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.
Phenom II Gets A New Revision: 125W AMD Phenom II X4 965 Performance Preview
Promising lower power consumption, lower temps, and most importantly for enthusiasts, more OC'ing, AMD is back with a new CPU revision for the Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition, which now boasts a 125W TDP. Is AMD able to deliver on their promises though? Find out in today's article!
Shattered Horizon Review
FutureMark, well known for their popular 3DMark benchmarks, is venturing into new territory with Shattered Horizon. This multiplayer shooter is perhaps best known for its system requirements -- the game supports DX10 only -- but there's more underneath the surface of this game than fancy visuals. Is it worth its $20 price tag though? Read Vandy's take inside!
Borderlands PC Review
Is it an RPG or is it an FPS? Borderlands blends the best elements of both in one entertaining package. Vandy has spent the past week playing the PC version of the game and came away rather impressed. Read his full thoughts on the game in today's review!
AMD Athlon II X3 435/Athlon II X2 240e Performance Preview
Today AMD is introducing 8 new Athlon II CPUs intended to service different segments of the budget CPU market. For HTPC users, new 45W dual, triple, and quad core offerings should deliver good performance along with low power, while performance junkies on a budget will want to look at AMD's new Athlon II X3 CPUs. See how the new chips stack up in terms of performance and OC'ing in this article!
EVGA P55 FTW Review
Looking for a good P55 motherboard to OC your CPU beyond 4GHz? If so, you may want to check out EVGA's P55 FTW. With its extra ATX12V connector, this motherboard can send up to 600W of juice to the CPU, and it's got more voltage settings in BIOS than 95% of the general public needs. But that's just barely scratching the surface of what this board can do. Check out today's review for the full details!
ATI Radeon HD 5770/5750 Performance Preview
With prices ranging from $109-$159, ATI's Radeon 5700 series of cards bring DX11 gaming to mainstream price points and usher in new levels of energy efficiency. But are they powerful enough to dethrone ATI's Radeon 4800 series cards? Yes and no. Read today's article for more info!
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising Review
While it's not the true sequel to Operation Flashpoint, Dragon Rising is billed as a modern tactical sim just like its predecessor. Does it live up to these claims? Read Vandy's take in today's review!
Batman: Arkham Asylum PhysX Features and Performance
One eye candy feature PC users can enjoy over the console edition of Batman: AA is PhysX. Rocksteady's PhysX implementation is more than just tearing cloth and added objects too, although that's of course in there. Vandy goes over the features and performance of PhysX in Batman: AA in this article!
ATI Radeon 5850 Performance Preview
Not everyone's got $400 to spend on a shiny new Radeon 5870 card, which is why it can be argued that ATI's Radeon 5850 is the more relevant GPU for a lot of gamers and hardware enthusiasts. Based on the same DX11 RV870 architecture as the 5870, the 5850 delivers next-generation performance in a smaller, more efficient package, and most importantly it's priced for less than $300. ATI pitches it as their answer to the GeForce GTX 285...See how it compares in this article!
Overclocking the Radeon HD 5870
We weren't satisfied with the 900MHz core/1300MHz memory speeds we hit last week with our Radeon 5870 boards. We wanted to see how far ATI's latest flagship GPU could be pushed, and how well it could perform at those speeds. We also wanted to see which component delivered better performance results: OC'ing the memory, or OC'ing the GPU?
Fortunately thanks to AMD's GPU Clock Tool, we now have unlimited speeds on tap for OC'ing. Is 1GHz within reach? Find out in today's article!