The Best Router for Gaming

What is the The Best Router for Gaming? Gaming isn’t just a term anymore. It’s a way of life. Gaming and Gamers identifies those specific players who spend a lot (if not all) of their free-time playing and learning about the games they love. Because gaming is so important to these players, they don’t joke about their equipment. A wireless router may be the single most important piece of equipment for a gamer. After all, this one piece of computer hardware is at the center of a gamer’s network—it’ll be relied on for years.

If you’ve shopped around for a wireless router, you know how confusing and overwhelming it is to get an idea of what you need. The price differences can vary by huge amounts and all routers boast very different features. Finding the ideal router for gaming is no easy task—you need to consider criteria such as speed, range, stability, and how user-friendly the router is.

Serious gamers look for serious routers—any old router won’t do. The right router, the ideal gaming router, provides a gamer with fast downloads, bandwidth, accessibility, and little-to-no gaming interference. A router is electronic device that forwards packets of data along networks that is connected to at least two networks.

So what’s the best router? How can you ensure you have the optimal router?

Here’s what you should look for:

The best router depends on what you’re looking for. Although gaming is now a major consumer field, it hasn’t always been the case. Up until recently everyone had to play on the same router on the same equipment with no apparent advantages. Now, gamers strive to find the best router—it can give users a significant advantage when they play competitively. Even if you play for fun, winning is better than losing. No one likes to lose.

Wireless routers are practically commodities—most routers are given for free when users sign up for broadband packages or cable/internet specials. Although you can likely get a router for free—should you? Manufacturers make high-end models with faster speeds, better security, and optimum media streaming. The best routers for gaming claim to offer faster speeds because their technology prioritizes traffic on your select network. Supposedly this results in less lag and lower pings. However, to the non-techie, all this router-jargon can sounds more like French than English.

The best router depends on what games you play and how often you play it. WOW, or World of Warcraft, is by far one of the most popular internet games. Top World of Warcraft players have to have the ideal router. They don’t just want them, they need them—if they don’t, for lack of a better word, they’ll lose. It doesn’t matter how often you play, when you play, or what your gaming name is (we’ve seen them all…from Neesyhasasia to Bolividarzo), without the best router for gaming, you just can’t guarantee that you will be on the same playing field as other competitors.

Keeping World of Warcraft in mind, we ran a few tests on many of the top gaming routers on the market. We looked at ping times and file transfers between two computers on the network. World of Warcraft’s built-in tools make it nice and simple to monitor latency. We ran the test while we downloaded a huge file (a list of all the patents in America) and streamed two long movies (Pirates of the Caribbean and Harry Potter, if you were curious). To test the best router for gaming, we wanted to see how well the routers prioritized network traffic.

Ping measures how long it takes a packet of data to travel to and from your computer from a server on the internet. The higher the number, the longer the router takes to receive information from the internet. We also looked at how the files transferred across our network (we ran the movies and downloaded the patents). The faster it took to download meant a faster transfer speed.

The best router for gaming couldn’t be narrowed down to one specific router. Based on our tests, we compiled the top 3 best routers for gaming. Take our word for it. They’re awesome.

1). Cisco Linksys EA3500 App Enabled N750 Dual-Band Wireless Router with Gigabit and USB(around $122): The Cisco Linksys is by far a best router for gaming. Cisco is promoting these routers as “Smart Wi-Fi” routers because they are engineered and designed to work with the newest and latest cloud management software. Specific apps are being specially created to enhance the routers’ capabilities. Some pros of the Cisco Linksys included a great set up. It was also really easy to use and understand. One of the cons of the Cisco Linksy was that I didn’t offer any extensive features.

2). Netgear N750 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router (WNDR4000) (around $130): The Netgear N750 is super fast. Record-fast. This was definitely a contender for the best router for gaming. The setup is easy and it has a port for NAS functionality. One of the cons of the Netgear is that its USB support is only limited to storage devices. Overall, it exceeded our expectations.

3). Western Digital My Net N900 (around $159): Although the Western Digital is the most expensive router in our list, it has a place on here for good reason. It is by far, one of the best routers for gaming. It has excellent throughput, great range, an intuitive setup, and great management software. It has seven, yes seven, Gigabit Ethernet ports. One thing we didn’t’ like though was the fact that one of the USB ports is way too close to the power on/off button. We really thought the Western Digital was great—which was a shock because Western Digital isn’t known for making wireless routers.

The best router for gaming really depends on what you’re looking for in a router. However, we strongly suggest you don’t settle for the router that comes free with your internet and cable subscription.