D-Link DGL-4500 Xtreme N Gaming Router Review

[Gizmo]

Sharky Extreme evaluate this unit:

The DGL-4500 Xtreme N Gaming Router is one of the high-end "GamerLounge" models offered by D-Link, and it supports both Wireless-N (Draft 2.0) and Gigabit LAN technologies, giving you best of both worlds. This is a serious piece of hardware, as in addition to wireless transfer rates of up to 300Mbps, you receive hard-wired speeds of up to 1000 Mbps. Although real-world speeds won't be that fast, these will exceed anything a 100 Mbps network connection will offer.

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D-Link DGL-4500 Xtreme N Gaming Router Review

[Áedán]

This might be a stupid question, but they only really seemed to evaluate the wireless side of it. There's nothing about the performance of it's routing/NAT engine, nor about the gigabit ethernet. It does support WPA/WPA2 when used in a RADIUS environment. It also supports WEP, but it's recommended that you don't use it, as you'll see a performance loss of about 70%!

Ironically, the D-Link DIR-855 outperforms it in terms of WAN to LAN and LAN to WAN performance. Both the DGL-4500 and the DIR-855 use the Ubicon StreamEngine (which D-Link is calling "GameFuel"), which performs QoS (Quality of Service) based on the ports the packets are coming from/going to. The DGL-4500 and the DIR-855 are pretty similar, apart from the fact the DGL-4500 uses a slower processor.

[Gizmo]

I tend to be suspicious of ANY networking product that adds 'Gaming' to its name. There are SO many things that affect gaming performance over a network (especially the Internet) over which the router has no control and on which it can have no effect, that such a moniker seems rather presumptuous.