What's your favorite enthusiast LEDE/OpenWrt device?

Wow, that is a lot of unnecessary RF radiation for no reason at all. Too much power output could negatively affect the wifi quality. This would be a single most important reason font to buy this unit! I just quickly tested an R7800 and it does not seem to have this issue.

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if you change the country, the power if reduced on 5Ghz from 27 to 20 if I remember

But this device is country/powertable hardcoded

from my experience, messing with region will lower the tx power

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Yes, I changed from the default US to FR and the transmission power went down by 5x. Thanks for the tip.

What do folks think of the Asus ACRH13?

Quad-core Qualcomm ARM v7 processor, 2x2 MuMIMO for 61 bucks on Amazon new.

Tempting, but a little short on RAM (ath10k eats RAM for breakfast), I'd be more comfortable with 256+ MB.

I've had a TP-Link C2600 and now have a R7800. Technically, there are not many differences: QCA9984 versus QCA9980, maximum bandwith 160MHz versus 80MHz, 1.7 GHz dual-core CPU versus 1,4 GHz dual-core CPU. Both support Mu-MiMo For normal home usage, the R7800 has not much additional performance. As the price of a C2600 is much lower it has a better value-for-money.

At this point any enthusiast router should have OpenWrt 2018 kernel 4.14+ support for CTF / FastPath / etc. This is required for 940Mbit/s up/down as more and more internet speeds are approaching that bandwidth. Also should support 75-100 MB/s read/write on USB Storage since some do that as well from OEM firmware (WRT3200ACM, R7800, R8000P, etc.) which effectively function as NAS replacement from a performance standpoint now.

Many routers support those features via OEM firmware, because of hardware NAT, good drivers, etc. and we're nearly there with open source. These features are essential for "enthusiast" in my opinion.

WRT3200ACM is nearly there on OpenWrt 2018 builds, and the R7800 is nearly there with DD-WRT 2018 builds. R7800 OpenWrt is currently behind because FastPath isn't patched in and requires manual patches. Kong (DD-WRT dev) has said the R7800 has latency issues on 4.x kernels and thus builds with 3.18 to provide this support. I've heard it works very well.

Is this still the case with WRT1900ACS or has some updates to LEDE improved the wireless performance? There are posts which report good wireless speed results.

depends on environment and what is a good speed for you ?
I can have ~300mb/s only near it, my experience with 5ghz is not so good, tried unify-ap-ac-lr and for me is the same, ~3m away in a flat and the speed halves.
I can only tell that 3200acm trunk is very stable !

True. I'm looking which device to choose. The other option at the moment is ZyXEL NBG6817. I don't need it be incredible fast. Streaming to Apple TV behind two walls 5 meters away from the AP should work. So far I've been happy with 100 mbits and I'm satisfied if I get that also 10 m away from AP in other rooms.

I was able to get 200 mbits with some Sagecom cable modem 10 m away from the device in another room. The limiting factor was then my 200 mbits Internet connection. If the new AP can do that I'm mostly happy.

Hi All. Just want to ask, is it WRT3200ACM really good choice ? I do have like 25 wireless devices (phones, tablets, laptops monitoring etc) and few on LAN. Just need reliable, fast device to serve 500Mbit downlink + 3 OpenVPN tunnels.

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For 500mbit just go with x86, don't waste money time and effort on less powerful solutions that you eventually need to give up on anyway. To get wifi use Enterprise style APs.

Any examples please ? I was thinking abot this solution also. Ubiquiti or something similar ?
PC-Engines APU2 maybe ?

Tp Link has the eap series and they can be configured stand alone or controller. Ubiquiti requires the controller. I really like zyxel managed switches, don't know about their APs but that's another one to look at. Also engenius.

I'm still using some left over routers running lede in access point mode, so I haven't tried the various APs myself. I can say that an x86 router is all I would consider at 500mbps and is what I use on my ATT gig fiber link.

Take a look at shuttle Celeron based mini PC's with dual Intel nics, or Protectli, a reseller of Chinese multi lan fanless boxes. Also XCY

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Not easy choice...I found some 4xLAN with J1900. At least they are available in Germany. Will it be sufficient ?
And TP-Link seems interesting indeed.
I also have ESXi ....

The 4x lan j1900 is sufficient for 500mbps-1gbps with shaping, but has no Aes-ni if you want fast VPN encryption. It's a decent choice if a little older tech. My own box is j1900 and works fine with shaping for a gig, a little tight doing additional stuff. Good power consumption.

Yes WRT3200ACM is a great choice, that includes the WRT32X now if you get a good deal since initial support was just added for it:
https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/commit/bfbdeeb3de3da31f7e5f9bd429e079c2d839644a

For the WRT series make sure you run davidc502's latest build, at least until an official OpenWrt 2018 is released.

Xiaomi wifi router 3g