Best 2021 OpenWrt WiFi

[O_o]

I recommend that you buy the Belkin RT3200 or the Linksys E8450, these routers are better than the Netgear R7800.

Both routers are identical from the same company, only change the color and price. (Belkin RT3200 is $50 dollars cheaper)

Search:

• Search results for 'RT3200'
• Search results for 'E8450'

@slh

They are hard to compare, especially with the rather limited feedback received for mt7622b in 1 GBit/s WAN situations (with/ without SQM) so far.

• mt7622b (Belkin RT3200 and Linksys E8450)

  • is ARMv8 (64 bit)
  • cortex A53 (in-order superscalar execution pipeline)
  • running at 2*1.35 GHz
  • 2.4 GHz: 4x4:4 802.11n
  • 5 GHz: 4x4:4 802.11ax (external, often mt7915e)

• ipq8065 (Netgear R7800)

  • is ARMv7 (32 bit)
  • KRAIT300 ~= cortex A15 (out-of-order superscalar execution pipeline) running at 2*1.7 GHz
    • NSS/ NPU cores: 2*800 MHz
  • 2.4 GHz: 4x4:4 802.11n (external, often QCA9984)
  • 5 GHz: 4x4:4 802.11ac/ wave2 (external, often QCA9984)

mt7622b seems to share very well optimized ethernet drivers with its (ra)mips based predecessors (e.g mt7621a), but is limited to 1 GBit/s ports due to its included switch hardware. In stock OEM firmware.

The Belkin RT3200 and the Linksys E8450 should beat ipq806x in practice.

But ipq806x is battle-tested by now, while mt7622b+mt7915e is still very new (and still being improved, with some fluctuations). What is clear, is ipq806x maxing out somewhere between 400-650 MBit/s WAN speed (without sqm, with sqm just under 200 MBit/s), mt7622b seems to beat that - I have not heard enough feedback about the wireless performance/ stability (but no complaints either, everyone seems to have been rather pleased so far).

@andyrichardson

My Belkin RT3200.

At 300Mbit on WAN with CAKE, I'm seeing ~35% usage on core 1 and <5% on core 2. I'm guessing this is because this doesn't scale linearly?

@netprince

Linksys E8450 (aka. Belkin RT3200)

Just a quick test with sqm-scripts (WAN<->LAN), the CPU maxes out around 600Mbit. (one core maxed out, the other around 10%) Its impressive for the price. Wifi range is good enough for me, better than my Ubiquiti UniFi 6 Lite, I dont have modern enough devices to test throughput over wifi.

I am using SQM without any offloading. 600Mbit is pretty good.

I measured the idle power usage to be 5w as well, which is pretty good.

blogic

we hammered the Linksys E8450 (aka. Belkin RT3200) under a full load stress inside a lanforge chamber with 200 stations attached for the last 48hr and it is peaking out on performance and stability. this is running a 21.02 tree with the latest mt76 driver from felix's staging tree. not seen any glitches at all.