I have a 24 port 10/100 switch and soon to be upgrading to a ~24port 100/1000 switch but first i need a router, during the last lanparty the router we were using over heated 3 times (Netgear WGR614 Router). and so i need a upgrade. I am looking for a Gigabit router, ~4 ports is the sweet spot, but can handle less or more. wifi is nice but not needed. We tend to have ~16 people at the parties on lan and we have only ever had 1 on wifi.
Yeah putting a fan on really helps, so much so that I really don't know why they don't just come with fans already. I have a router that I just use as a wireless access point for my public network and it used to freeze all the time, I put it on top of the exhaust fan on one of the computers and now i never have to restart it.
Of course this won't help if you're maxing out the number of connections the router can handle. If you can't use pfsense or something like that then look for a router with a lot of RAM or one that specificaly says that it can handle a lot of concurrent connections. I think you can also disable SPI (stateful packet inspection) on the firewall, I'm pretty sure it's the state table being too big which causes a router to crash when it has too many connections, so running the firewall in stateless mode should stop that from happening. Just be careful not to actually disable the firewall if you try that.
Now hear me out on this. The router is only 10/100, however... Im pretty sure you don't have a 100Mbps internet connection. If not this router will work just fine for you. It is designed for load balancing and has a great cpu. If you had more than one internet connection (cable & dsl) you can bond the two together and combine the bandwidth.
All that put aside, if you are getting a gigabit switch, that's only going to help with your pc to pc connection and not improve your internet connection much at all. If all the pcs in the lan party hook into the gigabit switch and then you uplink the gigabit switch to your router, even to a gigabit router, that gigabit lan port on the router will be feeding to a 10/100 wan port on the router.
Chances are if you have 16 people using your internet connection it's maxing out the bandwidth and cpu on your router due to all the network address translation going on with 16 people gaming online at once. The TP Link I mentioned above should be able to handle that just fine.
Real world example is. I have a 50 Mbps cable connection, and a 30 Mbps dsl connection. I have these load balanced and am able to stream Netflix to 4 different TVs in my house, download Skyrim from steam, and play Star Conflict at the same time. Thats all on a 100Mbps router.
