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Page 2 of 3 Setup: While the DGL-4500 does have a lot of features trapped inside its little black box, it’s surprisingly easy to setup. By default, like most routers, it will automatically grab an IP address from your modem (if set to give out DHCP), and will give out IP addresses via DHCP. So in a basic fashion it will be working and get you onto the internet as soon as it’s plugged in. The DGL-4500’s web interface handles all the other setup options and features, and if you’re not that confident with your networking skills then don’t sweat it, as just about everything you can change has a setup wizard included with it, from setting the Wireless Security to access controls and web filters, the router will guide you through everything step by step. For those who are confident with what they’re doing, you don’t HAVE to use the wizards, it can of course be done the old fashioned ‘manual’ way. In Operation: As we’ve just said the setup of the DGL-4500 is a piece of cake so you’ll be up and running in no time. Connecting to the router via one of its LAN ports is still my preferred option, and D-Link do make quite a big deal about it having Gigabit speed, but unless you have other computers on the network also connected as Gigabit speed and can take advantage of the speed for file transfers and such, then there’s no real advantage over a typical 10/100 speed router in terms on internet access speed. The port speed on a broadband router has almost no effect on either your download speeds or your ping times in games. Your internet connection type and speed will determine both those factors so long as your home network itself isn’t clogged with data and slowing you down. And it’s that last point where the DGL-4500 is meant to shine, if your internet connection is being used by a few people it should prioritise gaming traffic above all else to keep your ping times low and packet loss at a minimum. Sadly this is very difficult to test with internet servers, I had a game running with nothing else going through the router and getting ping times of about 15-20ms. I started a file downloading at full speed (150KB/s – only on a 1500kbps ADSL1 connection here at the office) and the game was ranging from 30-150ms+ with GameFuel disabled – so spiking quite badly. I enabled GameFuel with the same file downloading at the same speed, and the pings were still occasionally spiking, although I must admit game play did seem noticeably smoother with less jittering and packet loss, but the ping spikes were still there. I enabled and disabled GameFuel several times and always connected to the same server and I’m surprised to say it did seem noticeably better with the GameFuel rules enabled (I’ll admit I didn’t think it would make any difference at all). It seems to only be of any use though if your internet connection is rather saturated, because if nothing else is using the connection, it’s going to be as good as it can be, GameFuel or no GameFuel. So if you generally game online with nothing else running, this router would be of very little to no use to you. The wireless speed was quite impressive from the DGL-4500, just as good as the DAP-1353 Wireless-N access point I looked at earlier in the year. Excellent range and throughput speeds of around 3-4MB/s (that’s MegaBytes, not MegaBits), still nowhere near 300Mbps, but still way above what any normal 802.11g network could hope to accomplish (normal 802.11g network gives us about 1.6MB/s). The results were so similar I wouldn’t be surprised if exactly the same wireless hardware is in the DGL-4500 as is in the DAP-1353. It’s impressive none the less.
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