Will using a paid VPN at once on my router and my computer help me?
Will using a paid VPN at once on my router and my computer help me?
Hey guys, you can probably understand this question by just reading the title. I am trying to figure out how to do something specific. I like to play CS: GO on Steam. To get the best experience for EU players with low latency, I want my game traffic going through a Rome server. However, I also want all my other internet stuff (like browsing and watching videos) to go through a Seattle server in the USA. The problem is that even if I use split tunneling, it won't work this way because it can't handle both routes at once on one device. I found a guide from a VPN provider on how to set up a VPN on my router so that all traffic goes to the Italy server instead of my local ISP. I also want to do the same thing for my PC by connecting to the USA server and turning on split tunneling to make sure only game traffic uses the Italy connection. Will this work? Any advice would be super helpful! 🙂
It takes a lot of effort to set up, but once done, everything works exactly how you want it to. The hard part is that some router-based VPN clients don't support the split tunnel feature, which means they won't let you use your internet for local stuff while gaming on another app. To work around this, you usually need a PC-based client that handles this trick in reverse (using its own internet connection instead of yours) so both apps can run together without fighting. If you just stop the game and do other things, it's easier to turn the VPN off completely; that way, less garbage data gets corrupted by conflicting connections. I really hate these PC VPN clients because they don't always install or uninstall cleanly, so I only set them up once and then reinstall Windows whenever needed to test different services. Now, I only use my router for the VPN. It might actually be better if you do the reverse setup just for one computer and have all other traffic go straight through your ISP, though that is possible. The real problem with running a VPN on your PC is that it eats up a lot of CPU power. Your router can get pretty slow when running OpenVPN because its processor gets capped around 30 Mbps. But if you use WireGuard instead, the speed goes up a bit more.