hawkthorne:

 

Having said that, is my desire to get a new router warranted at all? I mean, I just thought that with such a fast connection, it'd make sense to make the most out of it with a high-tech router, but maybe I'm on a fast track to waste my time and money?

 

Fast wifi is best added with a seperate accesspoint. All the gaming features on these fancy routers are made for people with slow connections to prioritize the gaming traffic. Anything like that on a decently fast connection needs way more computer horsepower than a cheap router chipset offers. If you are saturating the gigabit download or half gigabit upload making gaming lag out, then start looking for solutions but as it is, all those things do is queue up packets and try to serve them out in a different order. And they cant keep up with gigabit.

If you start to want vlans and parental controls and scheduled times etc for kids, then this is often best done with a second router behind the main on, and the kids are the only things on the second router so double nat and slowness isnt an issue for them, and you can use that to block it when they should be sleeping etc.