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Forum Discussion
Netgear XR500 Nighthawk - 5th router - please help
I've been trying to troubleshoot for months. I have a pc that is connected to the router via a Cat8 cable. This XR500 Nighthawk is the fifth router I've bought to try to help with the lag and high ping in Fortnite. With this latest router, I spent an hour-and-a-half on the phone with technical support. They took control of the settings and tried many things. None of them solved the high ping. In my research for my next steps, I read one lone person said they had luck with a Cat8 cable... so I ordered two. One to go from the modem (a non-Puma Intel 6) to the router, and one to go from the router to my pc. Volia! After months of frustration, I seemed to have finallly found the needle in the haystack.
So it's actually my son who plays. He has had ping ranging from 15-30... 90% of the time. Yay. Much better than the 50-70 ping before switching cables, but still not quite right. Last week I noticed the ethernet light on the port his pc is plugged into was orange. I discovered his network adapter's Speed & Duplex value was set to 100Mpbs Full Duplex. We should be getting 400Mbps so I switched it to Auto Negotiation and BAM. His ping is now back up to 50-70. I switched it back, but the damage is done. I can't figure out how it got changed in the first place, and why changing that made his ping shoot back up. I thought I was fixing the other 10% of the time, but instead it's like I'm back to square one.
Can someone please help? I absolutely love PCs and troubleshooting, but I just don't know what my next step should be.
16 Replies
- Could you explain your physical setup e.g. ISP hub (wifi with some devices connected) > XR500 > just sons PC? Also are you making use of the QoS/Geo-Filter on the router at all or are you just plugging and playing in that regard? What is your rough location and is the region in game settings reflective of your location also?
Sure. Modem to XR500 via Cat8. Cat8 to son's PC, and Cat6 to mine. I counted 23 WiFi devices - not all online, and no different, nor more than before I changed the speed on his network adapter.
Midwest location. Geo-Filter radius set to 300 miles to try and only join Ohio servers vs Virgina. Yes, he picks closet game server location as well.
QOS - Anti-Bufferbloat set to "When High Priority Traffic Detected. (Netgear customer service turned it to off). I had up and down set to 90%. I just read to set both at 70% but it hasn't made a difference since I changed his network adapter speed, I've also given him more bandwidth allocation for downloads, but prior to the change I made, everything was evenly set to 5s.
- Have you got Traffic Prioritization enabled? I would suggest you disable DumaOS Classified Games and add the PC with the console service. If there is an issue caused by devices that should resolve it.
