Good routers for gaming & general purpose?

So I want a new router because I've been getting really horrible lag spikes in games where lag REALLY makes a difference. I want a good constant low ping from about 50-70 feet away from the router. I know nothing about routers so I need some recommendations. My wireless card is in my sig. I don't want anything extremely expensive.

 

What's your current router?

For your ping issues, does your bad ping also show up in pingtest or speedtest?

Is dual-band important?

How "noisy" is your area, that is, how many other wireless clients are sharing your router?

Are you transmitting through barriers (walls, doors, wiring, etcetera)?

 

What Forge is getting at is: Asus RT-N56U

http://forum.notebookreview.com/networking-wireless/546611-asus-rt-n56u.html

 

Well, yes, I do love my Asus, but I'm trying to give the poor man options, haha.

 

Okay to answer your questions.

My router. Super duper old and is probably crapping out. Microsoft MN 700.

Dual band would be nice, there is lots of interference on the 2.4 Ghz. I live in a Condo so my wireless card picks up ~20 networks.

I only have 2 other computers using the router and a wireless printer.

Transmitting through two doors and 2-3 walls.

 

Well, I do recommend the Asus RT-N56U, since it's treated me perfectly well.

And did you did a pingtest.net and speedtest.net run and see if you get bad ping there?

 

We use the Cisco e2000 at home and no problems so far.
Before it gets to my room, it passes through 2 thick walls built from Greece's fine cement quality-tested by Hercules.

No, kidding aside, I would get Cisco e3000 if I want dual-band.
Of course, as I am not very keen to collect routers, there might be new (and better ones) since I bought my e2000 last December 2010.

 

My ping is fine there but when I ping my router using pingplotter, there are several several spikes of up to 30-90 ms every few seconds. I want it to stay at 0-2 ms all the time.

 

Check this one out...
Belkin N750 Dual Band Router
Seems like it has some really great features that no other router has.

 

To be perfectly honest Belkin is missing a lot of features like:

-IPv6 support
-DHCP reservations
-Port range forwarding
-Triggered port forwarding
-QoS rule adjustment
-URL / keyword filtering
-Email alerts or log sends
-Transmit power adjust
-HTTPs admin access
-Firewall rule scheduling

Source: smallnetbuilder review.

 

My friend has a D-Link 4500 for sale for around 40 dollars. I might pick that up.

 

If you have the money for it, i would go for the Asus RT-N56, Linksys E4200 (successor to the E3000 which i can vouch for) or a netgear equivalent, you can as well make use of that 5HGz band. Being the only one in the neighborhood on 5GHz is awesome if you're in a crowded wireless environment.

 

Im not really willing to spend more than 80 bucks for a router :X

 

Netgear WNR3500L is $68 or so at amazon.

 

I second that- with that price-tag it's either Netgear WNR3500L or TP-Link TL-WR1043ND (the latter is cheaper but has half the RAM and slightly slower CPU)

 

Bonus for both is they get good reviews AND they can both run dd-wrt and be flashed through the web interface so easy upgrade if you want more features.

 

Any with dual bands?

As i said before my friend has a D-link 4500 which is a gaming router for 40 dollars. How is that?

 

Rats if you buy that one I won't get commission

From what I can tell, there is no simultaneous dual band. Could be a problem if you have legacy devices. You may not be able to get the full speed out of it that you were hoping for. But if your gaming rig is the only machine using the router, then yes this would run quickly. Better yet, use the gbit lan.

 

I need a good reliable router for wifi streaming/gaming. My old one is giving me way too many lag spikes and inconsistent performance. If I were to use a wired connection I would but I can't. What can give me the best wireless performance?

I was leaning toward a router that had a 5 GHz band as well but does it really matter so much? I hear 5 GHz has poor range but really good performance. 2.4 GHz experiences a lot of interference. But what about the Dlink dir-655?

 

That- Sir- is crap- router notorious for causing issues. It's been mentioned many times in this sub-forum so if you excuse me I won't elaborate this time.

 

Yeah, skip on the DIR-655. I mean, worked okay when it came to gaming and ping and general browsing, but as soon as I wanted to do streaming and wireless file transfers... yech.

 

Maybe this is a dumb question, but have you tried plugging directly into the modem to make sure that's not the source of your pingspikes? Replacing the router won't do a thing if the problem is upstream. I've had more than a few cases where the spikes were b/c of trees rubbing on cable lines, torrenting in my neighborhood on the same branch of the network, or just flat out a modem overheating.

 

I actually haven't tried that but this is more of a basis on observation of playing Street Fighter IV so much. This is a game where ping makes a HUGE difference online. More specifically, whenever I am on wifi these ping spikes will cause huge slowdowns during online matches. When I am on wired these literally never happen at all. The only problem is my router/modem are in another room.

 

Ah, no reason to try that then. The wi-fi function or overheating because of it would be suspect.

 

Ok well I tried it anyway.
My ping is consistently 0-1 ms for 99% of the time. There have been times where there has been 100% packet loss again which lags games/streams for a few seconds on end. Maybe it is the cable I'm using but the performance is much much much better than wireless. I want a router that can deliver similar performance via wireless.