Gaming router advice?

[Con]

My friends and I do a lot of LAN parties and we're running out of room on our current router. We'd like to have more people be able to come, and also to have a better and faster router. Do you guys know what would be ideal? We don't know much about routers and networking.

Here's a list of possibilities:
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/category/category_slc.asp?page=5&Nav=|c:2786|&Sort=0&Recs=10 (http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/category/category_slc.asp?page=5&Nav=%7Cc:2786%7C&Sort=0&Recs=10)

We need something with 16 or so ports.

[Cortexian]

If you need gigabit:
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1042002&CatId=2797


If not:
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=443865&CatId=2794

Personally I'm a D-Link fan, both of these would work, I have one of the DES-1024D's that I use for LAN's, they work great and I've yet to have an issue with it.

[Con]

what is gigabit?
e: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabit_Ethernet
oh

Is it really advantageous? 300 bucks is quite a bit compared to the other.

[Cortexian]

what is gigabit?
e: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabit_Ethernet
oh

Is it really advantageous? 300 bucks is quite a bit compared to the other.
I have a D-Link DIR-655 for normal house usage, it's gigabit, and both my computer, and my dads computer are gigabit. File transfers are defiantly faster (1GB/s vs 100MB/s), works well for gaming too, but 100mb/s is fast enough for gaming. Only get the gigabit one if you're passing disk images around at your LAN's or something...

[Kalub]

I have some older looking switches from my school, I think one is a 24, and the other is a 32...

I'll get you some more info soon, they are at my other house.

[Snowy]

I host a lot of lanparties. 100MB/s is fine for gaming. You really should only get gigabit for linking all your switches together, and only if you have a lot of them. Which you're probably not going to be doing any time soon. Gigabit makes a nice difference if you're doing a lot of DC++ file sharing. Otherwise, 100MB/s is fine for gaming. Though I have an "off brand" switch for my lanparties, it works just fine. D-Link and Linksys have both sponsored Quakecon in the past, which I attend every year. Their networks have been solid.

[Con]

i see, thanks guys
+reps

[Phopojijo]

:lmao:

"100MB/s is fine for gaming" ...oh yeah since a 6800RPM HDD with OS loaded can barely transfer 20MB/s per sec...also what I could recommend is having a server if you haven't already...it doesn't even need to be the ubber machine but it makes things easier.First thing -- it's all megaBIT (... so 100Mb.)

Secondly -- harddrives really are quite slow for gaming. They're better than optical media, but still very ass slow for gaming. To compensate people create redundancies in their file system to cut down on the seek time of the harddrive. Etc. etc. etc. Also -- netcode doesn't carry the same info as games.

Blah blah blah -- apples and oranges.

For the most part, netcode could easily be run under 100Mb/s. Heck, it could be run under 1Mb/s as many listen servers can run on the up bandwidth of a standard aDSL modem.

That being said -- as physics systems get more and more complex -- people may want to put every game in a pseudo-lockstep netcode versus client-server... etc. That can eat up bandwidth a lot quicker.

But for games like we have today... yea -- 100Mb is definitely WAY overkill, probably by a factor of 100. Gigabit is mostly for LARGE networks. And when I say large -- I usually mean geographically large.

[Con]

we decided to go with a ~100 dollar d-link 16 port switch

[CrAsHOvErRide]

First thing -- it's all megaBIT (... so 100Mb.)

Secondly -- harddrives really are quite slow for gaming. They're better than optical media, but still very ass slow for gaming. To compensate people create redundancies in their file system to cut down on the seek time of the harddrive. Etc. etc. etc. Also -- netcode doesn't carry the same info as games.

Blah blah blah -- apples and oranges.

For the most part, netcode could easily be run under 100Mb/s. Heck, it could be run under 1Mb/s as many listen servers can run on the up bandwidth of a standard aDSL modem.

That being said -- as physics systems get more and more complex -- people may want to put every game in a pseudo-lockstep netcode versus client-server... etc. That can eat up bandwidth a lot quicker.

But for games like we have today... yea -- 100Mb is definitely WAY overkill, probably by a factor of 100. Gigabit is mostly for LARGE networks. And when I say large -- I usually mean geographically large.
Phopo chill...you must have quoted me when I deleted my post BECAUSE I realized I said something wrong and I didn't want to edit the stuff out. ;)

[Phopojijo]

Phopo chill...you must have quoted me when I deleted my post BECAUSE I realized I said something wrong and I didn't want to edit the stuff out. ;)Just figured I'd clarify stuff.