a little work and i i don't think that they're going to be bad i don't i don't i think they're probably going gonna be okay but i gotta i gotta come back to that i don't know what was going on with that uh the takeaway here is that for the money these are really impressive devices that have a lot of the features that you're looking for and so far for me they've been really solid especially with 802.11 ax especially with client handoff especially with packing in a ton of devices in both like a small office and you know residential stereo so i'm wendell this is level one be sure to check out that performance table it's not bad didn't talk about some of the edge case parameters but hey maybe something we can revisit in the future i'm wondering this is level one i'm signing out i'll see you laterthis video is brought to you by asrock and the new razer edition of the tai chi b550 now if you're looking at am4 for your next build b550 is a good choice it's got lots of features 16 power phases it's got all the power delivery you could need from the 5950x all the way down to the uh 3600x this motherboard has lots of rear connectivity including lots of usb 3 5 gigabit and 10 gigabit only two usb 2 ports got the type c we got the killer nick and the killer wifi so you've got you know killer networking for uh that for your gaming if you're if you're looking for that we've also got pci express 4 pc express 4 across the board uh you have the reinforced slots and all the connectivity here that you could ever need you got two 30 pin connectors get the 10 gigabit type c for your front panel connection and you've got razer's software that's synapse 3 built right into the motherboard so the motherboard goes with all of your razer rgb accessories whatever you're looking to do for your build chances are this board is going to support it and be sure to check out the razer edition of the b550 tai chi razor thanks asrock and on with the video it's time for the ultimate grudge match in wireless technology i don't know about ultimate grudge match this is actually really tricky if you follow the channel at all you know that i've recently reviewed uh you know a bevy of gear from ingenius and i've been a long super long long time user of ubiquity access points and gear i mean i'm a pro user it's a different use case than a pure commercial use or campus use or something like that where you usually go for density meaning that you have a lot of wireless clients and not a lot of access points as an early adopter i've got a lot of wireless devices everything from computers to laptops sure yeah that's fine but even my home automation system is wireless and my kitchen lighting and the alarm panel parts of it i mean even before wireless mesh networks were a thing i was picking up used and refurbished you know cisco gear way back in the day because it was way better than anything that you could get commercially i mean all of the consumer stuff was basically crap it was all the same it was all terrible it's like oh let me flash ddwrt on this piece of garbage it's still a piece of garbage consumer crap it's just crap but you know the cisco stuff you're going to buy and it was insanely expensive ubiquity was the first real contender to attack that middle of the market it's more expensive than the cheap stuff but it's almost as good but not quite as good as the more expensive stuff and over the last 10 years ubiquity has really taken over the universe but you know they've had some missteps uh certain models that would overheat and be weird i've lamented about bad botched firmware upgrades on this channel and other podcasts it's just occasionally not a pleasant experience that led me to seek out other brands and a genius is one such brand where their models sort of caught me by surprise with how good they were at least the new ones wi-fi 6ax you know something i'm still kind of waiting on ubiquity for to do really well and stellar performance we'll talk more about that in a second well it's time for that longer term ingenious evaluation and my thoughts and benchmark tests not just against ubiquity but also go the cisco c 911 9115 and the meraki mr55 which is an 8x8 solution that's a yeah it's kind of like the commercial equivalent of that asus spider router thing except it's actually commercial grade not basically still residential grade so a lot of what i'm going to be talking about is kind of subjective it's kind of just my own personal experience but don't worry i have real world-ish benchmarks or at least benchmarks that i could control thanks to some of our patrons they also bought the bullet and picked up some gear to retrofit their homes and offices and i can include some of their thoughts and their perspectives in this video so i'll sort of weave that in with the stuff that i'm going to talk about so first let's talk about features now a lot of this i've already covered in our prior videos so check those out for more info but here's where we are here's where we landed basically with setups like the meraki setups it is extremely nice killer in fact it's decent hardware but the software can really be hit and miss a lot of the time they'll finish the hardware and then rush it out before the software is really done you get to basically pay for a subscription or your network stops working in order to get updated software in about the middle of the device lifecycle cycles when it's really good i mean well okay your network will kind of keep working but things like client handoff and roaming those suddenly stop working and other things suddenly stop working so this subscription it slowly bleeds you dry and as wireless clients evolve and software changes you know people do need to be paid to keep working on software updates for these access points on the one hand the initial software from day one from meraki really isn't the best so maybe you're not getting what you pay for from day one i don't really know what to think about the subscription model instinctually i think the instruction subscription model is not good but i could kind of see the argument that well things change and you need to keep paying the programmers now ubiquity uses the same equipment for cloud managed via cloud key device on premises manage and there is no subscription and the devices are usually a little bit better than half baked when they're first released but it can be hit and miss for example those android voip phones that i always love to go to those basically represent an abject failure of ubiquity you know it's like hey we're going to do android phones and it's going to be this great view ip system i can see the dream no follow through another more recent example of that is and there was supposed to be a warranty and if you look at the product listing it seems to imply that there's a manufacturer's warranty but ubiquitously says no no this is a third-party seller so you don't get any warranty so they would not honor the warranty to deal with that but you know they're still third-party sellers that ubiquity is not shutting down on amazon so be sure that you understand what that means for your warranty i expect ubiquity to do better now to be sure ubiquity is not at feature parity with meraki meraki has way more stuff and in genius well they're not a feature parody with ubiquity there are several features in integration that ubiquity has that i wish ingenius had for one it's trivial to run a management app locally versus in the cloud with ubiquity same hardware same configuration that just finds it on the network with ingenious you can do that but you can get access points and other hardware that has different firmware that's designed for local management now ingenius supports all the common things that i wanted to do though so it's not like you're really short on features things like guest networks with a captive portal no problem the take you to a default web page which is great if you want to show guests your network local resources everything from hey you can print to these printers here's the plex media server here's some links to some other internal resources you can do all that with a captive portal it works great on ingenious multiple ss ids that map to different vlans that's also really well supported i tested the security of that as best i could it seems to be pretty robust you can also do mix a mix of wpa enterprise and wpa authentication so you can for example have per user encryption keys on your wireless network which is pretty awesome they support external systolic servers radio servers for authentication mac filtering client rate limiting quality of service so on and so forth that's really nice those are it's good to see that for me the killer features were good wireless handoff and good 802.11 ax support and nothing really compares to that especially with their like 3x3 and 4x4 solutions as i decided to put them to the test i thought it would be like hey let's just benchmark them so introducing my walk-in faraday cage now there's a story behind this and that's going to have to be in another video but i have a walk-in faraday cage basically this is an all-metal bunker it's a cozy out of the way place and it's ideal for doing wireless testing it's just over 100 feet long and the metal walls and ceiling and foil lined floor means that there are no stray radio waves there's not even cell phone coverage in here because well it's basically a metal faraday cage which is kind of nuts so for the tests i set up a basic file server 10 gigabit and our 10 gigabit ingenious switch i pref 3 for the clients that support it and i did some other informal testing for the wireless clients i used a bunch of different things use an apple iphone at last gen ipad pro a microsoft surface some other clients with the intel wi-fi six adapter and so on and so forth i tested it with a galaxy s9 plus android phone and several other you know sort of portable battery operated clients like that the numbers that i'm about to show you are the best numbers out of five runs so i also um tested with the asrock razer motherboard that has the killer wireless nix which is also a wi-fi six and it was not horribly broken it was it was decent it wasn't as fast as the other stuff i'm about to show you so i'm just going to leave that out it's not part of our benchmark numbers but just so you know i tested something other than the intel client now testing here is a little bit of a pain i'm not going to really get super deep into the reasons but i tried to test with both wi-fi 5 and wi-fi six that's 802.11 ac and 802.11 ax uh i tried to make sure that we always used both bands as well 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz so here we are now if you look at this we've got our cisco catalyst switch and our meraki that's kind of the baseline performance here ruckus ubiquity and uh you know our actual ingenious access point the apple devices do really well pretty much across the board overall the ingenious device is fast although in some cases it really just eeks out a very very small win a very small margin but remember the ubiquity ac hd is not technically 802.11ax so it's a little bit of a speed disadvantage there and we'll talk more about the ac hd light in a second now you need to take these results with a bit of a grain of salt because there are a lot of variables in here clients may not support or want to use both 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz at the same time the roaming and handoff can also affect throughput as the client is trying to use one radio on the wireless network card to probe and see if other access points are available while the you know another radio is busy so it's really hard to set up a test protocol where the results were consistent within a few percentage points across a series of runs there's also the channel width setting which i tried to set to 80 megahertz everywhere that i could a lot of the time out of the box these devices are going to be configured for 20 or 40 megahertz channel width which is gonna hurt your throughput testing i also wanted to include the unified wi-fi six light for this comparison that's only a two by two solution but i had trouble keeping it going that it kept wanting to go to the 2.4 gigahertz band and stay out of the 5 gigahertz band which is kind of crap when it did work i could get it to 810 megabit for the apple devices which is not bad still slower than the ingenius but disabling the 2.4 gigahertz band to try to force it into 5 gigahertz made it worse so i'm gonna have to revisit that in the future because this video has already been far too long in the making the meraki as i said before it's an eight by eight device and so i'll just point that out because that's ridiculous obviously it's meant for density not speed because the speed here isn't great so perhaps these classes this class of device is less desirable than it once was because it's not a speed demon but i'm sure that you can pack on a lot more devices than these other devices in any case i look forward to doing a lot more of this kind of testing if you want to see it it's clear that in ingenious partnership with uh seneo i think that's how you say it the taiwanese company as a communications company so far has produced really solid reliable hardware there may yet be more disruption here uh you know the way that the old guard like cisco was previously disrupted i really think they're on to something because the hardware the hardware really is solid and the places where i've had trouble has been more on the software side once i've gotten them set up there's not really any complaints that i have and sure if you watch the older videos it's like i had to jump through some hoops to get the ingenious stuff set up but for all the features that i've tried and the management portal and all that kind of stuff it's been solid and reliable you know kind of impressively so like more more than i expected i also didn't expect the the ingenious access points to perform as well as they did versus the other access points of course i did expect to include the the a uh ubiquity ac6 light the light access point that's wi-fi six it's a two by two solution i don't know what the deal was there i went through a couple of different firmwares we're just i'm gonna have to revisit that something wasn't right there and i don't wanna i mean 810 megabits not bad but i don't want to publish those numbers because um it needs a little work and i i don't think that they're going to be bad i don't i don't i think they're probably going gonna be okay but i gotta i gotta come back to that i don't know what was going on with that uh the takeaway here is that for the money these are really impressive devices that have a lot of the features that you're looking for and so far for me they've been really solid especially with 802.11 ax especially with client handoff especially with packing in a ton of devices in both like a small office and you know residential stereo so i'm wendell this is level one be sure to check out that performance table it's not bad didn't talk about some of the edge case parameters but hey maybe something we can revisit in the future i'm wondering this is level one i'm signing out i'll see you later\n"