Introduction

A “gaming” router?

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.

The DGL-4300 Box

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.

LAN Status

Network Utilization

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

Package Contents

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.