High speed networking brought home

Our home has two wired computers, another two on wireless, a Vonage VOIP box and an Elgato Eyehome (like an Apple TV before Apple made one). Our old router failed and I needed to find a replacement. The DLink 4100 DGL turned out to be perfect, and since it's Gigabit Ethernet, my next computers will be able to communicate with each other faster.

The DLink 4100 DGL is a "Gaming Router" featuring "Game Fuel", which is a fancy way of saying that it has Quality of Service features built-in. Any power user can tell you that if you're doing a big file transfer, other operations get slow, even if they don't need much bandwidth. The 4100 lowers the priority of the bigger transfers so the more interactive ones can be handled too. I never notice the big ones slowing down, but I certainly notice being able to use the other ones!

I've done some testing and here's what I've found:
1) My old router responded to pings around 2-3ms. The 4100 is in the .02ms range. Knocking 2ms off your ping times may help in games.
2) I can have a BitTorrent upload working as hard as it can and still use the VOIP Vonage box transparently. That's quite a feat!
3) It's fast. My peak BitTorrent download (getting a Starcraft 2 cinematic trailer from Blizzard) is 500KB/s, about twice what my old router got. I didn't think the router would matter for something like that, but maybe the CPU is faster or better able to handle multiple connections.

The 4100 works right out of the box (especially important for PS3 / XBox owners, or computer users who don't want to worry about it). Tweakers are covered too! There are configuration options for different protocols and you can manually set them to 1 - 255. Of course, there are also options for port forwarding if you run home servers as well as a built-in DHCP server and uPNP. A few tests with Warcraft3 and DOTA proved less laggy than the router it replaced.

I did return my first unit (to Amazon, who very promptly replaced it) because I was having terrible gaming performance. It turned out that with the cable modem plugged in, I was getting 4-6% packet loss (which went away when I unplugged the cable modem). Digging into the advanced status options, the router was recording ethernet packet errors. The replacement is error free and a great performer, and is evaluated above.

The power and link lights are bright blue -- very bright. If you're putting it anywhere visible, it will be quite distracting. If you can put it behind your desk or on a shelf or even put some tape over the lights, you'll be happier.

The box includes an instructional CD (I didn't look at it), a quick start guide (I did look at it), the 4100 unit itself, an AC power adapter and a blue ethernet cord.