Question Can I use a spare router to create a direct wireless connection between my PC and devices in the same room without connecting it to my main router?

[Unpolarize]

I can’t run Ethernet from the room with my PC to my main router across the house. All of my devices in this room are on a 2.4 GHz band to connect to the internet because the 5 GHz band constantly drops connection.

The issue I’m having is that I would like to stream games from my PC to devices in the same room, such as my VR headset. Going through my congested main router on a wireless 2.4 GHz band is infeasible. So can a spare router I have be used to achieve what I need if I connect it (via Ethernet) to my PC and have the devices I want connect wirelessly to this router? Does this spare router have to connect to my main router through the WAN port? I don’t believe I need an internet connection on these devices when I’m streaming games through Steam Link or Moonlight.

If this is possible, would I connect my PC into the LAN or WAN port?

 

[bill001g]

I have not used either of those apps and don't know the details of how they function. If they can actually run without any internet at all it might be possible. Say you had a app that could stream data from a local hard drive to a connected device.

It is all going to depend on how these apps really work. In the simplest case you would run the second router as second network. Leave the wan disconnected. Change the lan subnet to something that is different than your main router. So if your main router is 192.168.0.x use 192.168.99.x for your new network. On the pc side you would want to manually assign a IP address and leave the DNS and default gateway blank.

Your pc is now smart enough to talk to both networks and knows that the main network is where the internet is. That is what the default gateway and dns settings do.

The problem is these other devices on the secondary network can only talk to the pc and other devices on the second network. Since there is no connection to the wan port of the second router it does not have internet and your pc is not going to function as a router even though technically data could flow through the pc between the 2 interfaces microsoft prevents this.

 

[failboat]

yes but it would be a real pain to setup. to get internet on anything connected to the 2nd AP. you would need to create a 2nd network on your pc and add the nic into it's bridge. make your 2nd router an access point with the dhcp server running. create a gw on the windows machine for that network and add this into the dhcp server. create routing rules to forward traffic and masquerade it using your interface from wifi on the gaming pc (main router network). this will make your main router see all traffic coming from that pc as using the ip it was assigned. it will drop it all if it's not masqueraded.