Four essential components of a gaming router
Four essential components of a gaming router
Marketing excitement, since they understand that sharing impressive numbers and leveraging the popular keyword gaming attracts customers like insects to a light show.
Not much to benefit. Companies keep putting the word "Gaming" in things to make people buy them. Unless it offers plugin support (like plex and move transcoding) there is NO reason to buy one of these unless you have a very specific scenario you're working with. If you just want good performance without killing the wallet, look into ubiquiti equipment.
I visited the Ubiquiti website and read about their gateway cores. Core count is important for performance. For streaming multiple HD feeds and using HD IP cameras, a higher core setup would likely provide better reliability and speed. A 4-core router offers more capacity than a 2-core one, so you'd benefit significantly.
For simple routing, NAT, and stateful firewalls require minimal setup even with high-speed internet. The key factor becomes the router's core count (or overall processing strength of both cores plus clock speed) when activating advanced tools such as Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) – which reveals communication patterns between devices and servers – and IDS/IPS (Intrusion Detection/Prevention System), which inspects packets for potential threats. For instance, a basic Unifi Security Gateway can handle gigabit speeds without DPI or IDS, but nearly reaches gigabit with DPI alone, dropping to about 85Mb/s when IPS or IDS are active. Another area where processing power matters is supporting additional services, like USB ports for external drives, file or media sharing, though it's generally not advisable to depend on your router for such tasks.