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Router Built for Gamers
VL writes "Ping times suck? Too much lag? If your loved ones are hogging all your bandwidth with P2P and torrents, you'll want to check out the D-Link DGL-4300 Wireless 108G Gaming Router. This is a router designed for gamers that also happens to be a great router for regular folks."
$120? What makes this router so special? In fact, what the heck IS a gaming router? My $20 Netgear wireless router with logging and access control works fine and it's $100 less. It might not have glowing blue lights and make a front page Slashvertisement, but it works fine for me.
blurb from TFA? How lazy can you get?
More Slashdot commercials... tho I hate to admit it, this one looks niiice.
To me it just seems like a normal router with some fancy lights and colors and some QoS software built into the router (most other routers have QoS as well, at least the Linksys ones do). To me though, it doesn't seem all that interesting.
According to TFA, this router comes with no password and also lets you get at the admin tools via http rather than https.
OK, most routers are utterly insecure in their default configs, but for something relatively high-end I don't see why they don't require a password. (Not to mention the SSL bit, which is standard on my much older D-Link).
It's not that hard. All you have to do is only allow access to the admin tools until a decent password has been set, and have a hardware reset button that gets you back to that state in case you forget your password.
I suppose you could have an option for a completely open wireless network, but you'd want to require a few confirmation clicks with big fat warnings.
Am I missing something? Is that really so hard?
(And yes, I know people don't normally associate "high-end" with "D-Link" but hey, mine cost $30 and works just fine.)
This Like That - fun with words!
Quit fucking advertising shit marketed to people who don't know a thing about networking that no respectable slashdotter would ever buy.
It's a shame to have an Ad article like that...
;)
If only it was something new. The only new thing is the marketing concept, the features are not.
I hope not to see such kind of articles anymore on Slashdot.
i-neo
PS: Fortunately they'll be slashdotted
There it is, the reason that QoS on the internet does not exist and will not work. This router allows anyone, including clueless newbs, to easily establish QoS policies for their favorite game. Now, don't get me wrong, there is nothing inherently wrong with this but, what would it be like to have your internet phone call interrupted or preempted by some one else's fragfest? Or for that matter, I want to speed up my surfing so I set QoS priority for my port 80 traffic at the expense of your video stream.
The point is that it is just too easy to abuse QoS and therefore it won't be implemented on a global level. Not in its present incarnation, at least.
It's mainstream now, so expect these type of products hitting the market more and more in the near future. It's like video cards. There was a time when a video card didn't have to come with a flashy 3D collage on the box, but now, thanks to the mainstream culture, video cards have to look cool before they're even out of the box.
And now that joe six pack is playing multiplayer games more and more we see routers and other gear that was once only found in the domain of the geek eeking their way onto the plates of the masses.
It's not a bad thing, just something that happens every time something becomes popular. Companies try separating products for specialised tasks, even if the variance between these products is rather insignificant.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
If your ping is not consistent, you'll get annoying jittering and server-side compensation will suffer. If you can get a 130ms constant ping, that's OK (to a certain extent), but a ping that varies between 50 and 130ms will lead to issues.
As for the games it happens in, I've had issues with CS:S and UT2004. I don't really play any other FPS games over the internet, so I don't know how other games perform.
I never understood why people insist on integrated hub/switches on their routers, personally I prefer having a separate router with *ONE* LAN port and a switch that I can replace whenever I want without having to buy a new router.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
As soon as a read this article to myself I started to laugh, well, at least inside (I was in a public place and a geek laughing at a bunch of text on the screen might not be the best thing for his image). Anyway; this specifically reminds of the products that Creative advertises as "Gamer's Soundcards" that they specifically sell targetting towards gaming.
The fact is; any decent soundcard would do for gaming and you don't need to buy the specific product. But because of the fact that it says "Gamer" on it, and that they're giving away some cheap games with it, people buy it. You really have to love the marketing twists that TPTB put on the consumers.
I'm f#$king magic!
... when you can have a P200 with a wireless card running a flavour of BSD running pf+altq ? (or linux, for that matter), giving priority to gaming packets ?
Syntax error:
10: "Over-exaggerate"
You can't "over-exaggerate" something. "Exaggerating" is synonymous with "over-stating". And "over-over-stating" makes no sense.
"Over-exaggerate" implies there's an acceptable level of exaggeration and you've crossed it.
I may be the grammar police, but otherwise we'd have "words" like "ain't" and "cuz" in the dictionary.
QOS seems kind of useless to me in a home setup. Last time I checked you can't control what your provider is sending you.
Your router can obviously ensure that your precious northbound game bandwidth is being preserved, but how can it keep updating your status steadily if your wife is in the next room downloading all last weeks Days of our Lives episodes?
Has this changed and you can assume that providers will support some kind of QOS protocol now?
(Disclaimer: I have the router described in the article at home in use)
I see all these posts from people saying:
"Oh this is nothing special, I can do everything this routers does with my Linux box and iptables and tc"
Hello people! This is a CONSUMER ROUTER. How many people who are just regular people are competent enough to:
1. Build their own computer (ok, they could buy it prebuilt)
2. Install Linux
3. Configure Linux
4. Understand TCP/IP
5. Learn how traffic shaping/traffic prioritization works
6. Implement #5 on their new Linux box.
Just because us Slashdot nerds can build our own routers doesn't mean this isn't a bad product.
Also, for the people who are saying:
"Oh the Linksys routers can do QoS with the Sevasoft firmware"
This still requires the average consumer to:
1. Know what the hell QoS
1a. Know how the hell TCP/IP works
2. Learn what ports different online games and p2p apps utilize
3. Know about alternative niche firmware for their consumer router
4. PURCHASE the firmware and install it (without borking their shiny new router)
To the people who have been going on about how previous older/current different models of D-Link's have had problems for them I say this:
The D-Link gaming router actually works as advertised. I haven't had it burst into flames. It's been perfectly happy handling World of Warcraft, IRC, IM, DC++, and Bittorrent all simultaneously over my cable connection. The router hasn't spontaneously reset due to extreme traffic flow. The router has simply Just Worked.
This is a quote of the complete contents of the site it points to. It's a lame sales site without any further information. I had to Google the product name to get a different site where there were any product specs. This post is nothing but an advertisement for an advertisement. Maybe the product is worthwhile; if it is the poster should have sent us to a site that had something to say.