Hello. I’d just like borrow a moment of your time and describe to you the great glory of the D-Link DGL-4300 GamerLounge router. It’s a masterpiece. While I’m still in the process of testing the wireless uptime (now approaching 1 day), there’s nothing else I dislike about this router.
The user interface for configuring the router is absolutely amazing. The greatest I have ever seen on any router. It looks pretty and has every option you’d ever want.
The perfect test of any router would be to start up a couple torrents and test the sucker out. So after checking out mininova and discovering that the February CTP of Windows Vista came out yesterday, I knew exactly what to start downloading.

OK. UPnP is awesome. I actived it on the router, then installed the UI on my computer (see XP setup). Then I went into Azureus and activated UPnP. All of a sudden my inbound/outbound port mapping is done and I’m downloading torrents with no NAT problems and with the Distributed Database working correctly. No screwing around with port forwarding. Just opening Azureus and letting UPnP do it’s thing.

(I’m new to this whole UPnP on a router, so I’m just ecstatic about this.)

Now it’s time to test the router when it’s stressed with a torrent. First I went into Azureus and changed the max upload and download speeds to unlimited, then changed the max connections per torrent and globally to unlimited. Within minutes the torrent is connected to over 500 peers.
On any previous router I’ve ever used, at this point you’d start to notice some lag time when loading webpages. Even other computers on the network would start to notice that their slashdot was taking longer than usual to load. With this router, thus is still not the case. No web page lag on this computer or my laptop, and I’m still even maintaining a shoutcast stream with no buffering.
The final test of this router for now is the torrent-streaming music-web browsing-World of Warcraft combo test. This test has the torrent continuing to run (with another torrent seeding), the 128kbps shoutcast stream running, some standard web browsing on the computer with the torrents running, and World of Warcraft running on another computer on the network.

Suicide, right? WoW should report latencys of incredible numbers, and the world should start to feel lag, especially when the torrent is approaching 600 peers.

(Waiting until it hits 700 peers)

Average World of Warcraft latency (as calculated over one minute, and as the torrent peers stay steady around 715, and while streaming a 128kbps music stream, and refreshing slashdot every 10 seconds): 199ms

I wouldn’t doubt that an IP phone would excel with this router. Just the fact that I’ve got a torrent with unlimited up/down with unlimited connections running with no performance drop amongst the network puts an incredibly large smile on my face.

This router gets 10 out of 10 stars from me. While it does cost more than other routers out there, you’re getting gigabit and a (as shown here) high-performance processor that seems as though it’ll handle anything you throw at it (rumor has it that the max concurrent connections is 6000).

~Jaker

PS–Since we’re someone on the subject, expect a Windows Vista build 5308 review very soon. This build is supposed to be code-complete (with the return of the sidebar!)…

—–