[FrankTheCrank @ Oct 25th 2007 9:02AM]

These hardware manufacturers are a bunch of CROOKS.

A simple wireless ethernet bridge is cheap to build. And if you look high and low, you can find one for less than $40. A gaming router is just an wireless ethernet bridge. But the minute they slap "gaming" on there, they charge everyone through the nose. A linksys gaming router is $99. That's highway robbery. They should be ashamed.

[Maestro @ Oct 25th 2007 9:54AM]

Huh? I have a wireless bridge on my network and it is nothing like a router.

[Kamokazi @ Oct 25th 2007 10:53AM]

The main benefit of this is a QoS system that prioritizes game traffic. It's not much better than the DIR-655 which runs for $100 less (The DIR-655 QoS does not focus on game traffic unless you tell it-it prioritizes VoIP, streaming media, etc as well). But if you take a look over at smallnetbuilder.com and look at their comparison charts, you will see a major difference in router performance-a $40 router does not perform nearly as well as a $100 router (with a few exceptions, of course). And the QoS does work if you have other traffic; your games will perform about as well as they would without the extra traffic (the extra traffic suffers from this however; these things don't magically increase your bandwidth to your ISP). So you can download a bunch of hentai torrents without worrying about your game ping :-)

[portwineboy @ Oct 25th 2007 11:05AM]

I wish I could manage the traffic at the cable modem level to some extent.

I have optonline boost service, so I get great bandwidth, but if I am watching an HD show, recording an HD show and/or downloading a large file at the same time, I get lots of breakup on the HDTV.

I can do my own QoS stuff on my router, and I have, but what I really need is to be able to manage the cable modem to prioritize what's going to the digital cable TV and what's going router. Any thoughts anyone?