What Is the Best Gaming Router in 2021?

What Are the Criteria for Choosing One?

Modern routers are complicated devices whose performance exceeds that of many personal computers from the last decade. The best wireless routers for gaming offer a whole host of gaming-oriented features intended to improve your experience, and they are certainly worth spending extra money on if you consider yourself to be an avid gamer.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the most important criteria for choosing the best router for gaming:

• Band support: Modern routers can simultaneously broadcast on multiple frequencies (bands). Dual-band routers broadcast on the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands at the same time, while tri-band routers broadcast three separate bands, typically a 2.4 GHz band and two separate 5 GHz bands. The more bands you have at your disposal, the easier it is to avoid issues with Wi-Fi signal interference, so paying extra for a dual- or tri-band router is always a good choice.
• Connectivity: There’s a good reason why most gamers prefer Ethernet over Wi-Fi: a wired connection is almost completely immune to issues caused by interference. That’s why the best gaming routers are equipped with multiple gigabit Ethernet ports, allowing you to connect your desktop computer, video game console, and other devices to the internet without any compromises.
• WiFi 6: The latest generation Wi-Fi standard offers higher data rates, increased capacity, improved power efficiency, and many other benefits that make it worth paying extra for a gaming router that supports it. The good news is that such routers are becoming increasingly common, and the same can be said about the devices that connect to them, such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops.
• MU-MIMO: Multi-user, multiple-input, multiple-output technology makes it possible for routers to communicate with several devices simultaneously. This technology can be incredibly useful in environments where several people are regularly playing online games at the same time because it ensures that each person connected to the router enjoys a low latency.
• Beamforming: This signal processing technique allows wireless routers to focus a wireless signal towards a specific receiving device. As such, beamforming lets you enjoy a stronger Wi-Fi signal, resulting in a faster and more reliable connection to the internet.
• Wider Wi-Fi channels: Some routers can take advantage of wider Wi-Fi channels, including 40 MHz and 80 MHz, to enable higher data transmission rates. The downside of wider Wi-Fi channels is that they are more likely to suffer from signal interference, so avoid them if you are located in a heavily congested area.
• Quality of Service (QoS): The purpose of this technology is to ensure that high-priority traffic (such as online gaming) doesn’t have to wait for low-priority traffic (such as torrenting). Of course, the best routers for gaming leave it up to you to decide which traffic you consider to be of high priority so that you can always enjoy the best performance possible.
• Virtual Private Network (VPN): A VPN allows you to create a virtual tunnel between you and a remote server across a shared public network (the internet). All data going through this tunnel is encrypted to prevent prevents unauthorized people from eavesdropping on you. With a VPN, you can also easily obtain a new IP address, and it doesn’t even need to reflect your actual physical location.
• Security: It doesn’t matter if you want to use your router almost exclusively for gaming — you still need to pay attention to secure and ensure that your personal information (such as your credit card number or your logins) can’t be stolen from you. The most secure gaming routers today support WPA3, a Wi-Fi security standard intended to replace WPA2 to better secure personal, enterprise, and IoT wireless networks.
• Performance: It takes quite a bit of processing power to manage multiple high-speed connections, which is why the best wireless routers for gaming boast hardware specifications that can put many budget laptops to shame, often featuring quad-core CPUs and more then enough RAM to fit a desktop operating system.
• User interface: The best gaming routers offer a dizzying number of features, and a well-designed user interface can go a long way in helping you take full advantage of them. Some routers can even be controlled and configured using a mobile app.

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