Advice on WRT600N vs. DGL-4500

[kevin]

Howdy everyone! I found this site a few days ago and have been absorbing as much information as I can about the various draft 802.11n devices on the reviews and forums as I would like to upgrade my home network. I can't even begin to say how incredibly useful this site is over the various reviews on Newegg/Amazon/Cnet/etc.

So anyways, I'm trying to decide whether to purchase a D-Link DGL-4500 wireless router to run side-by-side with my existing Linksys WRT54GL wireless G router (which uses DD-WRT). OR if I should replace it with the dual-band Linksys WRT600N. The reviews indicate they have very similar performance, and they cost almost exactly the same.

I plan on keeping various 802.11g devices on the 2.4 Ghz band (kids desktop, xbox 360, phone), and a laptop and media extender using 802.11n on the 5 Ghz band to avoid the huge mixed-STA perf hit.

For my two 802.11n devices, the laptop has a built-in Intel 4965AGN card, and I'm likely going to get the new HP X280N MediaSmart Connect device that is coming out next month to stream media to my HDTV (it has built in 802.11n, but not sure what chipset). Does anyone know if there would be any difference in using the DGL-4500 or WRT600N for the laptop and media extender?

I'm leaning towards getting the dual band WRT600N, which would reduce the amount of deskspace needed and let me repurpose my old Linksys WRT54GL as a wireless bridge for my SatelliteTV DVR which has an ethernet input... But I suspect the DGL-4500 has better QoS which would be useful for HD media streaming from my home server to the HP MediaConnect when other devices are using the network at the same time. Wish my house was pre-wired for ethernet, would make things much easier. But I have to use wireless for just about everything right now.

Any advice would be much appreciated!

 

[thiggins]

Welcome Kevin. Glad you like the site.

If you have used the Wireless Charts to compare throughput vs. path loss you have seen that the DGL-4500 and WRT600N have very similar performance in both bands. So that isn't a deciding factor.

Since you have many 11g devices, however, I'd say that tips it in favor of the WRT600N, since it has two radios. You can set the 2.4GHz radio to b/g mode and the 5 GHz radio to handle your draft 11n devices, which are also dual-band.

I haven't tested the Intel draft 11n adapter, so can't say how it or the HP MediaSmart Connect (which I also don't know the chipset of) will perform. But, generally speaking, wireless video streaming tends to be disappointing, especially if you are trying to cover any sort of distance.

You're correct that the DGL-4500 (and most D-Link wireless routers) have Ubicom's auto-QoS, which can be helpful to prioritize real-time traffic like music, video and voice over data traffic. But it may or may not be helpful, depending on how much bandwidth your video needs and how heavy your data traffic is.

As for your plans to use the WRT54GL, make sure the alternate firmware you plan to use doesn't depend on WDS to bridge. This is because neither the DGL-4500 nor the WRT600N support it. From a quick look at the DD-WRT docs, however, it looks like its Client Bridge mode doesn't use WDS.