ac1750 vs n900 vs ac1900

[tsmooth94]

I'm planning on upgrading my internet before I do a new gaming pc build, and I was looking into some more high end routers. I want the ultimate performance and it seems that the top choices are ac1750, n900, and ac1900. I'll have to be honest, that I don't know anything about the difference with routers, they all seem the same to me. But I want one with both 2.4 and 5GHz frequencies, and high in mb/s speed. Cost doesn't mater much to me. If someone could help me understand the difference between ac1750, n900, and ac1900, and which one would be best for gaming it would be much appreciated.

 

[bill001g]

They all will likely be exactly the same for gaming. The router alone does not make a difference you need to have a matching nic in your PC.

But even if both matched exactly when you look at gaming it makes no difference.

Games do not care about speed maybe they use 1mbit/sec most use much less. Then all those routers are faster than your internet connection so the fastest they can ever run is whatever you buy from the ISP. So even for data intensive things like bit torrent it makes no difference.

Pretty much you would only see a difference in these routers if you were transferring large amounts of data between machine INSIDE your house.

If cost doesn't matter you would be much better served paying to have a ethernet cable run from whatever router you currently have. All wireless is subject to random interference and that is one things games do not tolerate at all. A web page or even netflix will work ok with quite a bit of data loss a game you will see lag almost immediately for even small amounts of data loss.

 

[MartinWilson]

Always use an Ethernet cable when you can, when it comes to playing games.

Wireless is susceptible to interference, but perhaps more importantly, wireless is half-duplex - meaning that data can only be sent to each device in one direction at any one time. Ethernet cables run full-duplex, so data can be transmitted both ways simultaneously.

 

[tsmooth94]

I'm already planning on using Ethernet for my rig since the router is in my room, and I like the solid connection that Ethernet has. So I have no problem with that.

But I'm asking in the interest of the other people in the household. We have multiple game systems, two gaming computers, and two web only used laptops, on 3 floors, so wifi is kind of a must to stay connected to the internet. I don't know the difference, if any, in routers. I only know that they are used for wifi and that they vary from ten bucks to 250 and up. I'd like to have a high speed, and long range router, and it seems that three types fall into that general category, ac1750 n900 and ac1900. If there isn't anything outstandingly special that differentiates them from each other then that's fine, I'll get a moderately priced one. But if there is, that's all I was looking for.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

There's very few NICs with the 3x3MIMO needed to use an N900, or a high-end AC one.

I suggest just getting an N600 one. Latency is unlikely to be affected by the switch to AC, and few people have the internet connection needed to push 200Mb/s+.

 

[smitbret]

n600 = Simultaneous Dual Band (2.4GHz & 5GHz) that are both 300Mbps
n900 = Simultaneous Dual Band that are both 450Mbps
ac1750 = Simultaneous Dual Band that is 2.4GHz n450 and 5GHz ac1300
ac1900 = Simultaneous Dual Band that is 2.4GHz n450 +QAM and 5GHz ac1300

Your real world performance is best estimated by dividing any of those numbers by 3. A 300Mbps will get you a maximum of about 100Mbps under ideal conditions and a 450Mbps may get you close to 150Mbps. Don't forget the footnote that the receiving device must also use the same standard; i.e. n300 router to n150 device will connect at n150 speed.

Last fall I had a wireless bridge that used two AC1750 routers. When I sent one back because it wasn't working right, I never replaced it because I just didn't see any real world benefit. Don't get me wrong, it was pretty cool to get 400mbps over wireless, but the only time it came into play was for large file transfers (1GB+) which just never happened over the bridge.

An n600 or n900 would be the option I would choose, since a decent setup with either should approach 100Mbps, depending on the device on the receiving end. That will max out pretty much any internet connection you have and allow reasonable connections between devices in your home. I like that I can set up a 2.4GHz network and a 5GHz network that will run simultaneously with an n600 or n900 router.

Really, there aren't many devices out there that have an n450 adapter so n900 isn't necessarily that much better than n600, either.

The one advantage you could get is that the ac1900 routers tend to be top of the line and have better processors that can speed up the data throughput if there is a lot of traffic.