Final Verdict

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.