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After a whole night of playing around with the router I’ve tested every firmware from stock onwards including merlins. Some are better than others and stable with nice features but none of them matched R7000’s performance. So I’ve swapped it for a R7000 again although the user interface and features aren’t as exciting as Asus, the R7000 does what it’s supposed to do very good. Also got an EX7000 range extender and running it in access point mode through a power line adapter for the time being. Range is as good as R7000 if not better and throughput was also as good when I tested it directly wired to router, I’ll be sticking to this router and range extender.
 
Your posts are not clear, have you tried the XVortex RMerlin fork on your R7000?
 
I'll give that firmware a go next weekend. Are the switches on access point any good or would I be better off using a 5 port switch behind it for all the switching?
 
A separate dedicated switch offers no performance benefit over the built in GBe ports of current routers.

In fact, if only a single switch is used, then all clients connected to it will need to go through a single port on the router for their internet needs and depending on the ISP's level of service, may be a detriment in itself.

Will be interesting to see what you find with your testing next weekend.
 
That is very unlikely to be a performance detriment unless you have >1Gbps WAN speeds.

What can be a performance benefit is if you have high LAN traffic. Most consumer routers (all with OEM firmware) do not support LACP/LAG. Most/all semi managed and managed L2 and L3 switches do support LACP/LAG. So you can get a lot more intra LAN performance by using a separate switch.

Also you have more ports available.

Also other stuff you can do on a good semi managed or manage switch, like VLAN, port limiting, etc.

Looking at it of "router ports" or a "dumb switch", if you have enough ports, put it through the router, not a dumb switch.
 
I was running the Xvortex Merlin firmware for the past 4 days to test it but unfortunately had to switch back to original Netgear firmware due to poor throughput with AsusWRT on R7000. I’ve played around with every possible setting there is that could possibly increase throughput but had no luck. R7000 with latest original firmware held 19+ wireless connection without a hiccup tonight along with other wired devices connected to switches via powerline simultaneously.

Next part of the job is to replace powerline adapters connected to two switches on ground floor with Ethernet, these are the only other 2 locations I’ll be needing wired connections. I’ll be running the cables directly from router until I need more ports for IP cams and get a switch. Neither of two switch locations will be exceeding 70/90 Mb anytime soon so I’ll just run single cable to each location 15m and 20m partly external. Would I be better off using pre made cables such as http://www.cablemonkey.co.uk/cat6-rj45-patch-leads/1355-external-cat6-utp-ldpe-rj45-patch-leads.html ?
 
2 x 30m Cat6a running them internally now
 

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