Gamepass for a £1 (April/May 2018)

[Digfox]

Showing up for me for £1 for the next 13 days. Might be worth it if you want to try it. I've only ever used free months (1 x month with the X1X and 1 month for auto-renewals) so it might not be for existing subscribers.

[Neon Ignition]

This actually shows up for me for once. Will probably give this a go despite there currently not being anything I'm bothered about as if I pick it up towards the end of the offer it'll cover access to State of Decay 2 for a fortnight

[Digfox]

Ditto. It's kind of come about at the wrong time. I used my free 2 months already and even then just to complete the campaign of Halo 5. I've got a backlog of games I want to play like FarCry 5, Ass. Creed Origins, Horozon: ZD, FH3 etc. Not including any of the looter, grind fests either.

Apart from SoD2, that said I'm tempted Homefront Rev. of all things even though I know it's very similar to FC.

[QualityChimp]

Thanks for posting though, [MENTION=2982]Mgear[/MENTION], despite it not being of use to you.

I'm going to do this, but I'm away this weekend, so will wait until next week.
Then I'll fall between the sweet spot of a couple of weeks of Sea of Thieves and a couple of weeks of State of Decay 2.

[Digfox]

[MENTION=10111]QualityChimp[/MENTION] No worries. I did also post over at RLLMUK too given GamePass for May was also being discussed.

The bit that makes me a real hero is doing this whilst trying to set my Virgin Media Super Hub 3 to modem mode and assigning the Router job to my Netgear Nighthawk. That was difficult! Basically you have to leave the VM Super Hub 3 off for at least 30 mins for it all to work. And that isn't mentioned in many places at all.

[charlesr]

I'm considering a new nighthawk with a built in modem. It's such a faff having the separate unit

[Digfox]

Can you run VM without their equipment, I thought that their SH3 equipment has to be in at least modem mode?

I got this Nighthawk X6 R8000 back in 2015, and was running it in on my existing Zen FTTC connection. But we've switched to VM for the faster internet, and whilst the SH3 was OK for me at being an all-in-one router and modem I think the performance of the Nighthawk is much better. The SH3 is also very slooooow when even trying to access it's admin pages, and even then has no options. Although it seems much happier and a bit faster when accessing it as a modem-only. Presumably because the internal SOC is under much less stress.

I've noted there are a couple of newer, better Nighthawks on the market; R8000p and R9000, but they get quite expensive. The latter is nearly £400!

[charlesr]

Oh, you are probably right about VM and the modem.

This offer did not show up for me. I've never used it before and I have gold. Weird

[Olly C]

Can you run VM without their equipment, I thought that their SH3 equipment has to be in at least modem mode?

I got this Nighthawk X6 R8000 back in 2015, and was running it in on my existing Zen FTTC connection. But we've switched to VM for the faster internet, and whilst the SH3 was OK for me at being an all-in-one router and modem I think the performance of the Nighthawk is much better. The SH3 is also very slooooow when even trying to access it's admin pages, and even then has no options. Although it seems much happier and a bit faster when accessing it as a modem-only. Presumably because the internal SOC is under much less stress.

Unfortunately no, you can't run VM without their equipment in at least Modem Mode.

More unfortunately however is the fact the SuperHub 3 is horrendous for gaming :/

There is a huge 370+ page thread on the Virgin Media forums that has been around for over a year now detailing the issues and its never really been addressed or solved by Virgin Media and no alternative is given.

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Gaming-Support/Hub-3-Compal-CH7465-LG-TG2492LG-and-CGNV4-Latency-Cause/td-p/3271492/page/372

The short story is the Hub 3 is plagued with latency issues, these are apparent in Router or Modem mode it makes no difference, these for a lot of people obviously negatively affect gaming or streaming etc on it.

I had the problem for ages myself and managed to luckily find a solution (which I shared in that thread) unfortunately its not really an option for most people especially now because they won't supply people with Hub 2's and actively push people onto the Hub 3, that solution was to go back to the old Super Hub 2 I had in my possession and run that in Modem Mode with my NetGear Nighthawk as my router.

Sorry for the thread highjack there, just wanted to give you guys some info.

[Digfox]

Ouch.

Thank you for all the information. It seems there is never a perfect broadband connection (my experience was less than ideal with FTTC). From the sounds of it this is an issue with the Intel Puma chipset, but basically VM aren't doing much, or enough to acknowledge and help with the issue. It's interesting that in 3/4 months of using VM, I haven't noticed the problem. I suspect it's more a statement of our use case in this house (i.e. not much online gaming being done, but more liking to be downloading). I certainly haven't noticed a slower browsing experience, for example. And even though VM SH2ac's are cheap on eBay it seems activating them is a faff too.