Gaming Router: Should you upgrade?

4 min readAug 12, 2020

In the past two decades, the term gaming has gained a lot of popularity and importance thanks to the vast internet. People used to play games for fun and entertainment for short bursts of time back in those 90’s days. But now the scenario has been changed. An ample amount of people has taken gaming seriously up to a level that it has become their profession. Hence, with the emerging new era of gaming, the manufacturers have started producing devices like monitors, keyboards, mouse, headset, etc. just for gaming purposes. Here we’ll look around the gaming routers and see if it is worth upgrading from a standard router to a gaming one or not.

Let’s understand some basics of routers first.

What is a router?

The router is an electronic device consisting of a CPU, RAM, flash memory, and interface card to analyze, send, and receive data packets in the vast network. It examines the IP addresses of both sender and receiver to calculate an optimum route to transfer the data packets.

What is the Gaming Router?

Gaming router is nothing but a regular high-end router with some features to optimize the user’s gaming experience. They are bundled with QoS (Quality of Service).

The raw speed (bandwidth) of the internet connection is not an essential factor while gaming. Undoubtedly, it plays an important role, but only when the user is downloading something big or multiple users are accessing the same network simultaneously. For online gaming, the critical factor is latency. A gaming router is eligible enough to improve the latency with the help of QoS.

How different is a Gaming router from a normal one?

A typical router doesn’t know the difference between the traffic it gets. It treats all of the data packets as same. Meaning, they all have the same priority, whether you are playing games, watching 4k video, uploading your pictures to the cloud, etc. Whereas as a gaming router, that comes with the QoS, can distinguish it. It automatically detects the type of data. Hence, it knows that the user is playing games and act accordingly to prioritize the data packets to minimize packet loss.

Gaming routers have better CPU, RAM, and other hardware components. They provide some extra Gigabit Ethernet ports, eliminating the need for switches. They have potent antennas that cover more ground for better Wi-Fi coverage. They offer multiple bands for Wi-Fi, as in 2.4GHz and 5GHz. All of the bands can be utilized simultaneously to access the internet, which results in lesser congestion of devices on a single band and higher speed.

Coming to the price section, gaming routers are quite expensive. Whereas the standard high-end routers which also come with more Gigabit Ethernet ports, powerful antennas, more extensive Wi-Fi coverage, multiple bandwidth supports are available at a cheaper cost compared to the gaming routers.

Verdict

If your ISP’s connection is weak, then online gaming would be leggy. Surely the routers would try their best to keep the latency as low as possible.

After considering both types of routers, there is no need to buy a gaming router if you already have a mid-range or typical high-end router as they are quite capable of being configured enough to fulfill your average gaming purpose. If you want a dope looking router that goes with your whole gaming setup, then you can spend some more bucks on gaming router.

Our Recommendations:

Tenda AC10 1200Mbps Wireless Smart Dual-Band Gigabit WiFi Router: BUY HERE

TP-Link AC1200 Archer A6 Smart WiFi, 5GHz Gigabit Dual Band MU-MIMO Wireless Internet Router, Long Range Coverage by 4 Antennas, Wireless Router: BUY HERE