I'm a Netgear man myself. WNDR 3700 from about 4 years ago. I should probably upgrade to a Nighthawk, but I'm just that cheap :D

Just picked up the Nighthawk X8. Aside from the price, it's great. So packed with features, that I haven't even felt the itch to flash it with anything else yet. The active antennas are a cool thing too. Curious what your take on the X8 is? ( I know it's not worth it's price tag.....

My take is that most gamers buy $350 routers because they're neat instead of necessary. But honestly if or makes you happy, go for it.

I bought it because it supports aggregation,native vpn, has more potential throughput than anything else on the market ( nothing is even that fast on paper yet), has active antennas ( vs passive ) and broadcasts two 5ghz bands in addition to its 2.4. It has a ridiculous feature set, and boasts a ton of control with stock firmware. It's future proof for quite sometime too. Having said all of that, even I think it wasn't worth the money I paid. But I did get it for $350, and they "threw in" a Seagate 1TB usb ultra slim HDD. So, I COULD say I got it for $300....which is still crazy expensive I guess. Still, so far, I'm happy with it after updating the firmware. It was questionable out of the box.

That's cool. I certainly can't fault you for making that purchase. Like I said, it's neat, but not necessary...unless you're sending many copies of massive print jobs to a color printer on your LAN, or transferring a ton of 4k video to other devices on your LAN...it's way more bandwidth than your WAN connection supports.