Rated 
The best home router.
Started Oct 22, 2005
Strengths: Inexpensive for a gigabit router, improved performance for gaming (and other UPnP applications), easy setup, good firewall, parental controls and automatic firmware updates.
Weaknesses: Expensive compared to 100 megabit routers; most people don't need a gigabit router. Wired connections only, search for DGL-4300 if you want the wireless version of this router.
The biggest feature of the DGL-4100 is D-Link's "GameFuel" which automatically detects many online and network games and gives their packets higher priority. This helps prevent "lag" that may occur if your bandwidth is being used heavily. It also supports UPnP (in the latest firmware, which the device will update automatically) so non-gaming things like Internet telephones will work better too. It also includes a gigabit switch so, if your computers and wiring supports gigabit, you will get truly blazing networking performance. Moreover, if you want to hold a huge LAN party it delivers there, too. You can easily connect other hubs or switches to this router (it will automatically support them whether or not they have uplink ports) and connect many, many computers - this little black brick can support up to 6000 users! If you want the very best wired, consumer priced router you need look no further.
Now to the problems. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this router I can find, but that being said it is almost definitely overkill for a large percentage of home networks. You can buy any number 100 megabit routers for about $20 but this one costs over $100. Understand, that is an excellent price for a gigabit router, but you will only benefit from a gigabit connection if you have 1) two or more very fast computers, 2) gigabit network cards and 3) Cat 6 or Cat 5e cabling (or if you intend to use this router as a backbone to a large network). Also it should be noted that this router will not affect the speed of your Internet connection. Downloads won't be faster and if your connection is "laggy" it won't help with that either. It will really only help high-end users become even more high-end. If you're one of those lucky people then you really can't go wrong with this great little router. If you just have, say, two computers and only use your network for browsing the internet and sharing a printer then you would do much better with a low-cost option such as the D-Link DI-604.
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