Linksys WRT32X
$349 | WWW.LINKSYS.COM This mid-range model still has some quirks to iron out.
Showing up at the very last minute, the new WRT32X is Linksys’ attempt to take on the gaming market. While it has some great potential, the firmware is in dire need of some love and attention to maximise its potential.
Even setting this up proved to be troublesome — while most routers are simply plug and play, it took several attempts before we could get the Ethernet ports to connect, even though the Wi-Fi worked straight out of the box.
This is a dual-band router, so only delivers 3,200Mbps of bandwidth, yet our far range 2.4GHz performance numbers were truly abysmal. The other results were fine, suggesting this is a bug in the firmware. It’s got Killer networking technology built in that prioritises gaming traffic and lowers pings, especially if you’re connecting it to a Killer-equipped PC. Our test PC just happened to be using the Killer E2500 LAN port, and the results speak for themselves, with this router delivering the best gaming performance of the lot. Yet the ability to tweak the QoS settings are totally absent, other than being able to prioritise a certain PC on the network. Where this router did shine was the 5GHz long-range test, posting the best result in the roundup, at 169Mbps, though its other results weren’t quite so stellar.
There’s definitely the potential for this affordable router to shine, but Linksys needs to get to work on fixing some of the showstopping bugs. When they do, this will become a rather potent gaming router for those with a handful of devices and a priority on the lowest pings possible.