Asus RT-AC88U Wi-Fi Gigabit Router Teardown

yea we know that the heat shields are not easy to remove. but you're a tech youtuber and this is a teardown video! we need you to remove them down. what do you mean by not pushing your luck? remove it well and attempt to put it back..

can you add the Thermal pads thickness in the discription off this video since it's getting older these tend to dry and be less conductive of heat.
so people might wanna change these after a few years of heavy use.

had this happen on my rt-ac68u and bought this Router as an upgrade/quickfix since it's CPU load was 100% when QoS'ing 2 different PC's playing network games and causing network lag above 5000MS wich never was an issue in it's previous years of service.
suspecting the CPU to downclock itself to generate less heat i noticed that with the 2-screw heatsink design on the ac68u the board has bent ever so slightly causing contact to be lost in the center of the board and the heatsink.
after i get it fixed again i plan to experiment with Merlin CFW on that one and maybe later on the newer AC88U if all goes well.

i have the ac68u on hold at the moment since i i don't have all the Thermal pads in stock.
rough sizes are 0.5mm under the outside heatsinks 1mm for the CPU and 2mm for the Radio-chips
although i suspect the CPU is a 1.2-ish since i tried it with 1mm and not 100% sure it's not making good enough contact.

Love your video as now you can see the board can't flex that much under heat with multiple screws on each Heatsink.
i am however curious if someone ever used to extra Soldering joints to Hook up an extra 5 or 12Volt fan to that to keep it super cooled for parts in the world over 30degrees Celcius.

29 dislikes is dudes that dont find a solution xD
love it good vid

That was really helpful. Subbed. You clearly know what you are talking about. Trying to figure out why an AC-RT-68U I bought for my parents is not broadcasting on 2.4 but says it is when it is actually only broadcasting on 5ghz and giving it a 2.4ghz SSID! Also, only one cpu core is showing in ASUSWRTmerlin lol. I gave them a new one as it was on it's last legs anyway. About a year ago the primary WAN failed (I think due to nearby lightning) and it has been working on failover ever since. It is so weird. The leds show 5ghz but not 2.4 ghz. I made sure to name them completely differently. It will only let things connect on 5ghz even though the SSID says 2.4. I checked with only 2.4 capable hardware and scanners. Digging deeper it gets even stranger. 'Temperatures' under 'Tools' show 5ghz as 'disconnected', Logs shows one cpu core fails to boot and only one cpu shows up in GUI. I tried to set up a 2.4ghz guest network to confirm it is not just a glitch. Both normal 2.4 and guest 2.4ghz will only transmit on 5ghz (even though they call themselves 2.4ghz) and the control channel is fixed on 0! I have tried lots of different firmware's, resetting, clearing nvram and asuswrt. Next step was going to be removing the heat sinks over the chips to see if anything burned out. Have you ever seen anything like this? Just interested and will probably tear apart if not. Anyway, thanks for the clues.

6:15 It's 128MB flash memory

If I turn off WiFi function, in theory will it perform better on wired part.

How many screws do you have to remove? Where are the screws located?

I'm not sure if you will read this, but I heard that asus made some "interesting", choices in powering up this device, essentially buffing PSU by 19 volt to achieve more powerful CPU and USB ports (claims over overclocking from 800mhz to 1ghz), how true is that? People claim this to be the reason behind this Router generating a lot of heat and it got me concerned over it's lifespan.

It's not a modem by the way.

Good.

Does the Wan port wiggle any on yours?

So there are two serial ports and one JTAG port inside this router