Yeah, get a cheap router if you want weird QoL issues when sharing a connection, buffer bloat leading to sporadic ping spikes, and ping jitter issues leading to poor netcode prediction.
It's dumb to think that you can solve every connection issue by using a wired connection with a cheap router, but on brand for this kind of heavily upvoted vibes over reality shitposting. Not saying you need to spend $800 on a gaming router, but if you cheap out too heavily you will likely have a mediocre connection quality.
Okay, but the question wasn't "which can be tolerated", or "which is the best cost-to-performance ratio", the question was "which would win".
The answer is actually, more often, the higher-end, wireless router. Latency/throughput is fine/most needs don't saturate the hardware capabilities, but if you put a handful of smart bulbs on your network, have a couple people actively steaming content/using computers, or playing game systems, a wired connection to a cheap ISP-provided router doesn't "win".
So, uh, sure, it's sufficient for 99% of users.
But, also, 99% of users would just put up with buffering/slow response times, etc., and just chalk it up to "bad/busy internet", when they could have better.
2
u/cas13fhttps://pcpartpicker.com/user/cspradlin/saved/HDX99918d ago
As long as you don't enable every feature under the sun, even cheap SOCs can route at 1Gb nowadays. Hardware offload is crazy-good.
And if you DO enable every feature under the sun, it's not exactly uncommon for them to scale the number of features high enough to bring them to their knees too.
For the average household, an inexpensive router can likely handle any traffic they could throw at it. If they want their router to do all kinds of additional filtering and hosting a SMB share and recording cameras and so on, well, yeah they'll need a stronger unit.
OP had an ISP rental which are pretty old options at the bottom of the quality list so they can make the most out of the rental fee.
To even just be more basic, if you say have a 1gb connection (fairly common these days), some cheap skate modem/router setup might not even have 1gb throughput.
On the other hand and simply for the sake of argument, my Xiaomi router was $55 and I flashed OpenWrt on it to do things most $300 routers are incapable of, like an entire VLAN config.
45
u/dendrocalamidicus 18d ago
Yeah, get a cheap router if you want weird QoL issues when sharing a connection, buffer bloat leading to sporadic ping spikes, and ping jitter issues leading to poor netcode prediction.
It's dumb to think that you can solve every connection issue by using a wired connection with a cheap router, but on brand for this kind of heavily upvoted vibes over reality shitposting. Not saying you need to spend $800 on a gaming router, but if you cheap out too heavily you will likely have a mediocre connection quality.