The 9 Best Gaming Routers of 2021

How We Tested

Our picks for the best gaming routers are tested under the most rigorous conditions. Our trusted experts use free tools like Ookla's Speedtest to determine the relative speed of a router in its current networking environment before logging into some matches of Apex Legends or Overwatch to determine the severity or frequency of any latency with a particular model.

About Our Trusted Experts

Jesse Hollington is a freelance writer with over 10 years of experience writing about technology and three decades of experience in information technology and networking. He's installed, tested, and configured just about every type and brand of router, firewall, wireless access point, and network extender in places ranging from single-family dwellings to office buildings. university campuses, and even coast-to-coast wide-area network (WAN) deployments.

Jeremy Laukkonen is an experienced tech journalist with a background in automotive repair that has taught him the importance of breaking down complex technical subjects in understandable ways. He specializes in VPNs, antivirus, and home electronics, and manages his own automotive blog on the side.

Rebecca Isaacs is passionate about how technology, no matter how big or small, can improve daily life. She works in higher education. When she’s not checking out the latest tech gadgets or writing about them, she’s snuggling up with a good book and her beloved cat, Hobbes.

Yoona Wagener has a background in content and technical writing. She has written for BigTime Software, Idealist Careers, and other small tech companies. Yoona enjoys helping people simplify processes. She has experience providing technical support and help documentation to end users, building websites for small business owners, and offering career advice to social-impact job seekers.

FAQs

How do I know if I really need a Gaming Router?
If you’ve got a powerful gaming PC or console and you still find that your games are lagging and freezing up, then you need a router that can handle your gaming traffic. Even though some of the best wireless routers may get the job done, gaming routers are a special breed of devices that are focused on helping you up your game. The best gaming routers are guaranteed to deliver the raw performance you need for serious gaming with a wealth of optimization features to make sure that your gaming traffic moves fast and gets maximum priority. 

What is “Low Ping?”
“Ping times” are a measure of network latency, which represents how fast even the smallest packets of data can travel from your computer to their destination. You can measure your ping times using online tools like Speedtest.net, and for online gaming, low ping times—less than 100ms—are far more important than raw speed, since game traffic isn’t about moving a lot of data so much as it’s moving many smaller pieces of data as quickly as possible. Just keep in mind that while the best gaming routers can significantly reduce ping times, you’ll still experience some latency from your ISP.

Should I used a wired connection for gaming? 
Many hardcore gamers don’t trust wireless connections at all for serious online gaming, and those fears aren’t without merit as there was a time when Wi-Fi added significant latency and unreliability to gaming traffic. With modern gaming routers, however, that’s no longer an issue, and most of the best gaming routers will provide amazing performance over a wireless connection, as long as you remain within a reasonable range and don’t overload it with too many devices. 

The Ultimate Gaming Router Buying Guide

If you're a serious gamer, or you have one in your household, you'll know that gamers are a special breed when it comes to making demands on your home network. It's not enough just to have a fast router, or a long-range router, or one that provides good mesh network coverage throughout your home; you also need to make sure that it can offer the kind of lag-free performance that your favourite first-person shooters demand. After all, there's nothing worse than having your network slow down just as you're about to make that critical kill shot in Call of Duty.

A solid gaming router not only delivers when it comes to low latency, but it also needs to be able to recognize gaming traffic so that it can make sure it gets priority, since you don't want to be slowed down just because somebody else in your home is downloading 4K movies. In fact, some of the better gaming routers can not only make sure your gaming traffic goes through first, but even direct it to the fastest servers automatically while also providing an intelligent firewall to protect the rest of your network and keep your gaming traffic from getting slowed down by a VPN, packing in the kind of processing power that's necessary to manage it all.

Keep in mind though that just because you're looking for a router that's focused on gaming doesn't mean that you need to cut corners in other areas, or even that you should. Since gaming routers usually offer really fast performance, this makes them great choices for many other things too, such as streaming 4K movies, offering advanced quality-of-service features to prioritize other traffic such as voice and video calls, and more.

Why Buy a Gaming Router?

A good network connection can make all the difference between success and failure in many fast-paced online games, so there's no doubt that it should be a key part of your tool belt if you're a serious gamer. While you might get by with a high-performance general purpose router, it's hard to beat the more focused performance and advanced optimization features that a proper gaming router can offer. 

Make no mistake, though, just because you happen to play games doesn't mean you need a gaming router—it's not going to help you get higher scores at Candy Crush, for instance—but at the same time just about anybody can benefit from the great performance and features that gaming routers offer, so while one of these doesn't need to be your first choice if you're not a gamer, you shouldn't rule out buying one simply because it has the word "gaming" in the description.

Quality of Service

Quality of Service, or QoS is just a fancy term for a feature that allows a router to identity different types of network traffic so that it can decide what should get priority.

For example, real-time internet activities such as gaming, video calling, and streaming are generally more time-sensitive than simply downloading large files, sending emails, or surfing the web. If an email you're sending takes a few seconds longer to go through because you've added a large attachment, you probably won't even notice, but you'll definitely feel the pain if the movie you're watching starts stuttering because your TV can't maintain a fast enough connection to the Netflix servers. The same is also true with gaming, where traffic needs to get through fast enough to ensure that when you pull the trigger, everybody else in the game immediately knows about it—especially the player on the receiving end. 

To be clear, QoS isn't all that critical if you have a really fast internet connection, since it's hard for most families to saturate a Gigabit fibre service, but most gaming routers include the feature anyway, so you'll always be able to benefit from it. Best of all, you usually don't have to do much of anything to set it up, since the whole point of a gaming router is for it to identify gaming traffic and make sure it gets priority, ensuring that you'll always be able to make those critical headshots even when other family members are watching Netflix. 

Low Latency

Among the most important features unique to gaming routers is guaranteeing lag-free connections by ensuring that it doesn't take any more time than absolutely necessary to process network traffic and move it on to its destination. This is sometimes described as offering low latency or low "ping times." 

In this context, you can think of your router as a really fast post office. Each piece of data that passes through it still has to be scanned and forwarded on to its destination, and just like in the real post office, there's going to be some delay involved while addresses and routes are checked. While these processing times are measured in fractions of a second rather than days, they're still present, and the faster a router can move your data, the better.

While some latency is unavoidable, gaming routers include faster and more efficient CPUs than you'll find in most typical routers, so they can process traffic more quickly and handle more traffic at once. This is especially important when it comes to features like QoS, as it takes even more time to figure out which traffic to prioritize. This is why not just any router can meet the demands of gamers simply because it supports QoS—it also has to be able to sort that traffic out fast to avoid creating even more lag. 

Note that latency isn't the same as bandwidth. Although they're both part of how fast your router can handle traffic, to go back to our post office analogy, bandwidth would be the size and speed of the trucks that deliver the mail, while latency is the time it takes to actually process the mail and get it onto the trucks. 

Special Gaming Features

All gaming routers offer advanced QoS features and low latency that will provide almost everything you need for solid gaming performance, but the best ones go the extra mile by offering a variety of gaming-centric features to quite literally up your game.

One example of this is support for the WTFast Gamers Private Network (GPN), a specialized service that automatically routes your gaming connections to the fastest servers available, ensuring that your traffic travels along the fastest routes even after it leaves your home network, since even the fastest and lowest latency router can't help if you're dealing with a slower connection on the other end.

Some gaming routers also offer special features such as the Republic of Gamers (ROG) GameFirst or the Killer Prioritization Engine that can automatically communicate with specially equipped gaming PCs to ensure that traffic from those devices always gets priority through the router. 

Wired vs. Wireless

Wi-Fi has gotten a bad rap among gamers, since issues with interference and network congestion often create additional latency and other performance problems. Fortunately, modern gaming routers have come a long way in addressing these issues, thanks to features like MU-MIMO, beamforming antennas, multiple frequency bands, and advanced Wi-Fi 6 802.11ax support. 

These come together to offer the kind of performance that gamers demand from their internet connections, and for the most part, if a well-known brand is promoting their Wi-Fi router as a gaming router, you can be sure that it's been designed to offer solid Wi-Fi performance as well, so for the most part, we're well past the days of needing to jack in your gaming console or PC.

That said, every gaming router provides at least four Gigabit Ethernet ports, with some offering up to eight, and a few of the newest high-end gaming routers even offer special 2.5Gbps gaming ports for the ultimate in wired performance. So in the event your Wi-Fi isn't cutting it, or you just don't want to take any chances, you always have the option of a hardwired connection. 

Range and Coverage

How much range and coverage you'll need in a gaming router is going to largely depend on where your gaming PC or console is in relation to the router. While many gaming routers provide solid coverage, there's no need to make that a priority if your router is going to be in the same room as your gaming rig, although of course you'll still want to consider the other devices in your home too. 

Keep in mind as well that even though a router offers good range and coverage, speeds decrease as you move farther away. For example, many higher-end routers can easily cover a 5,000 square foot home, but you may only get the kind of gaming performance you need when you're closer to it. If your router needs to be some distance away from your gaming PC or console you may need to look to a Wi-Fi extender, Powerline adapter, or mesh solution to bridge the gap. Some brands like Asus also offer their own AiMesh technology, so you can extend your network by purchasing a second Asus router, which can also offer the benefit of keeping the non-gamers off your important Wi-Fi. 

Dual-Band or Tri-Band? 

Unless you plan to hardwire in your gaming console or PC, you'll want a router that offers at least dual-band 802.11ac support as a bare minimum. This allows older and slower devices to connect on the lower-frequency 2.4GHz band, while your gaming and streaming devices can use the higher-frequency 5GHz band, which offers faster speeds and is less prone to interference from other household devices like microwave ovens, cordless phones, and Bluetooth speakers.

If you have multiple family members who want to game or stream movies at the same time, you'll benefit from a tri-band router, which offers a second 5GHz band to help separate traffic to avoid congestion. Many gaming routers also support a feature called "band steering," which can automatically direct your gaming devices into their own high-speed 5GHz lane for maximum performance, since even the best QoS features won't help if your gaming traffic can't make it to the router in the first place. 

Keep in mind, however, that any given device can only connect to a single band at a time, so you'll only benefit from the additional 5GHz band if you have several active 802.11ac devices; you probably don't need a tri-band router if you live by yourself or have other family members that are extremely light internet users.

Top Brands

Asus

Asus has become one of the leading names in gaming routers, thanks to its focus on building powerful routers and delivering advanced gaming features across almost its entire product lineup. The flagship GT-AX11000 is the latest entry in its GT family of higher-end gaming routers, but even most of its general purpose RT series models still offer many of the same gaming features. While you'll pay a slight premium for Asus' gaming routers, the investment is well worth it if you're a serious gamer, with features like the WTFast Gamers Private Network support, GameBoost QoS to optimize gaming traffic, and even VPN Fusion to keep your VPN up and running without worrying about slowing down your gaming. Plus, if you're using Asus notebooks or PCs, its Republic of Gamers (ROG) ecosystem will make everything work together seamlessly for maximum performance. 

Netgear 

Netgear defined the modern era of gaming routers with the release of the Nighthawk XR500 a few years ago, built with an entirely new firmware, DumaOS, that was designed solely with gaming in mind. Since then, it's expanded its XR series in both directions, with models to meet the needs of just about every hardcore gamer. These routers build on Netgear's larger Nighthawk lineup of routers, which are some of the best in the industry, so they can be trusted to provide outstanding performance for a wide variety of applications.

Conclusion

By necessity, gaming routers offer some of the best networking performance you can get, so it's probably not surprising that they don't come cheap. If you're a serious gamer, the investment in a good gaming router will be well worth it, but keep in mind that a router can't help out much if your internet connection isn't up to snuff, so you may need to consider replacing your cable modem too, especially if you find that you're not getting good ping times. QoS can help if you're sharing a slow connection, but it can't do much about latency.

Also be sure that when buying a gaming router you don't forget about the other devices in your house. Even if your gaming rig is going to be in the same room, you'll want to ensure your router offers good coverage and performance for all of your other devices to get the bandwidth they need.