Older ASUS Vs Newer D-Link Router

[Supersonicwolfe]

I am in a peculiar scenario, my bedroom have poor WiFi signal (Main router is a D-link DIR-842 in the living room just 5 meters away), 5G signal at the center of the room dropped down to 3 bars (D-link DWA-182 USB3.0 Adapter) and none on my laptop (2012 Dell 17R/or any of my phone/iPad placed there), only 2.4Ghz maded through...(the room encased within 3 reinforced concrete walls... so you can say I live in a faraday cage) We do have a Ethernet jack but that was connected to nothing. 

So I need a second router. I am planning to build a small LAN for just myself, separate with the network used by my whole family (or maybe just a repeater abridged to the router outside).

Note: In my use case, I have a WiFi enabled Laptop and desktop, but I want to connect both machines to the second router via Gigabit Ethernet. The laptop is backed up via Backblaze but the Desktop isn’t, however I use Desktop to work more often. Every month, I copy my work from the Desktop to hot-swap HDDs then remove the HDDs and plug them into USB 3.0 HDD docks so those files can get uploaded to Backblaze for online backup. It usually take 10-30 minutes to copy to HDD and HOURS to upload, and I am kinda worried the files uploaded to BackBlaze will be corrupted due to the poor WiFi signal...  

 

In the future, I plan to create a shared drive on the desktop, the laptop will fetch the files from the shard drive via Ethernet to the backup HDDs, meanwhile the files will automatically get uploaded to BackBlaze via Ethernet - wirelessly abridged routers - internet).

I usually work with files with just a few MBs and rarely some 400 MB.

Oh and I do watch a lot of YouTube Vids and occasionally play online games on the desktop.

 

Even if my original “Copy then Upload” would be faster than “Copy while Upload” I planned to do, I still need a repeater to boost the WiFi in my room...

 

Now back to the contenders

I found 3 routers within my budget. (~20 USD)

(From the cheapest to the most expensive)

ASUS RT-AC55U

D-link DIR-823G

ASUS RT-AC1200G+

All of those routers are AC1200 Class routers and within 4 USD apart, but DIR-823G appears to be the most recent (Released Feb 2018 ish?) while the ASUS Models came from 2016.

The D-link model also have a 1Ghz SoC (RTL8197F) while AC55U &1200G+ is some 700MHz and 900MHz SoC respectively. (Not sure if a faster SoC will help my use case).

RT-AC55U is the only model here only have 2 antennas while the other two have 4, but it also have a USB3.0 port while the other two only have a single USB 2.0 port for personal cloud (That said I don’t think I will build a private cloud storage using the USB 2.0/3.0 Port, especially BackBlaze does not support backing up network drives to prevent people like Linus take away several PB of strove space. Likely I will use that port to put a cooling fan on the router if I feel like it... I have several fans laying around doing nothing...)

 

Other brand or model suggestions are welcome.

 

Currently I am leaning toward the DIR-823G, it seemed to have the bells and whistles I needed most with a faster SoC of the three, plus MU-MIMO, and it is from a more reputable seller comparing to other two. (AKA I am not sure the ASUS are brand new or not, but I fell comfortable using second-hand hardware anyway so it is not a super big factor)

 

P.S. I had read some people said D-link wasn’t so good back in 2015, but so far I had encountered no issues with the D-link 846 router and 182 adaptor, maybe they are doing better these days?