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D-Link DGL-4300 Wireless Router Review April 06, 2005 Paul Clarity Jastrzebski |
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Summary: Do you share your internet connection with a bandwidth hog at home and it's affecting your ping times while gaming? If so, D-Link's DGL-4300 router may just be the solution for you. The DGL-4300's GameFuel technology flags data packets from games such as Counter-Strike as high priority, while packets from other programs are tagged low priority, giving you the lowest ping possible for gaming. In addition, the router supports 802.11g and features four GigE ports. But does this technology actually work in games? Find out in this review!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 7 ) |
Walking through the halls of CES earlier this year, I made my way through the D-Link booth, expecting to see the same routers and switches that have been on store shelves at our local Best Buy and Circuit City stores for years now. With product life cycles that get into the one year plus range, the home networking market isn’t exactly the most exciting in the computer industry.At their booth, D-Link had on display their newest addition to their home networking family, the DGL-4300 Wirless 108G Gamers Lounge. Draped in a black exterior and equipped with blue LED’s, the DGL-4300 not only looks very unique, but it’s actually tailored to the hardcore PC gamer, the first router we’ve seen of the sort.
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There were two DGL-4300 routers and two gaming PC’s running Unreal Tournament 2004 to demo the DGL-4300’s most impressive feature, D-Link’s GameFuel technology. The demo first showed both systems running Unreal Tournament 2004, each with about a ping of 50. A D-Link representative then alt-tabbed out of the game on each PC and started uploading a 100MB movie file to a remote FTP, spiking up the ping on each system to 170ms.
Next, to show GameFuel in action, the representative alt-tabbed one of the PC’s, logged into the router, and enabled GameFuel, bringing the ping on the computer connected to the GameFuel enabled router down to 60, all the while still uploading the movie file. We’ll get more into how exactly GameFuel works later in the review, but needless to say GameFuel’s demonstrated results were very impressive.
Gigabit Routing
Along with pioneering packet-filtering technologies like GameFuel, D-Link is also among the first companies to bring Gigabit connectivity to their home routers. The DGL-4300 supports 10/100/1000Base-Tx connections, allowing you the increased internal network speeds Gigabit Ethernet brings to the table.
Over the last two years we’ve seen most top-tier motherboard manufacturers include at least one Gigabit Ethernet connection on most of their enthusiast class motherboards, so most hardcore gamers should by now have Gigabit Ethernet built into their system.
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It is important to note that although you are connected at 1Gbps, real-world network transfers usually hit around 300MB/s or so, as you can see through our Windows Task Manager screenshots.
Package Contents
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The DGL-4300 is equipped with a standard bundle one would expect to have with any router: one CAT5 Ethernet cable, power adapter, mounting kit, vertical stand, manual, and quick installation guide. Nothing is lacking from the DGL-4300’s bundle, but there is nothing extra either.
| The DGL-4300 Router: | Page:: ( 2 / 7 ) |
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The DGL-4300 Gamers Lounge uses D-Link’s standard exterior router casing, but has a unique black color and very bright blue activity LEDs. Although the blue LEDs look good on the router’s front panel, they do not go very far in telling us about the activities of the router. For example, the LED’s indicating connection on one of the routers four
ports do not tell what speed the connection is at, 10MB, 100MB, or 1GB.
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When we turn the router to it’s backside, we see a very standard four-port layout with a WAN connection for your broadband modem. There is a small reset button next to the WAN port that allows the DGL-4300’s settings to be reverted back to factory conditions.
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The DGL-4300’s wireless 802.11b/g antenna is easily screwed into the back panel and has great range, up to 200 feet from our in-house tests. It’s important to note that the DGL-4300 supports a 108Mbps wireless interface, but unless you have a D-Link wireless card that supports D-Link’s Turbo Mode, you will be stuck at the 54Mbps limit of the 802.11g standard.
Installation
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Installation of the DGL-4300 was very simple, with installation only involving plugging all the necessary connections in and turning the router on. For DSL and other broadband internet connections that require a password, logging into the router is very simple.
The DGL-4300 uses the common 192.168.0.1 local address and requires no password to log into. One thing you’ll notice about the web-interface of the router is that it is unlike any other home networking router; it actually looks good!
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D-Link put the extra effort into developing a web-interface that looks and feels like a real webpage, complete with Flash animation and easy to navigate menus. For the casual user, D-Link has included an easy to use internet connection wizard, allowing you setup your router in four easy steps. It’s nice to see that the wizard also includes a prompt to change the router login password, since as many of you know most people that own home routers never change their factory set passwords.
Also included in the basic section of the web interface is the wireless security setup wizard, which in four easy steps allows you to secure your wireless connection.
| Advanced Settings: | Page:: ( 3 / 7 ) |
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Although the installation wizards are very nice, the most impressive part of the DGL-4300’s web-interface is definitely it’s large assortment of advanced settings. The first under the Advanced tab in the interface is the Virtual Server page, which allows you to redirect a public port on your router to an internal network IP address, allowing you to host an FTP, Game Server, or Web Server through your router.
The next setting in the Advanced section is the Special Applications page, allowing you to open up specific ports on the router when data is sent to them. The Special Applications page is commonly used by applications such as Bit Torrent and AIM talk.
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The DGL-4300’s gaming section is very unique because it features an assortment of popular games and the TCP and UDP ports required to open in order for the data going through these ports to be re-directed to a single PC in your network. There are over 50 games in this section, with the list being constantly updated through new router firmware upgrades.
GameFuel
And now we get to the DGL-4300’s flagship technology, GameFuel. Essentially, GameFuel is a packet prioritizing technology that sifts through all the incoming and outgoing packets going through your router, and prioritizes their importance according to what kind of packet they are. Gaming packets will have priority over other packets such as those commonly associated with FTP and web traffic, allowing you to maintain consistent latencies while playing online games.
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GameFuel has automatic settings that let the technology work on it’s own, but is also fully customizable allowing you to add your own GameFuel rules, each with their own priority.
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Other advanced settings are primarily tailored for allowing and excluding access to your router, allowing you to block specific websites through the Web Filter, control access in and out of your network through the Access Control section, control access based on MAC addresses through the MAC Address Filter, and limiting access to a server on your network to a specific IP or IP range through the Inbound Filters section. A firewall is also included to help protect against unwanted intruders.
Tools Section
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The tools section of the DGL-4300’s web interface allows for you to change the router password and router name. Here you’re also able to set the router’s time, e-mail alerts, reset system settings, upgrade the firmware, and even host a web server with a domain name that you’ve purchased.
Status Section
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The status section gives you you’re device info settings, with all your WAN, LAN, and WLAN settings in plain sight. The Wireless Client section allows for you to see the MAC and IP address of the wireless clients using your 802.11b/g connection.
Also included in the Status Section are a routing table, displaying the routing details configured on the DGL-4300, System Logs, Network Traffic Statistics, and Active TCP and UDP Sessions.
| Test System | Page:: ( 4 / 7 ) |
System Setup
AMD Athlon 64 4000+
ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe
1GB Corsair XMS 3200XL Pro (2-2-2-5) @ DDR 400 (2x512)
2 x NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT in SLI
34GB Western Digital Raptor (10,000RPM , 8MB Cache)
Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2
DirectX 9.0c
Desktop resolution 1024x768, 32-bit color, 75Hz refresh
D-Link DGL-4300 Wireless 108G Gamers Lounge
Benchmark Settings
Doom 3 v1.1
Half-Life 2 Deathmatch
Unreal Tournament 2004 v3355
| Testing | Page:: ( 5 / 7 ) |
To test the DGL-4300, we’re going to put great emphasis on the router’s GameFuel technology, and how it affects gaming performance. We’re going to be using Doom 3, Half-Life 2 DM, and Unreal Tournament 2004 for our tests. To test, we logged into a public game server and observed our ping. We played in each multiplayer server for five minutes or so to see if the server was stable, and when stable we started to run our tests.
For our download tests, I used my Mercury account on Fileshack to download the Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Demo, which is approximately 500MB. Four our upload tests, I uploaded a 10MB file to my personal storage space at Comcast.net. I used a Shuttle SN95G5 PC to download and upload files while the ASUS SLI system was playing the tested games. Throughout our results I will note what speeds the uploads and downloads were transferring at on the SN95G5.
With GameFuel enabled, upload speeds were 8kb/s. With Gamefuel disabled, upload speeds were 40kb/s.
With Gamefuel enabled, download speeds were 295kb/s and upload speeds were 8kb/s. With Gamefuel disabled, download speeds were 350kb/s and upload speeds were 30kb/s.
With Gamefuel enabled, download speeds were at 220kb/s. With Gamefuel disabled, download speeds were at 520kb/s.
With GameFuel enabled, upload speeds were 8kb/s. With Gamefuel disabled, upload speeds were 40kb/s.
With GameFuel enabled, download speeds were at 215kb/s while upload speeds were at 7.5kb/s. With GameFuel disabled, download speeds were at 285kb/s and upload speeds were at 37kb/s.
With GameFuel enabled, download speeds were at 320kb/s. With GameFudel disabled, download speeds were at 485kb/s.
With GameFuel enabled, upload speeds were 7kb/s. With Gamefuel disabled, upload speeds were 39kb/s.
With GameFuel enabled, download speeds were at 225kb/s while upload speeds were at 7kb/s. With GameFuel disabled, download speeds were at 265kb/s and upload speeds were at 33kb/s.
With GameFuel enabled, download speeds were at 286kb/s. With GameFuel disabled, download speeds were at 490kb/s.
| Ballistics Report: | Page:: ( 6 / 7 ) |
Pros
Performance: The DGL-4300 delivers what D-Link had promised us, better network performance while gaming. D-Link’s GameFuel technology efficiently prioritizes gaming packets making sure that no matter what else someone on your network is doing, you will be able to maintain a playable and low latency connection.
Features: The DGL-4300 is one of the most feature-packed home routers on the market. It’s great looking web interface is both very easy to use and very comprehensive, and the interface’s wide array of settings should leave even the most hardcore of enthusiasts happy.
The DGL-4300 is also one of the few if not the only home router that has Gigabit connectivity, finally giving gamers the ability to have ultra-low latencies while LAN gaming and ultra-fast speeds when transferring files throughout the network.
Looks: D-Link did a great job of making the DGL-4300 a unique looking product. Black with very bright blue activity LED’s, the DGL-4300 looks like no other home router on the market.
Cons
Price: With a selling price of around $140, the DGL-4300 is definitely on the upper end of the home networking spectrum. Stiff competition in the home networking market has dropped the prices of most equipment to the $50-75 mark, with the DGL-4300 more than double that price point.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 7 / 7 ) |
FiringSquad Says:
The gaming community finally has a networking product it can call it’s own. While many segments in the computer industry embraced gamers with custom motherboards, tweaked memory, and even keyboards, the home networking companies largely ignored the interests of PC gamers and concentrated on the larger, more mainstream market. It’s great to see that D-Link has engineered a product that even it’s employees, many themselves being avid gamers, are proud to use in their own homes.
The bottom line really is that the DGL-4300 does what it is intended to do: keep online game latencies low while still allowing other internet tasks to run smoothly. However, there is a catch, since gaming packets have priority over their FTP and HTTP counterparts when GameFuel is enabled, download and upload speeds are slower as evident by our performance results. The DGL-4300 is limited by the width of your internet pipeline, and therefore cannot maintain 40kb/s uploads, 500kb/s downloads, and 40ms ping in your games; in fact, no router can do that.
As you can see from our tests, GameFuel essentially takes the bandwidth usually diverted to these uploads and downloads and allots them to your online games, a feature I’m sure many of you could have used many times over the last few years if you share bandwidth with others.
Talking about features, the DGL-4300’s Gigabit connectivity will allow for incredibly fast home networks and ultra-low latencies in games when throwing LAN parties. It’s great to see that D-Link has taken the initiative and incorporated Gigabit Ethernet into the DGL-4300. This feature alone is a huge selling point to many enthusiasts that have wanted to build their own Gigabit networks.
The web-interface is the best I’ve personally seen in a home router, both from an aesthetic and features standpoint. The DGL-4300 gives you a level of control commonly associated with enterprise level networking hardware, another first in the home networking segment.
Really the only downside to the DGL-4300 is its price, around $140 at most places. However, when one takes a look at the DGL-4300’s excellent performance and unique features, it can easily be justified as money well spent.
D-Link is definitely a step ahead of the game with the DGL-4300, but you can bet that they won’t be the only networking company we’ll see embracing the gaming community in the months to come.