Best wired router

[whitelightning]

I will be gaming and doing YouTube so I need the fastest.

 

[kanewolf]

What is your price range and your WAN (ISP) speed?

 

[Ra_V_en]

Any wired router even for 50 bucks will do the same job as the one for 200. Its more important how stable your internet connection is than how expensive the router is.

 

[kanewolf]

Any wired router even for 50 bucks will do the same job as the one for 200. Its more important how stable your internet connection is than how expensive the router is.

That is generally true unless the OP has very high bandwidth ISP connection. Above 100Mbit ISP connection, you want to be a little more selective.

 

[Calculagator]

If you need the fastest, build your own. Add a second network card to a pc or use a motherboard with two built in. There are some great atom boards with 2 nics. Install PfSense, monowall, dd-wrt, or your choice of router os. You can be up and running in no time with a very powerful router you can customize as you need. PfSense is especially easy to install and configure.
Connect one of the nics to your modem and the other to a gigabit switch.

 

[Ra_V_en]

That is generally true unless the OP has very high bandwidth ISP connection. Above 100Mbit ISP connection, you want to be a little more selective.

Agreed, passing that point it almost doesn't matter what router or connection you have, it will be so fast you hardly notice any difference at gaming or watching youtube 😉

If you need the fastest, build your own. Add a second network card to a pc or use a motherboard with two built in. There are some great atom boards with 2 nics. Install PfSense, monowall, dd-wrt, or your choice of router os. You can be up and running in no time with a very powerful router you can customize as you need. PfSense is especially easy to install and configure.
Connect one of the nics to your modem and the other to a gigabit switch.

They don't do that at corporate level, you have CISCO hardware for that, not sure why anybody would try do it for home usage... well except of science

 

[Calculagator]

They don't do that at corporate level, you have CISCO hardware for that, not sure why anybody would try do it for home usage... well except of science

You do have a point: rolling your own router is fairly rare in the corporate world, but it is not unheard of. The corporate world is usually most interested in stability and standardization rather than speed and cost. Corporate world does not use overclocked cpus and gaming gpus.
There are plenty of vendors who will sell a router based on standard pc/server hardware. Doing it yourself is definitely a hobby niche, but it can pay off.

I'll be the voice of dissent: most $50-$200 routers easily overheat and crash. Their software is buggy. While they can handle the bandwidth, they may not be able to handle things like bittorrent traffic gracefully. Since they are a closed box, you cannot know how they will work until you use them. The companies that make them have little or no incentive to patch security holes or fix bugs They work fine for most things and when they die, they are easily replaced, but the OP asked for what is fastest. He could spend a ton on Cisco or Juniper and get something with way too many features that is difficult to configure. For personal use, I think it makes more sense to DIY.

A good compromise between DIY and high-end corporate routers could be MikroTik / routerboard.com routers. They are based on solid hardware, have well-maintained software (relative to the competition), and have reasonable cost for their hardware.

 

[bill001g]

Commercial routers performance have little to do with the clock speed of the processors although some of the lower end ones do. It vary greatly since the lines are so large but the performance gains are mostly due to custom chips. It would be like saying you could process video with your main cpu in your computer. Everyone uses custom video chips for performance. This is key reason a business will spend the huge sums of money....much like people spend huge amounts on video cards to get the best performance. Still many consumer routers are more than fast enough to pass a couple 100 meg of traffic from a small number of users.