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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.
had a review of the D-Link a while ago
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.
8dimensional.com posted about this almost two weeks ago.
Not to be flip, but if one of the reasons you come to Slashdot is to hear about neat hardware and read the articles, go to 8dimensional.com first. If the follow-up discussions matter, then ok, yeah, keep coming here. But what the heck is going to be said here that couldn't be predicted anyway?
A router with QoS already defined for well know games and a easy setup to add new games.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I am sceptical about D-Link products - Even though a relatives WLAN Access Point works pretty well, I have made quite bad expiriences with them. Even their USB 2.0 HUB didn't work as promised with my G5 (anyone same experience?) - it only worked in USB 1.0 Mode (although USB 2.0 devices were attached).... So sounds kind of vaporvare to me... But thats just my humble opinion...
Spelling mistakes: My is english spoken not tongue of mother.
"Okay, now you're a judge, how do you know when someone's guilty? Let's say.. let's have this scenario: You've got a guy there, nineteen year old, driving around in top of the range router with the lights and everything, leather seats, bitches in the front, bitches in the back, sitting on the woofer speakers, gold tooth, UV light underneath, big drum and bass coming out, the guy never done any work in his life. Is he a gamer or is he a dealer? considering he never touched any joystick or held a fire button ever in his life? Are you going to send this man down?"
"sales in a slump? Got some free time at work? Cull your product tag-lines onto /. and profit! The editors no longer care!"
/. and a story because I updated my art website this morning.
Since everyone's just shamelessly plugging stuff, maybe I can get an "art" category on
stuff |
This is a router designed for gamers that also happens to be a great router for regular folks.
:: Military-Grade : Civilian.
You're stating the obvious.
Gamer : Regular Folk
yep, but this time, the QoS software is already configured for popular games and has a easy setup to add new games.
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Seeing as how TFA is /.-ed
Here is a review of the D-Link DGL-4300 Gaming router. They even test the unit with PCs running Fedora Core 3.
Reviews
http://gamesfirst.com/v4/index.php?m=l&i=372
http://www.gamingillustrated.com/dgl4300.php
http://firingsquad.com/hardware/d-link_dgl-4300/
Competition
http://www.dlink.com/giveaway/monthlyGiveaway.asp
According to the ExtremeTech review, the ping times are around 300-400ms when the connection is being heavily utilised. Well, that's useless for the target market. Alex Clouter's QoS scripts did a lot better 2 years ago:
http://www.digriz.org.uk/jdg-qos-script/
This is certainly overrated - at least it's slashdotted for sure :-)
The key to good ping times is to have 2 things:
1) A stable, low-latency connection to your ISP
2) Short TX queues.
In essence, 1) is recursively defined by having 2) at your ISP, but ISPs aren't too keen on having minimal TX queues, because that will limit the throughput slightly. Since people behave ridiculous if they get 53 KB/s instead of 55 KB/s, it's a hard compromise between latency and throughput.
Since there is nothing you can do if your ISP isn't up to snuff, I don't see how this router can anything important. If you ping 200, how can that be fixed by carving off something like 10ms?
(yes, I did read as much as possible of the article, which was only page 1 I'm afraid..)
With great numbers come great responsibility!
I spent a long time trying to get a sister product, the DI-624, to work.
First of all, I never tried their MIMO gear, but the range and power on all the previous XG gear I tried was shockingly less than I expected. You felt lucky to penetrate two walls, or go 30 feet. Yes, of course, this is all construction materials and background noise and so forth. But in general the way these devices are marketed you do not realize how unlikely you are to see the performance numbers they claim, or potentially even use the device in a meaningful way at all.
For the first YEAR I owned this product, the firmware was unusuable! The device would work, sure, but gradually you would see latencies and packet loss creep up over a 24-48 hour period until the network was unusable. Some kind of resource leaking... And then you would also see occasional random lockups. Only power cycling the router would help.
Can you picture a cron job that wget's the router reboot URL? Now you are getting the picture. And I know from the forums that earlier DLink adopters had it worse, in many cases much worse. DLink, of course, was just in no hurry at all to fix the problem. AN ENTIRE YEAR. Imagine my amazement when they finally fixed it at all.
I actually tried a competing Linksys product. It was worse, both in terms of analog performance, and also that it would lose 40% of its speed with WPA encryption enabled. Pathetic. The biggest draw there is a GPL firmware you can fix yourself. But don't get me started on the whole Sveasoft evilness. But in general GPL firmware is the way to go, and it's what we need to encourage. It just kills me the Linksys hardware is under-powered.
Of course, none of these chipset manufacturers can be bothered to cooperate on a high speed standard, so you are throwing in your lot with either Atheros or Broadcomm. The DLink XTreme G's are Atheros. So, if you bought in, you didn't just get the router, you got a bunch of cards, too, and you are locked in if you want to realize their high-speed modes.
And don't get me started on the Linux support. There is no GPL driver for these products. None. You can use MadWifi, which is a GPL wrapper around a binary, closed-source "HAL." This disables all the "Xtreme-ness" of the network, and MadWifi, according to their faq, is in no hurry at all to fix that. However, this is the ONLY stable linux driver solution I have found for the newer Atheros chips. You can use NDISWrapper or DriverLoader, however, neither is stable.
Overall 802.11g and derivatives are an ugly, ill-supported, overpromised nightmare, and in hindsight I would never have gotten within 100 yards of one. My advice, stay away unless you have no other choice, and just absolutely love troubleshooting.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
Viperlair.com, after reviewing thier weblogs, recently decided Cisco may have been a better choice for their routers.
Mirrordot
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!
That examines the gaming packets and makes them go faster using the same technology Lucy Ricardo used when she was working in the bonbon factory.
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
Demo Evaluation Unit - $0
Low Cost Web Hosting for your evaluation site - $100/month
Having your demo unit melted to slag trying to route a good slashdotting - priceless
There are few sites a little bit of traffic can't DDoS, for everything else there's Slashdot.
I'm very interested in this router and may purchase it (or the nicer 4600) in the near future. I don't play online games but I'm interested in VoIP, P2P, and Shoutcast hosting. Any combination of these things was impossible in the past but this router sounds like the answer. It got a great review in Computer Power User (CPU) magazine which I believe to be a very reputable source.
I'm a little wary of the claim of better ping times though. This may be a statement concerning QoS packet scheduling because I've heard from a few sources (including Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel) that 1000baseT has higher latency than 10/100. However, D-Link boasts that the router's onboard processor is much faster than most, allowing many more simultaneous connections, so perhaps it can direct packets more quickly than comparable products.
I should mention here that Linksys has absolutely abhorrent customer support and that I highly recommend supporting the competitive companies. I'm on my 2nd (non-consecutive) Linksys router and it's been very unreliable from the get go. Their tech support advised me to wait a while before calling back, and when I did they told me my 1 month replacement window had expired. 8 days ago after MUCH frustration with 3 techs and a manager they finally agreed to send me a replacement (shipped at my expense) in 3 working days and I've recieved no such thing.
Linksys is riding on its laurels. Hopefully they'll get the message when people start buying imaginative new products from competitors.
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.
So far, every D-link router product I have had has suffered from 'resetting' under heavy load. D-link's tech support was dismal and their end suggestion was to reduce the speed of the ports to 10mb, and reduce the broadband side to 2mb.. and 'don't put it under such a heavy load'.. What sort of garbage suggestion is that? They expect me to just surf web pages and not get any work done? No thanks.
Needless to say ay I no longer buy ANY D-link product and avidly recommend against them.
Will this new device suffer from the same defects, regardless of their promotion of 'features' ? Or have they finally got a clue and want to produce a useable product?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That is, just paying more money for something with a decal on it?
I could see them preloading it to know about and priortize some traffic (XBox Live, and a handful of the top PC titles), but I bet it's just the same old router with an X-Treme GamAr sticker and a 100 dollar higher price tag.
If you go to EB you'll see "XBox Lan Party" kits, with a simple 4 port 100mbit hub (not a switch) and a few patchcords, and they sell for upwards of 100 bucks.
Or an "XBox link cable" (read crossover cable) sells in the gamerz section of Best Buy for 40 bucks, whereas a regular x-over cable in the comp section will be about 10.
Go Go Gamer Rip-off!!
(I have an actual gaming router, linux based, that does prioritize xbox live, xbconnect, etc, and works great even when I'm bittorrenting the hell out of the connection).
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
You're completely missing the point. Everything the router probably does is schedule outbound packets belonging to locally prioritized traffic before other traffic like outbound filesharing. In most cases, this is quite enough to produce a perceptible speedup, although large downloads will still clog up your line. So what you have with this product is a consumer-grade traffic shaper, that may give you some advantages without doing anything to disrupt global internet traffic.
The same thing is possible with some tc and iptables rules.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
it's a D-Link, it'll SAY it has all sorts of useful and great features on the box, but when you plug it in and go to configure it you'll find out those features don't actually WORK, like D-Link's PPTP Client feature of some of their routers, it WILL connect to a PPTP server, but it's only a client for the router itself, not anyone behind the router, so it's not really all that bloody useful as a PPTP client now is it? I HATE D-Link, had 3 products from them, 1 had a meltdown turning a 10/100 switch into a 1Kb switch, 1 print server that fried after a year causing endless line feeds, and a VPN router that couldn't ACTUALLY be used for either end of a VPN connection. 3 strikes, they're out, screw D-Link!
If your loved ones are hogging all your bandwidth... Unplug them! That's what I do when it's game time. "Sorry guys, the Internet is down again."
Nothing beats playing my favorite EA games over my SBC Yahoo! DSL connection using my D-Link DGL-4300 Wireless 108G Gaming Router with a cool, refreshing Pepsi in one hand, my Logitech mouse in the other, wearing my Nike clothes and blasting a ClearChannel affiliate, my source for great new hits from 50 Cent and A Simple Plan.
Whoops, I meant to post that as an article.
I didn't see anyone mention this, but a BIG difference is gigabit enabled on the LAN ports. So not only do they have QoS preset for gaming, but you have the benefits of faster transfer speeds within the network while getting to keep the router and wireless together. You guys price a gigabit switch and a g-router then see how ridiculous this is (or is not).
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
does it have a Hemi?
I enjoy wathcing the creativity of marketing types. Take a product with modest success, turn on one software bit, and re-market the product to a whole new "specialized" audience.
Bean bag chair + appropriate logo = cool gamer's chair
Regular mouse + extra teflon sticker = cool gamer's mouse
Regular router + traffic prioritization flag = cool gamer's router
Regular PC + $3.00 of stencils and stickers = cool teenager PCs!
Regular mouse + retractable cord = cool travel mouse!
BTW: I'm not bashing the niche marketing, I really am facinated by it. It's great to see how certain products are re-branded or re-marketed and find huge success despite the fact that the underlying product is 99.9% identical as before. Of course, it's really entertaining to watch nich-marketing fall flat on its face.
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
Your upload is the usual problem. It has less bandwidth and worse, there's an outbound buffer you have to work through. This buffer (often in modem hardware) is horrible (2+ sec), and the only solution short of queue jumping is to keep it drained by throttling the sources.
You need a specific router ? take an old dusty forgotten box, 2 NICs, install a routing specialized linux distro. Tune it at will : there are plenty of iptables scripts available on the web for every game.
IMHO, it is cheaper & more versatile.
As soon as a read this article to myself I started to laugh, well, at least inside (I was in a public place and a geek laughing at a bunch of text on the screen might not be the best thing for his image). Anyway; this specifically reminds of the products that Creative advertises as "Gamer's Soundcards" that they specifically sell targetting towards gaming.
The fact is; any decent soundcard would do for gaming and you don't need to buy the specific product. But because of the fact that it says "Gamer" on it, and that they're giving away some cheap games with it, people buy it. You really have to love the marketing twists that TPTB put on the consumers.
I'm f#$king magic!
"It's like, some people only do things because they get paid, and I think that's just sad."
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I'm just curious as to how many people do the 'roll your own' route and use an old box like a P2 or K6-2 or something, put two $10 ethernet adapters in there, and use iptables with QOS to do almost the same thing? Now I realize that that is much more involved, and there is definite worth in purchasing a consumer level "router" and dropping it into place (not to mention the actual learning curve involved in setting up your own router), but I find it's given me so much flexibility (and it rarely runs into weird firmware problems, random freezes, and the amount of connections it can hold have never been a problem - this with seven PC's, running and seeding torrents) that I'm surprised when people get excited about routers like this, especially on slashdot.
Note that with that many torrents running, QOS is very important, and I seem to have it down pretty well - we've had four people playing online with the previous mentioned torrents running, and our pings still hold steady in the 30-70 range (yes, we have a nice set of data lines, but QOS is still important at keeping the torrents under control ).
The gigabit ports are nice, of course.
... 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 ?
Not to disagree with your overall point, but VOIP isn't all that latency sensitive. The speed of sound in air alone means you get 6 milliseconds of round-trip latency per meter seperating people talking.
Games can be very latency sensitive, the difference between two people shooting first can be a few milliseconds, though given monitor refresh rates anything under 15ms is a lottery... so if you did magically control your ISPs routers you wouldn't be unjustified in giving your games the same or higher QoS priority than VOIP
Slashdot - Mutual Assured Discussion
It's awful. Latencies average around 30ms, with spikes to 120ms. Before we installed the Sveasoft crap, we could drive our robot vehicle remotely, using an older Linksys 802.11b unit with stock Linksys firmware. Now, the latency is so bad we can't. Fortunately, we usually drive it autonomously, and E-stop is on a completely separate radio link.
Worse, the Sveasoft software garbles TCP packets. If you have several TCP packets in flight, the later ones tend to get garbled. We've put packet sniffers on both sides of the link, and we can see the TCP packets getting trashed. It looks like the packet queueing is badly broken. Worse, they don't get trashed randomly. The trashing is repeatable and the TCP connection never recovers. It looks like some kind of stateful TCP firewall has gone horribly wrong. We have the Sveasoft firewall turned off, or at least as "off" as is offered by its options.
Non-TCP packets don't seem to get trashed in this way. So remote file access (NFS, QNX native networking) still works. And HTTP out to the Internet works. But local high-traffic TCP connections fail.
Most users probably don't see these problems because they're using these units to connect to the Internet through a slow uplink. So they never have a bottleneck across the WiFi link and don't get a packet backlog in the Sveasoft software. But try to talk to a local server using TCP. A CVS checkout from our local server over a pair of Linksys routers using the latest, licensed, paid-for Sveasoft software hangs. Every time, within ten seconds. (Works fine with a wired Ethernet connection.)
Attempts to get this fixed have dragged on for months. It's been reported to Sveasoft, of course.
So we definitely recommend against buying Sveasoft firmwere.
John Nagle
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?
I've used various D-link and Linksys routers to work with VPN and has failed miserably. However, Netgear was solid and worked great even with heavy load. Strongly recommend Netgear for any low-end routers.
http://www.up0.com/
(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.