Why are pc's faster than routers?

breadturbo · 21 Aug 2011 at 15:14

Just a curious question.

I had our 4 pc's connected to our virgin cable via a netgear wgr614 router all was fine, i got 55 ping on world of tanks, 45 on wow.
We upgraded from 50mbit to 100mbit and got the crappy black router pings were same.

I've jsut set up server2008 with rras on an amd quad 2.4 4gb ram dedicated machine in the spare bedroom and now im running 35ms world of tanks, 25ms wow.
The entire internet browsing etc seems a lot smoother and stuff loads before i release my figner from the mouse fully.

Wonder if anyone can tell me why? i perhaps wonder if its due to me using all the ports on the routers they dont have the speed tot ransfer all the data?

cheers

DIABLO · 21 Aug 2011 at 15:27

If i'm understanding your post right, you setup a pc to route your internet traffic?

Routers for the normal comsumer are generally a compromise between cost, performance, size, power use, thus a PC routing your traffic especially with 4 machines using the connection is almost always gonna be better.

Sin_Chase · 21 Aug 2011 at 15:31

Routers are built to a price point. If you need serious switching, packet inspection/filtering etc you pay £££££ for a router/appliance capable of such throughput.

It's cheaper to get the same performance out of PC which comparatively has hugely more processing power and memory.

breadturbo · 21 Aug 2011 at 15:57

I was jsut suprised at the difference it made, never expected it to be that much.

Rozzy85 · 21 Aug 2011 at 16:36

Yeah, it would be better. I've kinda wanted to have a dedicated server, even an old machine would do quite nicely but it's not practical at the moment.

Most commercial routers are made on the cheap and only really serve as an Internet gateway so performance isn't a concern.

Dist · 21 Aug 2011 at 16:39

Well to put things into perspective, I had to buy 2 linksys E3000 routers for a uni project, these cost around £120 each so are fairly high end home routers. For that price you get a single core 480 MHz cpu, 64 MB ram, 8 MB Flash. Now although routers hardware and software is specificaly built for the task, it is still nothing compared to a PC. This is why there are a lot of people who build a cheap intel atom PC to use as a router, you can even get some small 1u cases for them and a DC power supply and they take up just the same room as a normal router but are much more powerful and much more customizable.

Also there is some stuff that router developers add on to make their router sound better for sales but often is poorly implemented, such as firewalls, filtering software etc...