AC5300, AX88U or AX11000 which is best

[Helder Santos]

I believe HW Acceleration on your router is Disabled. This may be the reason for high CPU loads.

How do you enable that option?

 

[Val D.]

How do you enable that option?

Look at LAN -> Switch Control for the current state, it's called CTF (Cut-Through Forwarding). If you use specific firmware options like traditional QoS or bandwidth limiter, hw acceleration gets disabled automatically (incompatible). As a result all WAN-LAN traffic is processed by the CPU and the maximum throughput is limited.

Everyone is 12 Wifi connections (Cell+Tablets) and 18 Wired (including 7 NAS...

7 NAS? What's the average daily internal/external traffic on this network? You can't expect from a consumer router to run a data center. And make sure there is no traffic waste in form of streaming 4K content on a phone/tablet screen, for example. It may be time to update the network with some more proper networking gear.

 

[Helder Santos]

Look at LAN -> Switch Control for the current state, it's called CTF (Cut-Through Forwarding). If you use specific firmware options like traditional QoS or bandwidth limiter, hw acceleration gets disabled automatically (incompatible). As a result all WAN-LAN traffic is processed by the CPU and the maximum throughput is limited.

I found it: CTF (Cut Through Forwarding) is enabled.

7 NAS? What's the average daily internal/external traffic on this network? You can't expect from a consumer router to run a data center. And make sure there is no traffic waste in form of streaming 4K content on a phone/tablet screen, for example. It may be time to update the network with some more proper networking gear.

No 4K streaming. All video is transcoded before streaming to max 1080 directly on my dedicated server.