D-Link appears to have snuck out a new router without me having any advanced notice. It seems that my beloved DGL-4300 finally has an exit strategy — the DGL-4500.
Built for gaming, the DGL series routers have a ton of tweaks to ensure the lowest ping times in games — even when your wife is downloading old 80’s hair metal off BitTorrent. I’ve been using the DGL-4300 since it was released and I have to say it has been the most rock solid router I have ever used. It would literally run for months until I decided for some reason to disconnect it from the UPS and move it. The priority engine and dynamic fragmentation of packets really makes this thing sing. I get pings under 30 on so many servers on the net it just isn’t funny playing TF2.
This update is really nice. It still has the great 2.4 GHz b/g wireless, gigabit ethernet and slick design. They’ve added 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz 802.11 a/n, as well as an all new OLED display on the front with control buttons to interact with a ton of the router features. The thing just looks slick, has a clean front, and glows blue when you touch the buttons. Very, very cool.
You can view a clock, the router event log, connection status for wireless, wired and WAN, send/receive speed (great for monitoring torrents), and a ton of other great stuff. Compared to the 4300, this model has a working NTP client to keep the time in sync, easier to understand configuration screens, and greater flexibility with things like Dynamic DNS. The UI is still the slickest of all D-Link consumer routers (considering their market is gamers, that’s a good thing) and provides plenty of feedback. Many of the options no longer require a reboot to complete configuration.
For now, the benefits of 5 GHz 802.11n are wonderful. There are so few devices in the field that actually have it the spectrum is clean and clear. I can pick up around eight 2.4 GHz b/g networks in my neighborhood alone, but I’m the lone 5 GHz station so far, and the bandwidth tests represent that speed. I’m currently running in 802.11 a/n mode since not all of my systems are n-capable (but all are a-capable). I setup the 4300 in bridge mode to provide g-only service to my iPhone.
I’ll report back on how stable the new DGL-4500 is after a few months of testing. If it is anything like the 4300, that could be a long time from now.
December 23rd, 2007 at 4:50 pm
I just bought DGL-4500 for my son. Any advice on setup wold be great. cable modem. I bought him the matching receiver card BUT we have 6 other comps in house with g cards as I don’t want to upgrade all of those mow. THANKS
December 23rd, 2007 at 4:57 pm
Well, you probably want to set it up on the 2.4 GHz band with legacy g enabled. That way you can do 802.11n for the new card and 802.11g for the systems without n support.
Alternately, you could setup the old router as a wireless bridge handling 802.11g and use the new router on 5 GHz with the new card for maximum n-range speed.
I use my old DGL-4300 to handle 802.11b/g on my network (as a SubXXX SSID) and the new 802.11n router (as a SuperXXX SSID) for the machines that support 802.11n. It works pretty well since nobody else in my neighborhood has an N router yet.
July 27th, 2008 at 7:45 am
So how did this router perform?
September 27th, 2008 at 1:22 am
How did you set up the DGL-4300 in bridge mode?
September 27th, 2008 at 7:19 am
I probably used the wrong term here. I use it as an access point. I have a wired 1GB connection connecting to one of the 4 ports of the switch and the wireless is enabled on a separate SSID. The other three ports are used to serve local devices (Apple TV, XBOX 360). I have a cat 6 line through the attic connecting the two routers.
I don’t think you can setup the 4300 in a wireless client mode where it acts as a wireless bridge. I’m just using it as a switch/access point without anything connected to the WAN port.