I do wish people would stop recommending a pi for a router. Its wifi is weak due to internal aerials and its limited to 8 clients on its wifi.
A router should have DUAL LAN ports to give you dedicated WAN and LAN.
Use the R4S instead with a switch and dedicated AP. You will have far less issues.
(edit) - @daydaystech Also that is a horrible async. as moeller says you will use most of your upstream managing that downstream. You definitely require QOS setting up internally to manage your upstream with 8 people sucking on that pipe. All it will take is one person running a torrent to murder the rest of your gaming.
having gone and had a read up on this. I have a few questions. Firstly it is way more powerful than the R4S or a pi. Why replace the default firmware that Asus provides? They have gaming QOS built in and preconfigured. Seems bit odd to replace that unless you are wishing to manage your own QOS settings?
I hope you are using a 2.5gb switch to backbone the router yes? or relying on wifi for other clients? or using the 1gb ports on back?
What you could do to take some of the load of your GT-AX6000 is to turn off the wifi on it and serve wireless via other APs. That would enable the cpu to only be used for routing instead of also being used for wifi if you are concerned with the cpu load. However the load should be shared across all its cpus. Have you checked that the merlin firmware uses irqbalance or other cpu sharing methods?
Nobody is recommending the pi4b as WiFi router, but as wired-only router, with the onboard WiFi at best as management access channel, hence the comment of needing an additional AP, switch and USB dongle. I did not spell out the rationale for that admittedly, but I did describe a reasonable and complete pi-as-a-router configuration.
I wish people would actually read the posts first they are going to diss
Pis, for all their problems have a lot going for them, before the shipping and chip issues they were much easier to source than more specialized devices and have larger production runs (which makes it likely these will still be available in a few years).
That said, a nanopi R4S would probably also do well as a router, judging from forum posts (again no first-hand experience).
it wasn't meant as a diss. Just that people need to understand the limitations of them and that real routers should have dedicated ports. Always seems to be a bit of a hack job with usb adaptors and some are a real pain to get to grips with as i noted on the pi forums.
Real nic over usb any day especially if you are relying on it to route. Temp access via a dongle sure. as long as its a decent chipset and not flaky fell of the back of a lorry in china rubbish.
ARM devices should have a good support for ages.
And the R4S is a little demon. Mine is loaded up with the unify controller (docker is using 2gb) and AGH with 600k ish filters and it just purrs along.
i want to manage my own qos give my gaming pc the best it can get for bufferbloat i will check on the cpu sharing software with merlin to see. i am using the 2.5 gig get 1400 down with out qos and the other 2.5g to my gaming pc have a 2.5g card installed
Check out the NanoPi R5S. It has 2x 2.5G ports and a 1G WAN port. SQM should be able to reach gigabit, although not positive. You can download a custom version of OpenWrt 22.03 branch on their website:
If you want something higher end that'll be fast for lifetime, x64 is the best choice. Although power consumption will be more like 15W. Maybe this with 6x 2.5GbE, but not sure, has an older Celeron:
For either of those (ARM or x64) just attach a 2.5G switch, and some U6-Lite-US wifi 6 access points.
Oh nice, those CPUs are on Intel's new 10nm process and is faster/more efficient. 2.5GbE ports too. Don't know anything about that brand but it could be an amazing little device if it's reliable
For those Intel 2.5GbE adapters, just install the kmod-igc driver. Don't have one myself, but OpenWrt should work great. pfSense is another good option it's FreeBSD based, where OpenWrt is Linux based.
look for stores with lots of sales and few complaints. The shipping can take ages and also you dont get alot of info. i had nothing for AGES till it was "on a truck" coming to me.
seems like asus merlin doesnt have cpu sharing methods this is really pushing me on getting that box from Aliexpress and go with openwrt setup N6005 may just get the ram and ssd preinstalled from them
bit disappointing they cut the ram to 2gb instead of 4gb like the r4s. if you were going to host an ARR stack or jellyfin/plex on it. the extra ram would be useful.
IMHO the switch from 2*A72(+4*A53) to 4*A55 is the bigger drawback... for a router 2 GB of RAM is plenty, but I would never consider hosting "host an ARR stack or jellyfin/plex on" a router
i could and did briefly on my r4s but i moved it back to the pi4 to enable me to keep it "portable" for taking round friends for evening if required. the r4s just hosts my ubiquiti controller on docker now.
