We’ve all been a victim of it. It strikes at the apex of the action, and leaves you helpless, vulnerable, and ashamed. It can ruin your night, make others dislike you, get you kicked from games, and worse of all, ruin your gaming pleasure! This horror I speak of is the dreaded LAG. Anyone that has played over the Xbox Live network has either experience lag themselves, or witnessed a fellow comrade going through the struggles of it. Sometimes there is little to nothing you can do about this issue, for example, cases where the Xbox Live servers themselves are overloaded, an ISP that’s tweaking their network, or a game with a poor connectivity code. But there is a sure fire way for you to be certain you and your connection are not the cause of this annoying internet gaming phenomenon; get what Xbox Solution views as the best router available for Xbox Live, the D-Link Wireless 108G Gaming Router (DGL-4300).

Now before I go on I want to clarify a few things. First off, I was always a die hard Linksys fan, every piece of networking hardware I owned was manufactured by Linksys. They had done well for me in the past, they’re easy to setup, and I figured if it isn’t broke, why fix it? But then I was talking to Dean, a close friend of mine and a networking guru (he’s gone through over 20 routers, testing, tweaking, and making the most impressive and secure home network I have ever seen). He showed me his new D-Link DGL-4100 Router, with GameFuel technology. I’m not easily impressed, but the slick black look did catch my attention right off the bat, and when he showed me the configuration options available in the setup screens of the router, I almost immediately went one up on him and purchased the DGL-4300 (the same router as his, with wireless features).

D-Link DGL-4300 Front Image - GameFuel Priority

Features

  • Optimized Gaming Experience with GameFuel Technology
  • Up to 108Mbps * 802.11g Wireless Connectivity
  • 4 Gigabit Ethernet Ports
  • Customizable Settings for Games and Applications

Initial Setup

Another thing I want to make perfectly clear is that, unlike Dean, I am not a networking professional. However, I do consider myself fairly experienced when it comes to networking, general PC usage and internet security, and I can perform most of the more advanced configurations without the assistance of a manual, help pages, or other resources. Having come highly recommended from Dean, I took my new D-Link router home and went through the setup process. Setting the basics up is a very simple process, just plug your modem into the router, then go to the administration page. In the case of D-Link’s routers the default IP address is 192.168.0.1. You simply navigate to that address in your browser, enter the password (which by default is nothing) and go through the Internet Connection Setup Wizard. In my case, the router detected my ISP correctly and I did not even have to go through these steps, although others may have to. Note that you will need to have Macromedia’s Flash player installed on your PC to use the slick interface.

Whenever I get a new router the first thing I do (aside from changing the password and the default SSID and encryption for the wireless network) is enable DHCP and setup static IP addresses for all of the machines on my network, including my two Xbox consoles. This is not a required step, but I like to have everything set so that if there does happen to be an issue, I can clearly identify with ease where the problem is coming from simply by looking at the IP address, and in D-Link’s case, the description of the machine. After I performed my basic setup, I created a couple of rules for the Xbox consoles so that their internet traffic is prioritized. D-Link’s GameFuel technology really makes this simple, opening the correct ports for you by simply selecting the game from a drop down list in the menu. The list includes Xbox Live, as well as most of the popular PC games, and multiple rules can be created for any machine. Let me give you a little information on the whole concept behind the GameFuel technology, and then I’ll give you the results of some of the tests Dean and I performed to verify the results.

Gamerfuel Technology

GameFuel is a feature that helps improve your network gaming performance by prioritizing network traffic from applications, including Xbox Live as well as PC games. To put it in terms that can be easily understood (as you can tell from what I’ve written, I am not writing a technical manual, but rather an informational editorial review on the product), GameFuel is the embedded technology in the gaming router that powers high performance gaming traffic. The GameFuel performance boost is provided by two separate mechanisms in the gaming router: dynamic fragmentation and packet prioritization.

In an environment of time-sensitive traffic such as Xbox Live gaming, extra delay can sometimes occur from the presence of large packets. A time-sensitive packet can get caught in the queue behind a very large packet. The result is that the time sensitive packet must wait during the period in which a large packet is being processed and transmitted. The extra wait time results in added latency and jerky movements, or lag, in your gaming experience.

The dynamic fragmentation functionality helps to alleviate this latency condition. By monitoring for time-sensitive traffic streams and fragmenting the large packets of lower priority streams, the added delay from the transmission of large, low priority packets can be greatly reduced. The other key GameFuel mechanism is packet prioritization. The gaming router has 256 priority queue levels for classifying packets and transmitting them according to queue priority. Packet classification can be accomplished automatically or through the manual creation of game rules. By simply enabling the GameFuel auto classification option, the router will start automatically monitoring traffic streams and identify time-sensitive traffic by looking at several parameters such as protocol, port numbers, packet size, and inter-frame gap. Auto classification will place the traffic into one of the priority queues for transmission. Higher priority queues will then be serviced before lower priority queues resulting in higher priority time-sensitive traffic being transmitted before other lower priority traffic.

It is important to note that Xbox Live does not support dynamic fragmentation, and if you have the latest firmware, version 1.3 at the time of this review, it is set by default to ‘on’, so you will need to disable that option for Xbox Live usage. When I first set up the router I had a firware version of 1.2, and dynamic fragmentation was set to ‘off’ as a default. The nice thing about the router is that it notifies you via email when a new firmware is available (if you have it set up correctly), it also checks for newer firmware when you log into the router’s control panel, and you can save your router’s current configuration before upgrading the firmware. When you have upgraded the firmware, you can then simply load your configuration file via the router’s control panel and your network is back on track. Also, as of version 1.3 the router is now certified as Xbox Live Compatible.

Test Results

My network includes 3 desktop PCs (one wired and two wireless), one wireless laptop, 2 Xbox consoles (one wired and one wireless), and a wireless pocket pc. To test the effectiveness of the GameFuel technology, we set the wired PC to upload a 100MB file to an ftp sever over and over via a simple script (which basically uploads the file, then deletes it, and then repeats the process until we tell it to stop), this way we knew we had some serious upload traffic on our network during the time of our Xbox Live tests. We then loaded up both Xbox consoles with Rainbow Six 3, Doom 3, Halo 2, and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, playing several games of each while the upload process was taking place on the wired PC. In total, we played for approximately 6 hours.

Doom 3 was flawless, and we noticed no lag whatsoever during the coop play. The same can be said for Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, we did not notice any lag at all, even though right now SCCT is known for a bit of lag on the larger maps. Now that’s all fine and dandy, but both of those games, at least the modes we played, are two player coop only, so to really test it out we moved on to RS3 and Halo 2. I have to be frank here, I have an excellent connection to the internet via my internet service provider, so we decided to really get a grasp of how effective the new router is, we needed to host a 16 player sharpshooter game in RS3. In this test, with random connections from other people on the Xbox Live network, the only thing that truly stuck out in our minds was the fact that we’re much better at the coop mode terrorist hunt than we are at sharpshooter. In terms of connectivity though, neither of us experienced any lag. Except for seeing one opposing player hopping around like a freak on speed cause his internet connection was no good, the gaming experience was exceptional. If I had remembered his gamertag I would have referred him to this review. Halo 2 had similar results, we experienced no lag.

So do these tests mean that if you purchase this router your experience will be 100% lag free? Absolutely not. As I said above I have a very high upload and download speed from my internet service provider, and I’m sure that helped in our tests, but you can be certain that making the switch to this router will definitely increase the effectiveness of your network traffic, and in doing so, help your gaming experiences on Xbox Live.

Related Links

As I had mentioned above, my network has one wireless Xbox and one wired Xbox. The wireless Xbox is connected via D-Link’s Wireless 108AG Gaming Adapter (D-Link DGL-3420). I’m not going to go into much detail about this product in terms of set up and usage mainly because its almost automatic. You basically plug the gaming adapter into the Xbox that you want to have wireless connectivity to and run the Xbox network setup wizard. It will guide you through the steps if you are running an encrypted network, and if you aren’t, it will just create the connection, although I recommend always securing your wireless network. The nice thing about this companion product is that it supports dualband wireless technology, for optimal range and connectivity up to 108Mbps.

Overall Score

Overall Score: 10/10 (not an average) PERFECT

Additional Comments

Xbox Solution has found this to be the best router for use on the Xbox Live service. We put a lot of testing into the review of this product, and we take our reviews seriously. If you’re looking to upgrade your network, this is the router to get. Its not often we give something a perfect score, and we are pleased to announce that D-Link’s 108G DGL-4300 Wireless Gaming Router has been awarded the Xbox Solution Editor’s Choice Award!

It’s not the cure all for all of your lag problems on Live, but until everyone has one of these routers, every ISP is perfect, and the developers code their games to work with the Xbox Live service more efficiently, this router will help you get your game on without fail.

Related Links

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