I purchased this router after tons of research and handwringing to pick the best one. My biggest dilemma was the years of solid performance from an ASUS RT-AC68U and the ROCK-SOLID performance of the ASUS RP-AC1900 repeater. I had already set up an AiMesh with ethernet backhaul and all was great, but I need more throughput and nodes thanks to our friend COVID-19. So back to this RT-AC88U (not the RT-AC3100 not sure why Amazon hasn't fixed this). I was tempted to go with another brand, but since I already had two ASUS product and great past performance, I decided to go for it one more time. Big mistake? Well, kind of...Out of the box, I got pretty good performance. I wasn't ready to make it my primary yet (as I feared setting it up from scratch), so I made it an AiMesh node over Wi-Fi. It worked well, but I felt my old AC68U was still the bottleneck. Finally, I made the new AC88U the primary node which was easier than I expected. Since it was already ASUS, I restored the settings from the AC68U and was up and running in minutes without having to reconfigure DHCP, IP routing, MAC Address permissions, etc. I was pleased. Initial throughput was great, too. I was getting 988~1010 Mbps from my 1 Gbps service. I was pleased. Then it happened...About a week into my nirvana, there was an unexplained hiccup. All of the devices on the network would periodically lose their IP addresses. The network was up and running, but they all had to disconnect and reconnect to fix it. I searched for days thinking it was a DHCP problem, but to no avail. And the problem was happening more frequently. But now, it was so bad that after a day or two, then after a few hours, the entire router would FREEZE. Or it seemed. Turned out SOME of the devices were smooth sailing while others were completely locked out -- even getting an "incorrect password" while trying to reconnect. The only thing worked was a full MANUAL reboot of the router (I had to do it manually because I couldn't log into the router either -- even from an ethernet connected device)! Even worse (as if it could be worse), my ethernet-to-WAN throughput was a measly 200 Mbps -- on a good day). When I connected a PC directly to my cable modem, I was back at 1Gbps. But with this $%#@! router, I was dying. After a few more days of searching, troubleshooting, firmware swaps, reboots, even a hard-reset and still the same issue. Then I noticed something...The CPU was throttling WAY high with the slightest traffic. So, I thought "heat". After hooking up my cooling fans (that I previously used on my AC68U), the problem seemed to dissipate only to come back with an annoying vengeance. Because I couldn't see the temperature, I installed the Merlin firmware. It showed the temperature as nominally cool yet the CPUs and now the RAM was spiking and staying uncontrollably high. I read more articles which told me to manually set my 2.4 and 5 GHz bands, turn off all versions of QoS, and disconnect my USB. That stuff got my CPUs in MUCH better shape (from 100% utilization to about 20%), but the RAM was still uncontrollable. Then I noticed something else...Merlin's firmware UI (and maybe the stock firmware, but I don't recall) showed only HALF of the Wi-Fi signal (See screenshot). This was the weirdest thing. I configured both, of course, but only one was showing up. In fact, it showed the 5GHz as "disabled". After a few head scratches, it all made disappointing sense to me. After reading all of the horror stories about how the 5GHz and/or the 2.4GHz band was unreliable on these routers, I realized that I, too, was a victim of this curse. For me, it was the 5GHz variety. After a reboot, within 4 hours (sometimes 2), my 5GHz would magically disappear. At that point, my RAM start spiking -- from 30-40% to over 80-90% in just a few hours. And then, BOOM!!!, the router would lock-up/freeze/go kaput. I FINALLY figured out the root cause.Because my 5GHz would fall out, the router would go into a fail/error routine that kept consuming memory as it tried to use the broken 5GHz band. And, once it didn't have any more memory, it would lock up and fail! This is a hardware issue. But with my families need for speed and consistent uptimes, I was stuck between an old router and a broken router -- or starting my whole home network over from scratch. So, what did I do?...I decided to (intentionally and manually) disable the 5GHz on my AC88U. I was sad to do it, but it was like a silver bullet. Since doing so in over a week, my CPU utilization has fallen to 1%-5% at any given time, my RAM usage has not exceeded 38% or 39%, there have been no unexpected drops, and throughput from ethernet devices are consistently 960 Mbps to 982 Mbps -- and all of this is with about 30 devices going at any given time -- including gaming, surfing, streaming HD (x4), Teams & Chime meetings -- the works. BUT, I had to sacrifice my supposedly long-range Wi-Fi 5GHz signal. Fortunately, the AC68U and the AC1900 are doing their thing on both bands, but I'm only getting SOME of what I paid BIG BUCKS for.Next stop is to see about getting a replacement from ASUS, but at least I'm stable (for now).