Fastest Router

[Raizinman]

I'm putting together a small office network of 3 or 4 computers. The computers will be late model quad cores with lots of RAM and Hard Drive. We will be using Road Runner Turbo. My question is:

What is the best router for fastest internet speeds for torrents/downloading?
What is the best router for fastest computer to computer (in house) file transfer?
I heard that some routers have turbo mode built in? Is this really noticable?
I was hoping to keep the router price around $300 or so.
If I get a FAST router, what then will be my slowest piece of hardware? The Ethernet card?
Will it make any difference if I use CAT 5, 6 or 7 cabling for the cables?
What things can be done to get the fastest speeds?

At my work, we work off a T3 line and internet with many many users and the connection is lightning fast. How can I achieve this same fastness at home with just 3 users?

 

[yinan]

In house transfer, any gig switch will do. Traffic does not get routed until it has to leave the local subnet.

 

[JackMDS]

At my work, we work off a T3 line and internet with many many users and the connection is lightning fast. How can I achieve this same fastness at home with just 3 users?

Get a T3 for home too.

If you have $10 and you put it in a small purse. You have $10.

If you put it in a Huge purse. You still have the same $10.

A faster Router (Whatever that means) would not get you more bandwidth than the one that your contract calls for.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Any 10 or 100mbps router will do. Your internet will be the bottleneck, unless you have FIOS then you want to go gigabit just to be safe but even then FIOS is 100mbps if I'm not mistaken and you probably wont always get that speed.

 

[Engineer]

Router charts

Drop down box to see different tests.

 

[ccbadd]

Get one of these with PFSense and you will have a professional grade router then add a gig switch: http://www.netgate.com/product_info.php?products_id=209&osCsid=713706dd7706964c1de340cae1f98a9c

And, a better router CAN get you better performance but don't look at any of the SOHO routers. Keep in mind though, this type of router takes more skills to get working just right right!

 

[her209]

Get one of these with PFSense and you will have a professional grade router then add a gig switch: http://www.netgate.com/product_info.php?products_id=209&osCsid=713706dd7706964c1de340cae1f98a9c

And, a better router CAN get you better performance but don't look at any of the SOHO routers. Keep in mind though, this type of router takes more skills to get working just right right!

Or if the OP is feeling really adventurous, get a PC with 2 NICs, install Linux, enable routing, and use iptables to perform firewall/NAT.

 

[Rifter]

Or if the OP is feeling really adventurous, get a PC with 2 NICs, install Linux, enable routing, and use iptables to perform firewall/NAT.

That would definatly be the fastest depending on the specs of the PC he built for it, i believe most soho routers are in the 300-600mhz CPU range with 32-64 MB of ram, so any computer you build with better specs than that would be faster but i think for residential internet it wont matter much, we would be talking a few miliseconds. You would need a T3 connection before you overload a soho router.

 

[robmurphy]

I would get a seperate gigabit switch and a router/PC based router. If you want good PC to PC transfer using gigabit for the local LAN makes sense. If all of the local PCs support jumbo frames I would make sure the swicth also supports them.

One big problem with many cheap soho routers is they do have enough RAM. As P2P uses many connections it uses lots of router RAM. One heavy P2P PC is enough to slow my WG624 router right down. This not bandwith as in total its downloading 100 KBs on a 20 Mbs link. When the P2P session is running my ping times to a site on the internet go from 15 ms to 150 - 600ms. If all the local PCs will be heavy P2P users then if you have a spare PC I would use that as the router. There are many linux based router builds like pfsene, vyata, monowall. You could also just run a normal linux distrubution. I think DD WRT and OPEN WRT can also be compiled to run on an X86 platform.

The platform mentioned by her209 would make a good base for a linux based router, and much lower power useage.

If you want a a router rather than using a PC then I would look for ones with 64 MB of RAM. These may cost as much a a seperate PC, but will use less power.

 

[MarkXIX]

These routers:

http://www.brocade.com/downloads/documents/data_sheets/product_data_sheets/ds-ni-xmr.pdf

 

[ImDonly1]

For home, I would say your bottleneck would be the hard drive if you are using gigabit ethernet. You can probably get about 50 MB/s out of the theoretical ~100MB/s of Gigabit ethernet. This is for computer to computer transfers of large files. To get faster than that you would need to do a RAID setup. But I think 50MB/s is fast enough.

It would help if you posted what kind of internet speeds you ordered from Road Runner. The turbo I google'd is advertised at 15/1 or 15/2 depending on location. 15 Mbits/s is about 1.7 MB (megabytes). Notice MB/s (megabytes) and Mb/s (Mbits) are not the same. That is plenty fast for web browsing and downloading. You can download a ~4GB DVD in less than 1 hour I'd say. A T3 internet line can cost thousands of dollars per month and they can get 45/45 Mbit/s (yours will be 15/1 or 15/2 Mbits/s).

I would suggest you get a router than can handle many connections for torrents since that's what you said you plan on using it for. Most people here will recommend a Buffalo, Linksys and flash it with custom firmware and then use a separate switch that has Gigabit speeds (for computer to computer transfers).

For your cabling question. Cat5e and Cat6 both support gigabit speeds. Cat6 should be a little more futureproof and I might might/does support 10Gig-E speeds. Cat7 I don't know.

Do you need a router with wireless G,N, etc?

I think the link Engineer meant was http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/index.php?option=com_chart&Itemid=&chart=121 (this one shows LAN performance, the one you posted shows wireless performance). Click the box to see different tests LAN to WAN, max connections, and such.

 

[Engineer]

I think the link Engineer meant was http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/index.php?option=com_chart&Itemid=&chart=121 (this one shows LAN performance, the one you posted shows wireless performance). Click the box to see different tests LAN to WAN, max connections, and such.

To be honest, I was in a hurry and didn't read anything but the title. First thing was fast router, so I popped up the Smallnetbuilder charts that I had bookmarked. That will teach this old man not to read all of the OP, lol. Most people are asking for fastest wireless rates and I just "assumed". Sure made an ass out of me, no?

 

[Raizinman]

Thanks to all of you. I was confused with the $39 routers compared to the $199 routers. Will the more expensive routers give me better speed? What can a person do to increase their speed on their home network? Switch to Cat 6 cables? Besides the Internet itself with is one bottleneck we can't do anything about, what are the slowest components on a home network? What tests besides speed test can be done to show a person what is the slowest component on their network? How would I know if my network card or cabling was slowing down the network?

 

[ImDonly1]

I was confused with the $39 routers compared to the $199 routers. Will the more expensive routers give me better speed?

The more expensive routers are #1 name brand, #2 usually can support more connections and crash less (using torrents), #3 have built in gigabit switch. They also have USB ports sometimes, can do wireless N and can do 5 Ghz instead of 2.4 Ghz for wireless.

Most other questions I answered above in my other post.

 

[JackMDS]

Thanks to all of you. I was confused with the $39 routers compared to the $199 routers. Will the more expensive routers give me better speed?

A Bulldozer cost many times more than a regular car.

Yet it is much slower than a car.

Why? While it is a vehicle like a car, it is used in a different way. It can take you (or your Kids) to school, but it was deigned for different purposes.

You keep Hanging on the word "Speed" rather than trying to understand what Network systems is all about.

No hardware in the world will get you the performance of your Work Internet if you do not have a similar capable Internet connection.

 

[kevnich2]

I agree with Jack on this. You can't just go by "what's going to give me the fastest uber speed I can get". With a 15mb cable internet connection - any SOHO router will do just fine for you. As far as your internal network is concerned - most people that think they need really fast network speeds with gigabit end up only using their network for small things - but hey that's just from my experience. If you want fast network speeds - then get a gigabit switch, use cabling that's atleast cat5e and run all of your computers to the gigabit switch. Then simply take a network cable from the switch to the LAN port of your router and bam, all done.

 

[alyarb]

road runner turbo* is 22mbps and it's pretty decent, i've used it at all hours of the day and they keep it above 17mbps. most routers have built in gig-base t. so uh, yeah. most of the torrents I use can fill up 22 mbps without having to have thousands of concurrent connections, so I still use consumer routers. I like the netgear wndr3300, it has good 802.11n range and performance if you ever have notebooks in the office.

 

[Raizinman]

I was looking at two different routers:

D-Link DIR-855 Xtreme N Duo Dual Band Draft 802.11n Media Router $249

D-Link DIR-655 Xtreme N Gigabit Router about $80

Any thoughts on these?

 

[robmurphy]

The 2 routers listed have different WAN interfaces. One is DSL aand the other is Ethernet. I'm in the UK so I do not know what interface you will be using.

If you want the PC to PC transfers then a wired connection will be quicker, simpler, cheaper and have less problems than wireless. Cat5E will give gigabit connections without any problems.

At gigabit speeds using jumbo frames can make a difference to the CPU load on the PC, so if the PC's NIC and the switch both support it then it makes sense to set it up. You may need to tune the settings on the NICs to get the best transfer rate with minimal CPU load.

I checked the RAM on my router after the last post and its 16 MB. 1 PC downloadiing a slow large torrent can bring the router to its knees. As said before the ping times go through the roof. I can not find the spec on the 2 routers you listed but the chances are they are a 32 MB or less. For 3 or 4 machines all using torrents I would want 64 MB as a minimum. I do not think a standard SOHO router will be good enough.

Another point is how will your ISP react. In the UK they not too keen on people using bittorrents. One heavy user on a home connection can attract unwelcome attention. 4 heavy users would start alarm bells ringing.

If your are going to be using 3 or 4 high spec PCs then I think you will need more than a good SOHO router. I would go for a seperate switch with 9K jumbo frames support, and use a PC as a router. The PC needs 2 NICs. You can use a normal Linux build on the PC, or one intended as a router, like vyata, pfssense, monowall, openwrt, ect.

You could also try a router intended for small offices like the Cisco 871, or better. There are some newer models out from Cisco, but I do not know much about them. The use of a PC as a router may turn out to be cheaper and more flexible.

Rob

 

[ImDonly1]

I was looking at two different routers:

D-Link DIR-855 Xtreme N Duo Dual Band Draft 802.11n Media Router $249

D-Link DIR-655 Xtreme N Gigabit Router about $80

Any thoughts on these?

the dir-655 is a great router. it has gigabit and is very popular right now. im not sure if it supports jumbo frames or not. the 855 model has two antennas 5ghz and 2.4 i think. 5ghz hhas less interference. i would get the 655. the 855 is overpriced and almost the same i think. i dont kno much about the 855 tho