Question Netgear R8500 or R7800 which should I keep?

[cc666]

Have both these and will be returning one. I mostly do 4K streaming to multiple TV's, no gaming. Need best
coverage and throughput. Mimo not important. Connection is 100 mbps down and 10 mbps up.

What do you experts think?

CC

 

[thiggins]

Doesn't your experience with both tell you what to do?

 

[cc666]

Tim,

No not really. What I am finding is the R8500 controls bufferbloat better, performance wise they are close, the R7800 seems to have a slightly better 5.0 signal. The R8500 runs perfectly on DDWRT and the QOS is much better than the Netgear/Voxel releases. The R7800 on DDWRT is not matured yet.

If it were you which would you keep?

CC

 

[thiggins]

It doesn't matter what I would do. You need to decide what matters most to you. That's my basic point

 

[avtella]

Also depends if you have VPN and 500+ Mbps Internet speeds. The R7800 CPU is ~60% more powerful, important for VPN and it uses a newer gen CPU which also runs cooler. Also it can hit 700+ throughout Mbps even if hardware NAT were not available such as in open source firmware. The R8500 with pseudo hardware nat disabled (ie due to traffic monitoring, QoS) takes a huge hit in throughput.

Other minor points of note R8500 won’t have proper wireless support in OpenWRT thanks to Broadcom and MU-MIMO implementation sucks on it, which can lead to a big decreased in performance (for MU clients) due to the Broadcom chipset. So disable MU-MIMO in the R8500. The R7800 as you mentioned has better GHz performance and importantly doesn’t run as hot (could be important depending on your environment).

Overall since you don’t use VPN or have ISP speeds over 400-500 Mbps, either should be fine. I only prefer the R7800 because it has much better 5Ghz performance in my usage environment, I don use VPN or have high ISP speeds to make use of the R7800’s full potential though.

Another thing is if you don’t mind installing OpenWRT you could get much better bufferbloat mitigation with SQM Piece of Cake QoS. Hnyman’s builds at the LEDE Project forums are pretty good.
The R7800’s stock os is actually based on an older version of OpenWRT with Netgear’s UI on it of course.

 

[avtella]

The R8500 would be much slower than the R7800 which should hit ~80-100 Mbps on aes-128 as mentioned by some including Kong on the DD-WRT forums. Haven’t used stock much to comment as I mostlly am using a newer gen Netgear test firmware or OpenWRT. The 86U would definitely be faster as Broadcom finally implemented crypto acceleration and might actually be a better pick, the only thing the R7800 has over that is the WiFi performance and not by much.

 

[cc666]

The R8500 would be much slower than the R7800 which should hit ~80-100 Mbps on aes-128 as mentioned by some including Kong on the DD-WRT forums. Haven’t used stock much to comment as I mostlly am using a newer gen Netgear test firmware or OpenWRT. The 86U would definitely be faster as Broadcom finally implemented crypto acceleration and might actually be a better pick, the only thing the R7800 has over that is the WiFi performance and not by much.

Would the 86U have good bufferbloat scores? I am convinced, based on performance, that the bufferbloat has an effect of 4K streaming and gaming.

Also what do you think of the Asus - AC3100 Dual-Band Wi-Fi Router?

CC

 

[avtella]

It’s should be fine (86U).


The AC3100/88U is pretty much the same as the R8500 minus the extra 5Ghz band hardware wise so probably not that great for VPN.