Homeplug/Powerline & Gaming?

Haggisman

Haggisman

Haggisman

Soldato
Joined
6 Oct 2004
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Location
Birmingham
So I've just moved to a new house, unfortunately, the only BT socket is in the hall, and so thats where the router needs to be.

Have 2 PCs need to be networked, 1 upstairs, and 1 in the living room, we're currently using wireless, however the lag is insane when playing any games (e.g. L4D, TF2 etc) and they lock up for 5-6 seconds at a time. I know it's the wireless, because I tried putting in cat5 temporarily, and everything is fine. It's not an option to have the cable there permanently, as it's messy and in the way, so I was looking at those powerline things. Does anyone have any experience of gaming over these, and what is the performance like?

We would be getting the 200Mbps ones, and I'm guessing I would need 3, one at the router, and one at each PC?

Also, is there any particular brand which is recommended?

Thanks in advance!
 
I haven't done any gaming on mine, but I get minimum 40mbps sustained throughput and about 3ms latency.
 
I understand that the quality of the power cables in your house and the way they are interconnected will be what determines how well they work.

If you have old cable and long distances with minimal shielding then they may suffer... they will still be better than wireless though. Make sure you plug them into a socket directly in the wall and not as apart of a multi adaptor as this will reduce local interference.
 
The house is (I believe) only 5-6 years old, so the cables should be reasonably good/new, so it should be pretty good for it?
 
I've got a couple of Advent 200mbps Powerline adapters. I don't use them for gaming but I did try them one night to test them for such. The house was re-wired in 2000 so in very good condition.

I didn't notice any significant lag or hangs. I had not installed the encryption software when I tested it for gaming. My gaming PC is quite close to the router. The only slight deterioration I found was a 1ms higher ping to my router compared to wireless g. This wasn't noticable in games and I only saw it using Linux to ping the router as a benchmark.

If you can run some cat5 then this would probably be better and cheaper. In my case I needed to get networking into the garage for a server. The garage is not next to the house and already has power so it was the obvious choice. But inside the house I'd probably run some cat5 due to the cost.

Seems to work fine for gaming for me though (in my limited test).
 
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Slightly off topic but do you know if homeplugs support VPN as my work laptop use a VPN connection for me to contect to the network. Currently i'm having to trail a network cable across the house to my office, which isn't great ,as the VPN won't work using a wireles bridge for some reason.
 
Geffen said:
Slightly off topic but do you know if homeplugs support VPN as my work laptop use a VPN connection for me to contect to the network. Currently i'm having to trail a network cable across the house to my office, which isn't great ,as the VPN won't work using a wireles bridge for some reason.
Click to expand...

I have a work laptop and can connect to work through my home broadband using VPN. Work won't enable the wireless on the laptop. So I sometimes use the powerline adapters to connect from different parts of the house. Works fine.
 
not a great answer from me but my m8 just set these up in his flat and he was very surprised by the speed of these not sure of the make and yes he does game on them.will see if I can find out more but what I do know is the flats he has moved into are new so probably helped.
 
They're fine for gaming. Latency is usually <10ms which is un noticable in games.
Though your wifi shouldn't introduce noticable lag, something is set up wrong there.
 
I can't say i have used these for gaming but for surfing the net and such they have been excellent for me, if you decide to get some post back and let us know how you get on with them.
 
Homeplugs should work fine in that age of house, the 200mbps ones are overkill for gaming (85 mbps would do and are cheaper) but will give you some headroom.

They are for all normal purposes transparent to vpn and most other formats.

You should know within 30s of connecting 2 of them if your lag free.

200 bps ones seem to have gone generic and very much cheaper inpairs recently so buy ones that are cheap and easily replaced like for like if they die.
 
Works fine in my house - reasonably new wiring about 5/6 years old too.

Pings through the power line system to the router are about 4ms but its pretty constant and no packet loss so it will add a little to the overall ping but its certainly a lot more reliable than wireless has been for me.
 
I use some old 85mbs powerline adapters, they work fine for gaming.

Sustained transfers are a bit crap, like 17mb/s, but latency and stability is much better than my old wireless.
 
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