The best firmware for me is?

[DaveMishSr]

Hi all! I am relatively new to the world of optware. I have recently purchased two RT-N66U routers (thought I had bricked one but I managed to save it) and am trying to determine which firmware I should be using. By that I am asking what I should chose between Tomato, DD-WRT, Merlin's totally awesome Asus optware builds, Asus beta builds or stock Asus firmware? Here are the particulars for my situation.

I have three DirecTV HD DVR's (one is hard-wired to the router) and streaming media to those receivers is my primary consideration. In addition to that I have three desktops (one is hard-wired to the router), three laptops, one Samsung tablet, up to 6 smartphones, two Samsung BluRay players (one is hard-wired to the router) with Smart TV and one X-Box Live game console that my stepson is on constantly (but he blocked from connecting to the live service from midnight until 8am every day). My ISP is Cox and I have their ultimate service of 50 MB/sec download and 5 MB/sec upload. The maximum number of clients I have had is 28. My old D-Link DIR-825 router was buckling under the load and upgrading was a necessity.

Now I have been experimenting with running differing firmwares as I swap out a router every other day or so to try and gauge their performance with the different firmwares. The stock firmware has been adequate but Merlin's new build has been superior for obvious reasons. His RM 12 version is very good but I like the monitoring features of Tomato. I have tried Shibby's new 097 version of Tomato with the support for 64k NVRAM but it is slower and has less range than RM 12. I have downlaoded and flashed Toastman's most recent Tomato version and that is next in line for live testing.

I tried DD-WRT but I couldn't get the WAN to connect to the Internet and I gave up. However, I would like to try and give it a shot if I can figure out what is keeping me from establishing Internet service over the WAN. So which firmware do you think I should be running? Once I hit upon the "winner" I am going to sell one of the routers on Ebay. I am especially interested in hearing from Merlin.

Thanks in advance.

 

[KevTech]

I feel the 155 is the best right now.

http://www.asus.ru/ftp/NW_TO_TEST/RT-N66U_3.0.0.3_155.trx

 

[TonyH]

IMO, best f/w for you is one does every thing well for your needs with good stability. You are the only one who can pick and choose.
There may be best one but no perfect one in this world.

 

[RMerlin]

As someone else said, it's hard for anyone to tell which one is best for you, as they all have different strengths and weaknesses, so it would be up to your specific preferences. What I could say is I'd skip on DD-WRT until they fix the nvram issue. 32 KB would prevent you from using what DD-WRT does best: having a LOT of features available for you to play with.

Optware support should be pretty much the same for all other firmwares (Asuswrt, Asuswrt-merlin and Tomato).

What Tomato monitoring feature are you missing in Asuswrt-merlin? It should be pretty similar to Tomato since I added the missing Monthly traffic report Asus had dropped, unless you are thinking about something different. If you want more advanced monitoring, it's possible to install SNMP through optware - someone else did it with Asuswrt.