Rob Clymo: Columnist - Tech & Gadgets
The Clymo Brief: High-end gaming
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There’s nothing quite like a virtual fire-fight to help you let off steam, so an invitation I got recently to do just that proved impossible to resist. It was an evening playing in a Call of Duty 4 tournament via a state-of-the-art gaming network.

“Located in the heart of London’s West End, HMV Gamerbase is as close as you could come to heaven for a committed gamer,” gushed the invite. “With no less than 80 Quad Core PCs and Dual Core notebooks offering multiplayer LAN and online play. D-Link is inviting you to experience this first-class gaming for yourself and put your game-play skills to the test!”

Mind you, they’ve kept Gamerbase so low-key you’d hardly know it’s there. It’s tucked away right at the back of the store and cloaked largely in darkness save for the glow of computer screens. Alongside lots of armed combat, D-Link, the networking and data connectivity company behind the invite, also promised an insight into the formidable technology that keeps this place up and running.
Full speed ahead
“Underpinning the Gamerbase network are five of D-Link’s flagship xStack DGS-3427 switches,” the frothy invitation went on to explain. “These switches form the foundation for one of the most powerful and exciting gaming centres in the world.”

Aside from all that back-end networking activity, it’s a neat setup out front. You get three feet of desktop space and there’s also a sumptuous leather chair to sink into. The on-screen action takes place on a 22-inch Dell monitor, computing power comes from a bank of space-age looking Dell XPS 720 machines while gameplay controls are courtesy of Razer peripherals.

After the obligatory meet and greet with members of the D-Link team, it was eyes down for the gaming tournament – a no-holds-barred session of Call of Duty 4. We were divided into three teams amounting to a mix and match combination of press types and D-Link employees. It was easy to see who was going to win the D-Link goodies up for grabs - a couple of the teams had some real hardcore gamers on board. And then there were people like me, armed with rather less gaming finesse. Overseeing the event was former professional gamer and Quake supremo Sujoy Roy, who helped put the whole Gamerbase project together.
Reliable experience
Fuelled by lager and nibbles, we took up our positions at the PCs and got to work. Boy, does this system fly! A pack mentality seemed to descend over the Gamerbase nerve centre as the corpses started to stack up in a relentless hail of gunfire. The whole thing rapidly descended into a free-for-all towards the end with a lot of friendly fire going on. Three relentless sessions later and it was all over. Needless to say, I wasn’t on the winning team. After giving the majority of us a damn good thrashing, the winners went on to donate their £400 prize to Cancer Research UK.

Things haven’t always been quite as ticketyboo at Gamerbase though. The concept was initially plagued with technical problems when it opened in December 2007. With a small army of computers all putting a drain on the network, the previously installed hardware proved unable to cope with the demand for high bandwidth and low-latency. It often died as a result and ended up with D-Link being appointed to ensure a much more reliable gaming experience.

Andrew Mulholland, D-Link’s Marketing Manager explains the scenario perfectly when he says “If a computer goes down, we’ve got 79 more, but if a port goes down in a switch or if anything happens to the kit, the whole network goes down. Whereas the PCs are like a cog in the wheel, the network is the wheel and if that ever breaks then none of the PCs are available for customers.”
“HMV Gamerbase needed a super-fast, robust network to support its bandwidth-hungry gaming centre. D-Link conducted an extensive site survey to ensure that a switch was chosen that was fit-for-purpose. D-Link provided five high-spec DGS-3427 xStack switches which provide a Gigabit to the desktop. Using clever load-balancing algorithms, traffic was fairly balanced along the uplinks between the switches to ease network congestion. This means that if one slave switch fails, the others will not be affected. Also, with D-Link’s unique ‘Safeguard Engine’, not even an over-utilisation of bandwidth will cause the switch to freeze.”

Home options
So how does all of this translate to a home user scenario? Well, D-Link has just unveiled their DIR-855 Xtreme N Duo Media Router and this product is designed with gamers firmly in mind. That’s because the technology inside the box supports dualband 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless signals at the same time. This means that you can check email and browse the internet with the former while at the same time enjoy online gaming or stream a high-def movie using the latter.
Problems with routers, wired or wireless, usually occur when they tend to mix up data traffic so that online gaming, video streaming and web browsing are all channelled into one single data stream. Using technology called Intelligent QoS Prioritization, the DIR-855 analyses data and is then able to separate the information into more efficient multiple data streams. More importantly, these streams are then categorised based on their sensitivity to delay meaning online games, video streams and VoIP calls are much less likely to suffer lag.

All of which should guarantee you lots of uninterrupted on-screen action.

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Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft.