First, I'd like to introduce myself.
Meet James.
I'm a 23 year old enthusiast who has made a great name for myself customizing, designing layouts, and then installing centralized & redundant storage, backup, and security systems for the local small businesses. I've been building PCs, as wel as rooting, flashing, and jailbreaking my phones for man years. Its always been easy to tell someone what to buy when it comes to Consumer Electronics. Often, you start with a budget, and then tailor a customers needs to a product (yep...I said that right. Customers normally want the basics...and don't understand that often, when buying computers and TVs and such, that you mustn't think only about what you need your devices to do...you should also think about they could do, to increase your enjoyment, productivity and efficiency), giving them what they need for their budget without going a cent over, checking off as many boxes as possible along the way.
And I do well for myself. I'm a Pre-Med student who's been lucky enough to squeeze my way into owning a MBP, a ASUS transformer, a HTPC with 12TB+ of space, a Samsung Galaxy Note, and a Onkyo 7.1 surround sound system hooked up to my sexy HTPC's Sonar Audio Card. I also have a Core i7 gaming pc, and my HTPC doubles as a file server.
The desktop PCs are taken are of. They're hardwired with Gigabit Ethernet...but I live in an apartment, and have always had issues with Wi-Fi. Mostly because we've only once bought a wireless router of our own...and even then it was a refurbished G router that died shortly later.
I once bought a fifty dollar Asus router, but it too bit the dust. I had it configured as an AP, but it had issues being the second router on the network.
We now have Uverse Internet and TV, and while the service is good...and the UI and boxes are leaps and bounds above anything other than Google TV, the router built into our Home Gateway, a 2wire 3800HGV-B, is the most horrendous piece....that I've ever used or had to dealt with. I'm running out of fingers and toes to count the amount of times we've replaced it because it took a crap on us, or the Wi-Fi was carpet bombing us--i think it'd better be described as water torture.
That brings us to the buying advice I need. The apartment isn't huge, but what walls we do have seem to make routers cry. They're nothing special...its just that the routers we have had, all stank.
Its relatively easy to distinguish routers at the high end, but my budget is meager, after having some health issues that have coated me a fortune.
The apartment is already wired for Gigabit via the 2wire Gateway in the front of the house...and a Dlink Switch in the second half of the apartment...the rear. Its all-in-all , about 900 Square feet. The issue with small apartments is, the smaller they are, the closer the walls are, and the more winding the halls are.
So range and penetration are key here. Serious transfers can be done over Ethernet, and other features are nice but not a must.
And the hammer falls....I need this for under $100...and even that will be tough. I've looked at the charts and reviews, but ultimately, without clicking on every single one and making my own spread sheet (which would still cause issues, because the sum of the parts can be greater than the whole, or less,or bottlenecked by a couple areas in the router's performance). I know little about the metrics used to measure a routers performance, so its impossible tie my expectations to the values. Networking benchmarks tell me just as much as a Super-Pi run. Its not that I don't trust benchmarks--to the contrary, I use them all the time. Its just that I don't know what the difference between a router is that rates 4/5 in reliability, and one that rates 2/5...or if finding a 5/5 is rare. I may understand throughput...but lack in creating the bigger picture.
So, to sum it up...I need a Sub-$100 router ($80 is the target price, but if there is value in paying more, I'll do it) that handles modest range well, and is reliable. Customization, and DDWRT support would be nice, nut not important. It must be WiFi-N...and Gigabit as well as removable antennae would make me chuckle like a school girl ever time I open my browser...and don't you want to make me chuckle?
Help a fellow geek out.
Once more:
1.) N
2.) Good Range
3.) Enough bandwidth and steady ness to stream HD Netflix, and stream files over the network...I dont mind buffering, but once the stream starts playing it shouldn't stop.
4.) Gigabit Ethernet
5.) DDWRT
6.) Removable Antennas.
The last two aren't as important, but I'd be extremely pleased if you came across something.
Help a fellow enthusiast/tweaked out!!!
Thanks in advance,
James
Meet James.
I'm a 23 year old enthusiast who has made a great name for myself customizing, designing layouts, and then installing centralized & redundant storage, backup, and security systems for the local small businesses. I've been building PCs, as wel as rooting, flashing, and jailbreaking my phones for man years. Its always been easy to tell someone what to buy when it comes to Consumer Electronics. Often, you start with a budget, and then tailor a customers needs to a product (yep...I said that right. Customers normally want the basics...and don't understand that often, when buying computers and TVs and such, that you mustn't think only about what you need your devices to do...you should also think about they could do, to increase your enjoyment, productivity and efficiency), giving them what they need for their budget without going a cent over, checking off as many boxes as possible along the way.
And I do well for myself. I'm a Pre-Med student who's been lucky enough to squeeze my way into owning a MBP, a ASUS transformer, a HTPC with 12TB+ of space, a Samsung Galaxy Note, and a Onkyo 7.1 surround sound system hooked up to my sexy HTPC's Sonar Audio Card. I also have a Core i7 gaming pc, and my HTPC doubles as a file server.
The desktop PCs are taken are of. They're hardwired with Gigabit Ethernet...but I live in an apartment, and have always had issues with Wi-Fi. Mostly because we've only once bought a wireless router of our own...and even then it was a refurbished G router that died shortly later.
I once bought a fifty dollar Asus router, but it too bit the dust. I had it configured as an AP, but it had issues being the second router on the network.
We now have Uverse Internet and TV, and while the service is good...and the UI and boxes are leaps and bounds above anything other than Google TV, the router built into our Home Gateway, a 2wire 3800HGV-B, is the most horrendous piece....that I've ever used or had to dealt with. I'm running out of fingers and toes to count the amount of times we've replaced it because it took a crap on us, or the Wi-Fi was carpet bombing us--i think it'd better be described as water torture.
That brings us to the buying advice I need. The apartment isn't huge, but what walls we do have seem to make routers cry. They're nothing special...its just that the routers we have had, all stank.
Its relatively easy to distinguish routers at the high end, but my budget is meager, after having some health issues that have coated me a fortune.
The apartment is already wired for Gigabit via the 2wire Gateway in the front of the house...and a Dlink Switch in the second half of the apartment...the rear. Its all-in-all , about 900 Square feet. The issue with small apartments is, the smaller they are, the closer the walls are, and the more winding the halls are.
So range and penetration are key here. Serious transfers can be done over Ethernet, and other features are nice but not a must.
And the hammer falls....I need this for under $100...and even that will be tough. I've looked at the charts and reviews, but ultimately, without clicking on every single one and making my own spread sheet (which would still cause issues, because the sum of the parts can be greater than the whole, or less,or bottlenecked by a couple areas in the router's performance). I know little about the metrics used to measure a routers performance, so its impossible tie my expectations to the values. Networking benchmarks tell me just as much as a Super-Pi run. Its not that I don't trust benchmarks--to the contrary, I use them all the time. Its just that I don't know what the difference between a router is that rates 4/5 in reliability, and one that rates 2/5...or if finding a 5/5 is rare. I may understand throughput...but lack in creating the bigger picture.
So, to sum it up...I need a Sub-$100 router ($80 is the target price, but if there is value in paying more, I'll do it) that handles modest range well, and is reliable. Customization, and DDWRT support would be nice, nut not important. It must be WiFi-N...and Gigabit as well as removable antennae would make me chuckle like a school girl ever time I open my browser...and don't you want to make me chuckle?
Help a fellow geek out.
Once more:
1.) N
2.) Good Range
3.) Enough bandwidth and steady ness to stream HD Netflix, and stream files over the network...I dont mind buffering, but once the stream starts playing it shouldn't stop.
4.) Gigabit Ethernet
5.) DDWRT
6.) Removable Antennas.
The last two aren't as important, but I'd be extremely pleased if you came across something.
Help a fellow enthusiast/tweaked out!!!
Thanks in advance,
James
