Good cheap AC router for the house

Hardware Hub Networking
1

So I’m upgrading the router in my house. Not looking for anything too fancy. But something good for streaming, gaming, and NAS functions. I’m looking for the following functions:
-Able to fully cover a 1,769 sqft house for both 2.4ghz and 5ghz and not get single drop off.
-AC least AC1750 prefer AC1900.
-USB port for a printer
-VPN functionality.
-Price under 170 USD.
-Gigabit ports.
-Good software and reliability.
-Does 1080p streaming. I stream a lot of content from my NAS to my TV.

Also how much of an impact would 802.11ac mimo affect performance. I have two cell phones in the house that support that.

2

I use this and it works fine. I can get a signal in my driveway with the door shut on my car. It is a dumbed down Nighthawk.

3

I have not personally tried these routers a few min. looking into specs and reviews I found a few models that looks somewhat interesting. Though by all means get all the opinions you can and it is worth the time to do the research.

^ apparently there is a guy with a 2300 sq ft home and hes getting 30 mb in his far kitchen that previously had no usable signal on a linksys (unknown model) however apparently this router is vastly stronger at range then that one. (again no model info though)

I looked though all of the sub 170 buck routers on microcenter and some on other sites. This router is pretty constantly beating out other routers at the price point.

Another very good router is this synology one

last suggestion of mine would be the
http://www.microcenter.com/product/464704/AC1900_Dual_Band_EXO_Wi-Fi_Router
^ though finding a accurate benchmark of this routers 2.4 and 5 ghz bands at range is really spotty some show it better and some show it worse then the synology and asus counterparts I mentioned. So more research should be done here

Honorable mentions:
D-Link DIR-880L
ASUS RT-AC87U ---> bit faster at 17M then the AC 1900 model however its 184 ish so out of budget range

Hopefully this might help a bit though I am interested to see what others say. I persoanlyl kinda like the Asus model myself it was pretty consistent in all the data I could find.

Can't even link the data i found cause new users cannot link more then 5 links :/ that is kinda annoying...not my first time at the rodeo in pc hardware just new to this forum as I am not a freq. forum user.

4

Look on ebay for a linksys wrt1900ac.

5

@noenkenany Any reason for a wrt1900 over a asus rt-ac68 U in quite a few tests I found the asus was beating it by a little?

6

Mainly because of the openwrt and ddwrt software option. Also I found a test ranking the other way around but ... fuck those reviews, hardware wise they are probably close enough.