Good gaming router

GR_Zombie

I need a good router to replace the craptastic one I bought a few months ago. I mostly play on XBL and WoW so anything that's a good speed for those would be awesome. I don't know a whole lot about how this stiff works so any advice would be great!

ApexMirage

Routers can't bottleneck your connection. Just get something reliable and you'll have no problems.

ASimPerson

Yeah, "gaming" routers are mostly a scam. Most consumer level routers are pretty crappy in general, so buying the most common denominator is usually best.

I have a WRT54GL that has served me reasonably well. I've certainly encountered worse.

If you're concerned about XBL compatibility, MS maintains a page with a list of known working routers: https://support.xbox.com/support/en/us/xbox/xboxlive/getconnected/compatiblenetworkequipment/compatiblenetworkingequipment.aspx

What router do you currently have, by the way?

acidlacedpenguin

grab pretty much anything you can load DDWRT or TOMATO onto and they'll be the best bang:buck ratio.

I have the WRT350N and its pretty damn reliable.

Enos316

Yeah, a router is a router. If you wanted to spend some money to see an improvement you're better off talking to your ISP about more bandwidth. Most have a tiered structure, more $, more mBits...

acidlacedpenguin

well a router is a router to a point. Many of the low end routers just drop connections all over the place, crash, etc.

Bartholamue

I have the D-Link WBR 2310, and from my use out of it, it is pretty reliable if the firmware is up to date. Works on all my game systems.

Fizban140

I had a WRT54G for a while but I had a lot of problems with it connecting to WoW and XBL and so I switched to a Buffalo router and that was alright for a little bit until I tried to add a connection to it. For some reason the router could not handle more than one connection. I am now using a Dlink EBR 2310 and it isn't too bad. I had trouble connecting to certain people (a few of my friends) and a little trouble with XBL (you have to forward some ports) but other than that it has been the best one so far.

I hate networking, so much shit doesn't work. I think half the problem is my ISP though, but it is so hard to tell.

EclecticGroove

Any router is not as good as another in all cases. A lot of the cheapo ones will do fine with a single pc doin nothing but checking e-mail and browsing the web, but fail horribly bad when you want to do more (VPN tunnels, online gaming, VOIP phones, etc).

My WRT54G is a good router for the most part, it tends to act dodgy when I have a lot of torrents going at high speed, it will literally lock up the router to a point where it needs a hard reset.

I don't have a recommendation for a good consumer router here sadly (was hoping to see some good suggestions here), but you can make your own with a dual homed PC (2 network cards) and a *nix OS set up as one (like smoothwall, ipcop, etc). Not the most usefull if looking for easy, but very full featured.

ASimPerson

Yeah, honestly one of the WRT54G varieties is probably the best bet. They're ubiquitous, at least.

Also, I loaded DD-WRT on mine and it's pretty nice, but I never had any huge issues with the default firmware.

(Groove: Just about any consumer router is going to lock up with a large number of BitTorrent connections due to memory limitations. Basically, all those connections necessitate a NAT mapping that has to occur and this takes up memory. If there's multiple computers on the network that can really start eating up available ports and memory.)

Jimmy King

Tally up another vote for a WRT54GL. These use older WRT54G hardware which many people find to be more stable than the newer WRT54G (and similar) routers and allow you to load alternate firmware versions that many other current ones do not due to having less memory. The alternate firmware can give performance boosts and almost always increases flexibility and configurability.

Beyond that, you're not likely to find anything that offers any sort of increased performance without going into higher end and more expensive hardware than you need. Even that stuff you're likely to not see any difference over decent quality consumer grade equipment because you just won't be using it at a level to see it.

Going the dual homed pc route with some sort of linux or bsd based firewall as EclecticGroove mentioned also has some advantages. I did this for years because it offers a ton of flexibility and you're not likely to run into performance issues. The downside is that this solution is going to use a ton more power than a little router appliance (unless you custom build a little mini-itx deal with ssd drives and such) and probably would have a noticeable, if small, impact on your power bill.