The Best Wireless Routers

Sometimes, the wireless router you wind up with is just the one that was most affordable at the time. The better routers are going to cost you a little over a hundred bucks, but if you need it right away, you don’t always have a hundred bucks just laying around. So here, we hope to list the most well reviewed wireless routers around, as well as the most well reviewed wireless routers that don’t cost an arm and a leg.

D-Link DIR-655 Xtreme N Gigabit Router

Usually costing around a hundred and twenty bucks, this one has been widely reviewed as pretty much the very fastest wireless router out there today (as of the time of this writing, anyways). You might not even need one this powerful, to be honest. Actually, the router was designed to solve the “lag” problem with online games. Online games are known as “bandwith hogs”, putting a lot more data per second through your connection than just about anything you could do with an internet browser. When gamers aren’t sending and receiving data at pretty much the speed of light, a split second of lag can throw your timing off and get you killed by other players. So this router really is ideal for gamers, but if you’re not really into online games, you probably don’t need this much power.

TRENDnet TEW-631BRP 300Mbps Wireless N-Draft Router

A little slower than the D-Link DIR-655, but still a pretty potent little router. Costing about eighty bucks, reviewers have also praised this one for great online-games performance, although there has been some criticism for the lack of a Gigabit Ethernet port for wire-only devices. You can still connect your wired devices with the 10/100 ports, but you’ll probably get a noticeably slower connection. Still, at eighty bucks, this router is a pretty good value if you don’t need the absolute highest-performance router on the market.

Linksys WRT54GS Wireless-G Broadband Router with SpeedBooster

Very simple and easy to set up, very reliable, and compatible with most computers, the Linksys WRT54GS is generally reviewed as one of the best basic routers. It might not be the best option if you play a lot of online games, but it really does provide more than enough power for normal internet use (no matter how big of a youtube addict you are). At sixty dollars, the Linksys WRT54GS is a pretty good value, to boot. Oddly, this router is not “officially” compatible with Macs, but… there are hundreds of Mac users using this router to get online nonetheless. It’s weird that the company wouldn’t want Mac users to know that, but there you go; it works on just about any machine.