Is it worth it getting a gaming modem?

[xxxlun4icexxx]

I currently have internet through a cable provider and generally get 100-150mbps on adhoc ookla tests.

I am currently renting one of their cable modems that they gave me years ago.

Are there any benefits to getting a more expensive modem? I was looking at the xr500 nighthawk, and while it looks cool, I was wondering if it actually gives you any benefits as opposed to a stock modem your internet provider gives you.

I do get annoyed with my internet sometimes. Randomly my ping can go up in a game for an hour or two, or my smart T.V. can't get on to netflix saying it has no internet connection when it's linked up with my modem/router.

I'd imagine that's more to do with my actual service then the modem itself. But was still just curious as I'd rather stop paying them monthly to rent one.

Thanks!

 

[jimmysmitty]

I have never used the cable provider modems. They are typically junk.

The best thing you can do is buy an Arris modem and a router. Typically the Nighthawks are good I personally go for Asus routers. Either work.

Beyond just being an overall better setup both are better quality by design. Superior parts (my Asus router has a quad core CPU) that allow for better and more consistent performance. Better QoS performance and vastly more control.

 

[xxxlun4icexxx]

I have never used the cable provider modems. They are typically junk.

The best thing you can do is buy an Arris modem and a router. Typically the Nighthawks are good I personally go for Asus routers. Either work.

Beyond just being an overall better setup both are better quality by design. Superior parts (my Asus router has a quad core CPU) that allow for better and more consistent performance. Better QoS performance and vastly more control.

Thanks for the response.

I was just looking at some modem/router combos. I was looking at both the netgear nighthawk C7000 and the Asus CM-32 AC2600.

Both have good reviews except people are complaining about the "intel puma6" chipset on the AC2600. Are the bugs with that worked out? The AC2600 is on Spectrum's list of approved modems and it also boasts faster allowable data speeds then the C7000.

 

[jimmysmitty]

If you are intent on getting an all in one then the Asus is superior. It has a 32x8 DOCSIS 3.0 allowing for faster connections and it has a 4x4 antennae which will allow for faster connections wireless and range as well. The Netgear is 24x8 meaning slower top download speeds and only a 3x3 antennae. The Asus also looks to be built on the same setup as the RT-AC3100 which is a decent router.

For the Puma 6 issues, it looks like Intel should have pushed a firmware update out to vendors and Asus is pretty good at updating their routers firmware. I would purchase it from a place with a decent return policy just in case you need to.

 

[Peter Martin]

does the asus have metal frame and ports that don't melt? what router please, I will need one... ok, saved for later. nice

 

[jsmithepa]

A new box may improve your WIFI but I doubt will cut down your ping by much, u want to go ethernet on that.

 

[bill001g]

They have patched the puma bug and most ISP pushed the patch so it is not as much a concern.

There is no such thing as a "gamer" modem/router. That is all marketing.

Game performance is most affected by consistent latency they use very little bandwidth most in the 500kbits/sec range, a 2mbps connection will likely run a game just as well as a 500mbps.

The largest difference you find between routers is related to wireless abilities. Since anyone that actually cares about game performance will never use wifi any of those feature make no difference. Wifi is subject to interference from outside your house which no router can possibly think to fix.

So pretty much you will see no difference between routers when it comes to games.

The modem you choose needs to match the plan you purchase from your ISP. Buying a docsis3.1 modem does not run better than a docsis 3.0 modem if the ISP is not using the features. As long as the number of channels match the ISP you will get the speed they promise.
This is why selecting from their list is important.

I would recommend you run a separate router and modem because it give you more option on router. The modem itself is a very simplistic device that mainly converts from coax cable media to ethernet it does very little else.

Up to you which other feature you find important on a router but "gaming" is not going be a thing you worry about.

 

[jimmysmitty]

does the asus have metal frame and ports that don't melt? what router please, I will need one... ok, saved for later. nice

I have the Asus RT-AC88U. I have not had melted ports and am not sure if it is a metal frame but so far its been a great router.

They have patched the puma bug and most ISP pushed the patch so it is not as much a concern.

There is no such thing as a "gamer" modem/router. That is all marketing.

Game performance is most affected by consistent latency they use very little bandwidth most in the 500kbits/sec range, a 2mbps connection will likely run a game just as well as a 500mbps.

The largest difference you find between routers is related to wireless abilities. Since anyone that actually cares about game performance will never use wifi any of those feature make no difference. Wifi is subject to interference from outside your house which no router can possibly think to fix.

So pretty much you will see no difference between routers when it comes to games.

The modem you choose needs to match the plan you purchase from your ISP. Buying a docsis3.1 modem does not run better than a docsis 3.0 modem if the ISP is not using the features. As long as the number of channels match the ISP you will get the speed they promise.
This is why selecting from their list is important.

I would recommend you run a separate router and modem because it give you more option on router. The modem itself is a very simplistic device that mainly converts from coax cable media to ethernet it does very little else.

Up to you which other feature you find important on a router but "gaming" is not going be a thing you worry about.

There are routers marketed towards gamers, for example the higher end Asus routers do have a feature called WTFast which is basically a VPN service with private servers designed to give better latency to gaming servers. I have never used it as I don't want to pay for it and am fine with what I have.

And there is much more to a router than just the wireless abilities. What CPU they use, the amount of RAM they have and what firmware they use. I like Asus as they use a customized version of the DD-WRT firmware and you can even flash it with a much more feature rich version from DD-WRT.

And games can benefit from a better router. If you have more than just a single person using the internet it helps. I recently upgraded my girlfriends mother from a netgear router to a newer router and everything has improved for them. They had normally 4 people streaming/gaming and it was slow now its pretty nice.

I agree having a distinct modem and router but the Asus he listed is a good router and looks to have a decent modem built in so it would probably do just as good of a job while minimizing the boxes.

 

[bill001g]

does the asus have metal frame and ports that don't melt? what router please, I will need one... ok, saved for later. nice

I have the Asus RT-AC88U. I have not had melted ports and am not sure if it is a metal frame but so far its been a great router.

They have patched the puma bug and most ISP pushed the patch so it is not as much a concern.

There is no such thing as a "gamer" modem/router. That is all marketing.

Game performance is most affected by consistent latency they use very little bandwidth most in the 500kbits/sec range, a 2mbps connection will likely run a game just as well as a 500mbps.

The largest difference you find between routers is related to wireless abilities. Since anyone that actually cares about game performance will never use wifi any of those feature make no difference. Wifi is subject to interference from outside your house which no router can possibly think to fix.

So pretty much you will see no difference between routers when it comes to games.

The modem you choose needs to match the plan you purchase from your ISP. Buying a docsis3.1 modem does not run better than a docsis 3.0 modem if the ISP is not using the features. As long as the number of channels match the ISP you will get the speed they promise.
This is why selecting from their list is important.

I would recommend you run a separate router and modem because it give you more option on router. The modem itself is a very simplistic device that mainly converts from coax cable media to ethernet it does very little else.

Up to you which other feature you find important on a router but "gaming" is not going be a thing you worry about.

There are routers marketed towards gamers, for example the higher end Asus routers do have a feature called WTFast which is basically a VPN service with private servers designed to give better latency to gaming servers. I have never used it as I don't want to pay for it and am fine with what I have.

And there is much more to a router than just the wireless abilities. What CPU they use, the amount of RAM they have and what firmware they use. I like Asus as they use a customized version of the DD-WRT firmware and you can even flash it with a much more feature rich version from DD-WRT.

And games can benefit from a better router. If you have more than just a single person using the internet it helps. I recently upgraded my girlfriends mother from a netgear router to a newer router and everything has improved for them. They had normally 4 people streaming/gaming and it was slow now its pretty nice.

I agree having a distinct modem and router but the Asus he listed is a good router and looks to have a decent modem built in so it would probably do just as good of a job while minimizing the boxes.

Don't buy into the hype.

WTFast should never be faster because a vpn adds overhead. It should always be slower because the traffic must travel more distance to go to the VPN data center which causes added latency. It only works in a very narrow situation where your ISP has poor path to the ISP the game company uses but the VPN company has a better path. The only place this tend to be true is in some asian countries where some ISP do no want to pay to use the most direct undersea fiber paths.

Almost all newer routers have moved the NAT function off the CPU. This means the traffic never actually passes through the CPU anymore. This is how they get routers that can pass traffic at 1gbit speeds, most that run via the cpu limit you to 200-300mbps. So the CPU clock speed means little any more.

Now yes you can load dd-wrt...or better merlin since dd-wrt does not have the cpu bypass... but none of those feature make "gaming" better. Still you have to be very careful using many feature in routers will disable the hardware nat accelerator dropping your speeds back to what the cpu can accomplish.

Even very inexpensive routers can handle mulitple people. The issue more is how much bandwidth you have than the router ability. If you are out of bandwidth there really is no fix that give good results someone is not going to get what they need.

 

[jimmysmitty]

does the asus have metal frame and ports that don't melt? what router please, I will need one... ok, saved for later. nice

I have the Asus RT-AC88U. I have not had melted ports and am not sure if it is a metal frame but so far its been a great router.

They have patched the puma bug and most ISP pushed the patch so it is not as much a concern.

There is no such thing as a "gamer" modem/router. That is all marketing.

Game performance is most affected by consistent latency they use very little bandwidth most in the 500kbits/sec range, a 2mbps connection will likely run a game just as well as a 500mbps.

The largest difference you find between routers is related to wireless abilities. Since anyone that actually cares about game performance will never use wifi any of those feature make no difference. Wifi is subject to interference from outside your house which no router can possibly think to fix.

So pretty much you will see no difference between routers when it comes to games.

The modem you choose needs to match the plan you purchase from your ISP. Buying a docsis3.1 modem does not run better than a docsis 3.0 modem if the ISP is not using the features. As long as the number of channels match the ISP you will get the speed they promise.
This is why selecting from their list is important.

I would recommend you run a separate router and modem because it give you more option on router. The modem itself is a very simplistic device that mainly converts from coax cable media to ethernet it does very little else.

Up to you which other feature you find important on a router but "gaming" is not going be a thing you worry about.

There are routers marketed towards gamers, for example the higher end Asus routers do have a feature called WTFast which is basically a VPN service with private servers designed to give better latency to gaming servers. I have never used it as I don't want to pay for it and am fine with what I have.

And there is much more to a router than just the wireless abilities. What CPU they use, the amount of RAM they have and what firmware they use. I like Asus as they use a customized version of the DD-WRT firmware and you can even flash it with a much more feature rich version from DD-WRT.

And games can benefit from a better router. If you have more than just a single person using the internet it helps. I recently upgraded my girlfriends mother from a netgear router to a newer router and everything has improved for them. They had normally 4 people streaming/gaming and it was slow now its pretty nice.

I agree having a distinct modem and router but the Asus he listed is a good router and looks to have a decent modem built in so it would probably do just as good of a job while minimizing the boxes.

Don't buy into the hype.

WTFast should never be faster because a vpn adds overhead. It should always be slower because the traffic must travel more distance to go to the VPN data center which causes added latency. It only works in a very narrow situation where your ISP has poor path to the ISP the game company uses but the VPN company has a better path. The only place this tend to be true is in some asian countries where some ISP do no want to pay to use the most direct undersea fiber paths.

Almost all newer routers have moved the NAT function off the CPU. This means the traffic never actually passes through the CPU anymore. This is how they get routers that can pass traffic at 1gbit speeds, most that run via the cpu limit you to 200-300mbps. So the CPU clock speed means little any more.

Now yes you can load dd-wrt...or better merlin since dd-wrt does not have the cpu bypass... but none of those feature make "gaming" better. Still you have to be very careful using many feature in routers will disable the hardware nat accelerator dropping your speeds back to what the cpu can accomplish.

Even very inexpensive routers can handle mulitple people. The issue more is how much bandwidth you have than the router ability. If you are out of bandwidth there really is no fix that give good results someone is not going to get what they need.

It actually depends. As I said I don't see a benefit to WTFast however it could have lower latency if it removes hops out of the equation. If your default ISP DNS takes 10 hops but WTFast takes 5 then there are 5 hops of latency dropped from the equation. I cannot verify as I have not used it but it is very possible.

And yes NAT helps but there is still need for the CPU and if you have a lot of connections the router will eventually slow down.

And cheap routers provide a cheap experience. The router I have covers large homes very will in wireless, has 8 gigabit ports and has never throttled me. My girlfriends mother had a lower end Netgear and when I changed it over to a nicer Asus their performance for everything improved. The router was not capable of handling multiple people streaming and gaming at once. They did not change their ISP speed, her mother is cheap like that, but overall performance has improved.

I am not telling the OP to get the top of the line ROG router or the top of the line Netgear but that switching from the ISP provided router to a better Netgear or Asus would improve his overall experience and it will.

 

[bill001g]

does the asus have metal frame and ports that don't melt? what router please, I will need one... ok, saved for later. nice

I have the Asus RT-AC88U. I have not had melted ports and am not sure if it is a metal frame but so far its been a great router.

They have patched the puma bug and most ISP pushed the patch so it is not as much a concern.

There is no such thing as a "gamer" modem/router. That is all marketing.

Game performance is most affected by consistent latency they use very little bandwidth most in the 500kbits/sec range, a 2mbps connection will likely run a game just as well as a 500mbps.

The largest difference you find between routers is related to wireless abilities. Since anyone that actually cares about game performance will never use wifi any of those feature make no difference. Wifi is subject to interference from outside your house which no router can possibly think to fix.

So pretty much you will see no difference between routers when it comes to games.

The modem you choose needs to match the plan you purchase from your ISP. Buying a docsis3.1 modem does not run better than a docsis 3.0 modem if the ISP is not using the features. As long as the number of channels match the ISP you will get the speed they promise.
This is why selecting from their list is important.

I would recommend you run a separate router and modem because it give you more option on router. The modem itself is a very simplistic device that mainly converts from coax cable media to ethernet it does very little else.

Up to you which other feature you find important on a router but "gaming" is not going be a thing you worry about.

There are routers marketed towards gamers, for example the higher end Asus routers do have a feature called WTFast which is basically a VPN service with private servers designed to give better latency to gaming servers. I have never used it as I don't want to pay for it and am fine with what I have.

And there is much more to a router than just the wireless abilities. What CPU they use, the amount of RAM they have and what firmware they use. I like Asus as they use a customized version of the DD-WRT firmware and you can even flash it with a much more feature rich version from DD-WRT.

And games can benefit from a better router. If you have more than just a single person using the internet it helps. I recently upgraded my girlfriends mother from a netgear router to a newer router and everything has improved for them. They had normally 4 people streaming/gaming and it was slow now its pretty nice.

I agree having a distinct modem and router but the Asus he listed is a good router and looks to have a decent modem built in so it would probably do just as good of a job while minimizing the boxes.

Don't buy into the hype.

WTFast should never be faster because a vpn adds overhead. It should always be slower because the traffic must travel more distance to go to the VPN data center which causes added latency. It only works in a very narrow situation where your ISP has poor path to the ISP the game company uses but the VPN company has a better path. The only place this tend to be true is in some asian countries where some ISP do no want to pay to use the most direct undersea fiber paths.

Almost all newer routers have moved the NAT function off the CPU. This means the traffic never actually passes through the CPU anymore. This is how they get routers that can pass traffic at 1gbit speeds, most that run via the cpu limit you to 200-300mbps. So the CPU clock speed means little any more.

Now yes you can load dd-wrt...or better merlin since dd-wrt does not have the cpu bypass... but none of those feature make "gaming" better. Still you have to be very careful using many feature in routers will disable the hardware nat accelerator dropping your speeds back to what the cpu can accomplish.

Even very inexpensive routers can handle mulitple people. The issue more is how much bandwidth you have than the router ability. If you are out of bandwidth there really is no fix that give good results someone is not going to get what they need.

It actually depends. As I said I don't see a benefit to WTFast however it could have lower latency if it removes hops out of the equation. If your default ISP DNS takes 10 hops but WTFast takes 5 then there are 5 hops of latency dropped from the equation. I cannot verify as I have not used it but it is very possible.

And yes NAT helps but there is still need for the CPU and if you have a lot of connections the router will eventually slow down.

And cheap routers provide a cheap experience. The router I have covers large homes very will in wireless, has 8 gigabit ports and has never throttled me. My girlfriends mother had a lower end Netgear and when I changed it over to a nicer Asus their performance for everything improved. The router was not capable of handling multiple people streaming and gaming at once. They did not change their ISP speed, her mother is cheap like that, but overall performance has improved.

I am not telling the OP to get the top of the line ROG router or the top of the line Netgear but that switching from the ISP provided router to a better Netgear or Asus would improve his overall experience and it will.

I don't disagree. The main comment is there is no such thing as a gaming router. Since you can load merlin firmware on almost the complete line of asus routers all would then be "gaming" routers if there was some special software feature it be just as effective on a mid priced box as the top of the line model. But there really is nothing that makes a router "gaming"

Hop count means nothing really what is most important is the latency between the hops. Lets say I have 10 hops with a total latency of 100ms. But now I instead I get a vpn service that has a data center in the same city as the game server. So now I have 1 really big vpn hop of 90ms and say 10ms to the game company server. It still is 100ms.

The only way vpn works to improve performance is if you can reduce the total latency. VPN providers do not own their own fiber they use the same internet as everyone else to carry their data. So the only way they could have a faster path is if they somehow bought a connection to a ISP that has a shorter distance. This is very rare in the USA or EU where all the major ISP are interconnected in many cities. The people the seem to be able to use it the most are in places like austrilia or singapore.

Now if people would stop complaining about net neutrality we could actually have a gaming internet. All the ISP could agree traffic marked as gaming get priority and if you pay a extra fee each month you could get your gaming traffic to get priority markings.

 

[failboat]

the edge router x has very good cpu speeds for the price $50. It can handle 100Mbs fq_codel, some have tested higher. the er4 can handle more than the erx for $200. if you can figure out how to load cake on the ERX it can do 250Mbs.
past that going with ipfire on x86 cpu will get you multigig + many other services with no bottleneck.

If you load ddwrt, openwrt, asuswrt-merlin on a router you need to look up it's confirmed speeds for each model.
these all have fq_codel which is very good for bufferbloat.
not many routers have strong routing cpus. the $100 ER3 lite can only do qos @ 50Mbs even though it can TCP WAN->LAN much better than the ERX.

https://www.ubnt.com/edgemax/comparison/

 

[Alabalcho]

]I am currently renting one of their cable modems that they gave me years ago.

Check your bill - most probably, you're paying $5-$10/mo for that modem. For two years, that's $120 and up. While good modem and router will end up $200 and more, you'll be of full control of what you have, and you'll break even in a year or two.