What router to buy? (Ok with 3rd party firmware,400mb down/45mb up speeds, gaming and a large house)

[John DeLuca]

Hello techies how are you? I was wondering what new router to buy. I have a large house to cover with wifi, internet speeds of 400mb down/45mb up and am a gamer. Right now I have the new GT-AC5300 hardware wise it looks amazing but my parents are getting pissed off at the router dropping out. The other thing I see is high bufferbloat with the asus router that I did not see with the netgear x6. I'm fine with and almost prefer using 3rd party firmware possibly I may try LEDE firmware. Idk if I should wait for the GT firmware to get fixed or just return it. Price not too much of an issue.

The X10 looks pretty good but I really don't have a need for AD band. For gameing I'm connected directly to the router.
Thanks

 

[psychopomp1]

If you can afford it, go for the Netgear R9000 X10. Forget about its 802.11ad capability (not many 60ghz clients around & its short range anyway), its got a very meaty quadcore 1.7 ghz processor, 1GB ram and with the excellent Qualcomm Atheros (QCA) 2.4 & 5ghz radios it gives superb wifi coverage -better than Broadcom radio based routers in my experience. Mu-Mimo also works well, unlike on broadcom routers which is still very buggy. It supports the latest DD-WRT builds and is a superb router all round.

I'm using the Netgear X10 in the UK and get line speeds through wifi almost anywhere in the home on most of our devices. Have sold my Asus RT-AC5300 which I found buggy as hell.

A cheaper alternative to the X10 is the Netgear R7800 which i believe uses the same (?) QCA radios but has less power under the hood (slower processor & less RAM) so may not be as good as the X10 when doing CPU intensive tasks such as running Openvpn in DD-WRT.

 

[pege63]

EdgeRouter-X with a Ubiquiti Unifi AP AC PRO, will do the trick and be worth it.

 

[John DeLuca]

Odd the x8 actually has faster 2.5 and 5ghz then the x10

 

[avtella]

If going for OpenVPN and CPU intensive tasks, then I suppose the X10 would suit your needs as it has four ARM Cortex A15 cores but do you really want to dish out ~$500, not worth IMHO. The R7800 is much cheaper ~$160-180 but has two Krait Cores (Similar to A15 in performance). The R8500's Cortex A9 based Broadcom CPU is significantly slower clock for clock vs the A15 and the Krait.

Wifi performance wise the R7800 beats the R9000 and R8500 on 5Ghz, in my own testing.

On top of that the ath10k driver in LEDE Project has improved the 5Ghz performance further vs stock on the 5Ghz band for the R7800.

As for bufferbloat I get an "A" using SQM "Piece of Cake" in LEDE, I get a B or C in stock with Streamboost enabled and I never had much luck with bufferbloat mitigation in DD-WRT.

 

[System Error Message]

guys he did not talk about vpn, only about wifi and bufferbloat.
Regarding asus, give rmerlin firmware a go, try enabling and disabling hardware acceleration. You can use priority QoS for your games to reduce bufferbloat (i suspect that asus auto QoS is causing your bufferbloat issues).

So rather than perform an online test the best way to measure using asus auto QoS which is for gaming is to game while torrenting. Saturate your bandwidth with torrents and game. If your game ping increases than you should try using manual QoS. Asus auto QoS is optimised for gaming whereas online tests use web which doesnt have a high priority so game packets should be going through without bufferbloat.

 

[avtella]

Yeah your right, he had another thread as well, where he mentioned OpenVPN, looks like I got confused lol.

 

[John DeLuca]

Yeah i just picked up the X10 and about to put on dd-wrt kong build. The default firmware seems good but bufferbloat is an issue because the x10 doesn't have very good QOS. I almost got the 8x but I don't have that many devices so I rather have the power

I'm going to run some VPN testing too.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[psychopomp1]

Yeah i just picked up the X10 and about to put on dd-wrt kong build. The default firmware seems good but bufferbloat is an issue because the x10 doesn't have very good QOS. I almost got the 8x but I don't have that many devices so I rather have the power

I'm going to run some VPN testing too.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

You can't wrong with Kong's DD-WRT build

 

[psychopomp1]

Yeah i just picked up the X10 and about to put on dd-wrt kong build. The default firmware seems good but bufferbloat is an issue because the x10 doesn't have very good QOS. I almost got the 8x but I don't have that many devices so I rather have the power

I'm going to run some VPN testing too.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

So how did you find the Nighthawk X10?

 

[avtella]

That router won't push the 400 Mbps connection that OP has. I doubt it could hit more than 100 Mbps in real world use.