Hi Pingplotters,

I bought a new gaming rig last week.
I still got my 5-6 year old Acer Predator with onboard WiFi.

This runs with 0 packet losses and no problems whatsoever..
Now I noticed it playing World of Tanks and as far as I have seen - this is the only game for me that lags.

It can be steady at 20-25ms which it were with the old computer and suddenly spike or it can simply just go up to 500-600ms and stay.

Pingplotter show 50-70% loss on Hop1 (my ISP provided Router) but only from my new computer. It is almost the same whether it is via ethernet or WiFi.

This packet loss does not always appear as with the reponse time. It can start good but usually once its gone bad - I either have to restart World of Tanks or the computer to get it stable again. This is only done for testing purposes as it usually comes back within 10-20 minutes and it is therefore unplayable for me.

The PCE card purchased with this computer is not very good compared to many others. It is the Asus AC-51. Not a very new card.

But is this the problem or does anyone have an idea how to help me?
I have no problem buying a better Network card - but if this is not the issue - no point wasting the money

/Thomas

Hey Thomas,

Congrats on the new rig! How fun. I'm about due for one myself, but bought a One X instead (gotta have that 4k).

So to me it sounds like there's some packet loss on hop 1 - but is that packet loss present on the hops following? Reason being - it's really common for routers to discard the packets that we send directly at them, but forward the packets that are destined down the route. This doesn't impact your final results at all as the packets are still being passed - the router just thinks it has something better to do than to respond directly to your packets.

When you're reading your PingPlotter data, you kind of want to take a backwards approach, bottom to top. Start at the final hop. Does the final hop look good? If so, you're in the clear. If not, though, you'll want to start looking at the hops prior to see which one started throwing the latency or packet loss.

We have a really good guide on how to read this data here if you're interested:
https://www.pingplotter.com/fix-your-network/getting-started/interpret-the-results.html

And, if you want to know what to benchmark against, check out this article we wrote:
https://www.pingplotter.com/wisdom/article/is-my-connection-good

Lastly, if you are still having issues and would like us to take a look at your data, we're happy to give you some guidance and let you know what our "gut feel" is.

Cheers - and have fun on the new rig!