FRONTPAGE D-Link Xtreme N DGL-4500 Gaming Router Review

If you are in the market for a new router, the top of your tech wish-list needs to be Wireless N and Gigabit transfer speeds. D-Link has a wide range of options with those features, but one model that should interest all the gamers is the Xtreme N Gaming Router. In addition to the latest technology, it also has an advanced quality of service (QOS) filtering called GamerFuel. Throw in an LCD screen and a USB port and you’ve got yourself a very attractive product on paper. Hopefully this little guy has the muscle to back it all up and deliver the performance you require.

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Nice quick review there, Splat. It would be pretty difficult to run a bunch of tests without an inventory of different routers. you did a great job with what you had available.

I been using mine for over a year now...

It's a great little router...

I did however have some firmware issues with the original firmware. A quick update solved all those though.

Yup great router. Had mine for lets see how many years has it been since Circuit City was in business?

Best $200 ever spent on a router.

Pretty quick review. How is the firmware that comes with it? My biggest question for routers is how intuitive are they? Can you make changes to it (ie open/close ports, turn on/off the wireless, ect..) without having to reboot the router and bring down the entire home network? Does it have traffic monitoring (this is becoming more important given more isp's are putting data caps on service)?

Most lower end routers always seem to bring down the network for every change you make to them, which is annoying as hell.

To tag along to Lyian's questions:

How in-depth are the QoS functions? That was one of the main reasons I switched to Tomato/DD-WRT but apparently stock router firmwares have been getting better about it. Still really unfortunate that you can't put a custom firmware on it though.

Lyian said:

Pretty quick review. How is the firmware that comes with it? My biggest question for routers is how intuitive are they? Can you make changes to it (ie open/close ports, turn on/off the wireless, ect..) without having to reboot the router and bring down the entire home network? Does it have traffic monitoring (this is becoming more important given more isp's are putting data caps on service)?

Most lower end routers always seem to bring down the network for every change you make to them, which is annoying as hell.

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at first it took me some time to find all the settings I wanted because everything is divided into "basic" and "advanced" areas. I definitely agree that rebooting is annoying, but even with dd-wrt, tomato, etc. there are some functions that will always loose connections because a service needs to be restarted. It's just something i've learned to live with when setting up a wireless router so I didn't take too much notice of how frequently the Xtreme N Gaming Router was rebooting. That being said, I'd conclude it reboots at the same frequency as any router when changing settings.

I'll double check when I get home but I'm also pretty sure there isn't any bandwidth monitoring like there is on dd-wrt and tomato. I definitely don't recall any pretty graphs.

Janus67 said:

To tag along to Lyian's questions:

How in-depth are the QoS functions? That was one of the main reasons I switched to Tomato/DD-WRT but apparently stock router firmwares have been getting better about it. Still really unfortunate that you can't put a custom firmware on it though.

Click to expand...

The QoS seemed quite in depth. I couldn't really come up with a good test to show them working so I figured it best to not even comment on the subject. I tried to load up a few linux torrents on a couple of clients then play games on another but i couldn't get any solid stats on if anything was happening.

However, I remember using the QoS in dd-wrt a few years ago and it was completely broken. Even when there was light traffic it would degrade the performance of anything running. I didn't experience that at all with the DLink, so i can just assume it was working. i haven't tried the QoS on tomato so i have no idea if it is any different than dd-wrt.