🔒 Best WiFi 6 WireGuard VPN Router Setup - Asus AX5700 (RT-AX86U PRO)

0:00 hello everyone this is Troy from troypoint.com and in this video I'm going to show you my favorite WiFi 6 wire guard VPN router setup with the Asus RT ax 86u Pro this is a powerful router that will provide most of you with little to no download speed degradation when the VPN is active your streaming devices will love this because they won't see the huge speed decrease that we get when running the VPN app directly on the device the thing about running a VPN off the router is that you don't need to worry about using VPN applications on the devices that you want to protect within your network plus this ASUS router allows us to Define which devices are protected by the VPN and which aren't now there are a couple

0:45 of drawbacks of running a VPN on a router and I cover those in this video as well everything that I reference will be linked in the notes below such as a huge surf shark VPN discount and a purchase link for the exact router that I'm using in this tutorial all right guys my new ASUS router is connected properly to my network nothing special you just connect it as you would any other router if you want to run multiple routers on your network you can simply plug this one into an available land port on your existing router and this new one will automatically configure itself as a second router that's exactly what I've done because I want to keep my primary router in place and use this one mostly as a VPN router now you'll see I'm on my Windows PC and I've connected

1:31 the new ASUS router to my computer via landan Connection in my opinion this is the best way to get the router up and running as opposed to trying to do it wirelessly less hassle if you have an ethernet cord running from your computer to the ASUS router okay now we need to set up the router I'm going to launch my Chrome browser can use any browser on your computer doesn't matter if it's a PC Linux Mac whatever you can also do this through a phone or tablet however I find a computer to be much easier in the address bar I'm going to type in router. asis.com hit enter and now I get the welcome screen for my new router I'm going to hit create a new network okay right away I do want to separate the 2.4 gigz and 5 gigahertz

2:17 bands so I'm going to click that and now I can create a network name for each of those bands now when I say network name what that means is that's the wireless network that you're going to see when you go into your wireless settings on any device to connect to it since I'm mostly using this as a VPN router what I'm going to do is call this Secure net and you'll notice when I do that it automatically names my 5 gigahertz router as secur netore 5G now I could change that if I'd like but that's completely fine I'm going to leave it as is so now when I want to connect wirelessly to this router on any device I'm going to see these two options in the list now the difference

3:02 between 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz is that 2.4 covers larger areas however 5 gigahertz is going to give you faster speeds and now I'm going to input a password and it automatically fills it in as well for the 5 gahz band so we're using the same password to connect to this on our different devices which is good okay I'm going to move down and hit apply and now it's asking us to change the router login information to get into the router control panel you can set this to whatever you'd like put a username here and then a password here again this is just for the control panel this is to get into your router settings through the browser here this is not what you use to connect your devices to your

3:49 router we just set that previously so I'm going to go ahead and fill in this information here and then click the next button okay now it's showing that there is a firmware upgrade available I'm going to go ahead and upgrade all right it looks like it's going to take about 3 minutes I'll just let it sit here and update okay the update has completed I'm going to hit next okay now I'm on my control panel login screen so I'm going to log in and now you're going to see all kinds of different settings that can be manipulated in this area now I'm not going to go through every single screen here I'm just going to hit on the important ones to get this up and running as far as the VPN is concerned okay the first thing I want to do is go into Wireless now the only item that I suggest checking in this area for both the 2.4

4:35 and 5 GHz bands is making sure that WiFi 6 mode is enabled and you'll see that it is for me if it isn't enabled go ahead and enable it this is one of the main reasons we're using this router is because it supports Wi-Fi 6 connections you definitely want to take advantage of that so right now in the wireless settings that's the only thing that I'm going to look at at this moment everything else should be good okay let's set up our VPN connection now I'm going to move down hit VPN I want to go into VPN Fusion now the great thing about Asus Routers is it comes default with quickly setting up surf shark VPN which you can see here so what I want to do now is log into my surf shark VPN account in another tab so

5:24 I'm going to go to Surf shark.com by the way if you don't have a surf shark account I will provide a link in the video notes below with a great discount be sure to click that link and you will get maximum savings by going through my affiliate link and you're also supporting Troy point I thank you very much for that okay I'm going to hit log in I'm going to input my account email address and password okay you will see that I've been logged into my surf shark VPN account now I'm going to go back to the control panel for my Asus wireless router now I'm going to click Add profile connection name you can name this whatever you'd like I'm just going to call this surf

6:10 shark move down and now it's asking for VPN type I'm going to hit the down arrow here for VPN type and you're going to see here there's different options if you are a surf shark VPN customer you want to choose surf shark we're going to be using the wire guard protocol in this setup which is much faster than these other protocols that you see here now even though wire guard is listed that's for people who have a different service than surf shark so yes if you have a different VPN service you can set those up manually here but the great thing about this router it makes it very easy for us to configure the wire guard protocol through our surf shark account so surf shark is selected here now I'm

6:56 going to choose region and now what this does is list the very ious servers within the surf shark VPN service now I suggest choosing whichever server is closest to your physical location to get the best speeds unless you're trying to get around certain Geo blocks then you're going to choose whichever location necessary to do that but for me Chicago is the closest to my physical location so I'm going to choose that and now it's asking for a private key and that's why we need to be logged into our surf shark VP PN account I'm going to go back in there hit the down arrow where VPN is located on the left menu click manual setup choose router wire

7:44 guard I don't have a key pair you can name this whatever You' like I'm going to just call this router next generate a new key pair and you'll see here it gives us a public key and a private key I want to copy the private key I'm going to go back into my control panel for my Asus wireless router paste that private key into this box now I want to hit apply and enable but before I do that I want to test what my internet speed is on this device before I activate the VPN so I'm going to open a new tab type in speed test and I'm just going to use the Google speed test here run speed test

8:31 F and I do have a gigabit internet plan you're going to see I'm getting 721 megabits per second down and 536 up so back into the control panel for the router now I'm going to hit apply and enable and you're going to see here in this box it automatically adds the wire guard VPN protocol and enables it now let's make sure that this is actually connected right now now to the VPN I'm going to open another tab do dnsleaktest.com and you're going to see here it has changed my IP address it is coming from Chicago which is good let's hit standard test and you're going to see here there

9:17 are no DNS leaks everything is working the way it should now back to speed test even with my VPN active I'm getting screaming fast download speeds 706 megabits per second upload 633 and that's due to the wire guard protocol back into the control panel now if I wanted to deactivate the VPN I can easily do that by just pressing this button here and then here in a little bit I'm going to show you how we can assign various devices on our Network to either use or not use the VPN but before I do that I want to move over to a couple of my streaming devices connect

10:03 those to this wi-fi network make sure everything is working properly with a VPN come back here and I'm going to show you how we can do some selective routing and tell it exactly which devices we want on the VPN and which ones we don't okay guys I'm now on my on 4K Pro Android TV box you're going to see here I am currently connected to the surf Shar darkvpn application and the reason I did that is because I want to show you the speeds that I get with this app and then I'm going to disconnect from the app we will connect to our new Wi-Fi network which is protected by the VPN we're going to test speeds there and see what the difference is okay I'm going to open

10:48 analyti okay I'm getting 46 megabits per second down and about 29 up so I'm going to go to the home screen go into to surf shark VPN disconnect this because we no longer need the app since we're going to be using the VPN on the router go back to the home screen into network settings go to settings network and internet and here you're going to see our new two wireless networks secur net and secur net 5G I want to connect to the 5G one that should be faster like I said earlier 5 GHz is faster than 2.4 GHz but 2.4 GHz covers a larger area since

11:34 I'm right next to my router 5G should work great for me I'm going to type in the password that I set earlier in the tutorial okay I am connected back to the home screen now what I like doing is whenever I change my VPN connection or I go from a VPN connection to no connection or vice versa I always like to go back into settings apps analyti for stop clear cache that way it's not remembering the previous connection okay let's try the speed test now that we're connected to our new

12:22 router a huge change as you can see because we're now using the VPN on the router and we're not requiring CPU resources from the streaming device and I do know that I am connected to the VPN top rightand corner it's showing a different IP address than the one that my internet service provider assigns to me can also move over here go to check VPN now you're going to notice it says this connection is not using VPN software on this device and the reason it's saying that is because it knows that it's not using an actual VPN on the device but what it doesn't know is that we're using a VPN on the router so don't get confused with that language there the important thing is is that I know my

13:08 VPN is working due to the fact that my IP address has been changed to 149342 40110 okay now I'm going to move over to my formul z11 Pro Max and we're going to do the same exact test okay guys just like on the previous device I'm going to go into surf shark V PN app you'll see that I am currently connected back to the home screen I'm going to move down launch analy on this one 97 megabits per second down and 62 up all right back to the home screen I'm going to go into surf shark we'll disconnect

13:54 this back to the home screen I'm going to go to settings apps analyti for stop clear cach all right I'm going to go back a few screens go into network and internet and here are my two new access points just like on the previous one I'm going to hit Secure net 5G type in the password okay I'm now connected to my VPN router back into analyti getting very strong speeds on this one as well as you will see top right hand corner I know my VPN is working because the IP address has changed on this one as well now the z11 pro Max comes with a powerful gigabit

14:42 Ethernet port so I'm going to try testing that now I'm going to plug the z11 pro Max directly into the back of an available land port on my new ASUS router into settings you're going to see here network and internet it does say ethernet is connected I'm going to go into Apps we'll do the same thing for stop clear cach so through the gigabit Ethernet port on the z11 pro Max almost getting 100% full speeds by running the VPN on the router with surf shark wire guard protocol so as you can see here these various streaming devices that have a hard time pushing out good speeds through their native app if you're running the VPN through the router

15:29 you're going to get much better speeds now there are a few downfalls in running a VPN on the router and I will show you briefly if we go back into surf shark VPN application there are some features in here that you can't take advantage of if you are running a VPN off the router one of them is clean web clean web blocks ads trackers and malware unfortunately we can't take advantage of that when running the VPN through the router and then we have the split ing option here which allows us to ignore certain applications when running the VPN application again that's something that we can't do either those are the two big downfalls of running the VPN on your router okay now let's move back

16:14 over to the router and I'm going to show you how you can specify which devices you want protected by the VPN and which ones you don't okay we're back in the control panel of the Asus wireless router and you're going to see here we're on the same page that we were earlier when we set up our profile and there's a button here apply to all devices so this is currently set to where anything that goes through this router will be protected by the VPN now we can disable this but first to make any changes you want to come up here and deactivate the VPN so I'm going to do that move down let's say we want the VPN to protect the on 4K Pro streaming

17:01 device but we don't want the VPN to protect the formular z11 pro Max what I would do is come in here and turn this off go into device now this right here shows the different devices that are currently connected to the router now it may be difficult to discern between which devices which but you can go into the network settings on these streaming devices and see what the local IP address is when I do that I know that 171 is my formul device so I'm going to leave this unchecked and I know this one right here is the on 4K Pro it ends in 161 so I'm going to turn this on

17:46 M2 is the Windows machine that I'm using right now so I want to enable this for my Windows PC as well and this here is the formul z11 pro Max when I connected through the Wi-Fi network so I click okay and once I do that all I need to do is Click apply all settings it's asking me to log back into the control panel I'm going to go into VPN VPN Fusion you'll see everything has been saved when I turn this on here the only two devices on this router that will be protected by the VPN will be my Windows machine and the on 4K Pro streaming

18:33 box says that it's connected I'm going to open DNS leak test here to make sure that that is the case and it is connecting to the Chicago surf shark server and my IP address has changed and there are no DNS leaks so this is working the way it should now I do want to show you a quick tip that will help you differentiate between these devices you can actually rename these devices that are connected to this router I'm going to show you really quick how to do that all you need to do is go into Lan DHCP server and if I scroll down you're going to see here the devices that are currently connected to the router and

19:20 all you need to do is go into them by clicking it this one here is named M2 but like I said earlier this is my Windows machine you can name this this whatever youd like for this one I would identify this as Windows Office hit apply 161 was my on 4K box on 4K Pro apply and then this one here is my formul z11 Pro Max apply and then once I set all those I'm going to hit apply again you can see here the names have been changed and if

20:05 we go back into VPN VPN Fusion Chicago you'll see that those have carried over to every other screen within the Asus wireless router control panel now the last tip I'm going to leave you with is that the ASUS router comes with nice applications for both Android and apple you can install these on your phones or tablets and then you can easily access the VPN settings within the application and make quick adjustments there rather than going to your computer firing up a browser or opening a browser on your phone or tablet and trying to find the setting that you need I personally have the Android application installed on both my

20:52 phone and tablet and it allows me to make quick adjustments guys as I mentioned everything that I referenced is in the video notes below we have a huge surf shark VPN discount and I also have a purchase link for the exact ASUS router that I'm using in this tutorial as always please be sure to hit the Thumbs Up Button subscribe to my channel and click the Bell icon to be notified when I release new videos like this in the future as always thank you very much for following Troy Point have an awesome day