EA8300 vs AC57U: a couple of question

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
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Hi guys!

I have an Asus AC57U with the latest official OpenWrt release on it (22.03.5). I use it as a dumb AP (using both 2.4 and 5ghz wifi) with a Wireguard server and sometimes I use a configuration file I did to use it as a Wireguard client. Nothing to say about it: stable, fast (at least for what I need), good wifi coverage, can handle Wireguard without performance loss.

Yesterday I've bought used at a very special price an EA8300. When I bought the AC57U a couple of years ago, I went for it because of the very high price of the Linksys product in that period! It has a better CPU, a more complete (and maybe complex?) wifi radio units, more ram, more storage and USB 3.0 ports, too! :grinning: So, now that I have it, why don't try to replace the Asus?

So, as I said, I've bought the EA8300 used and obviously I instantly put OpenWrt on it! Same release as the Asus: 22.03.5, because of a couple of issues on the 23 release I read here on the forum. I was sure that the EA8300 was faster and newer than the Asus, but obviously I wanted to test it before swapping.

I configured the Linksys the same as the AC57U: dumb AP, for first. I've found that radio0 (2.4ghz) works, while radio1 (first 5ghz antenna) results not enabled even if it's enabled, while radio2 (the second 5ghz antenna) works. The coverage isn't as good as the Asus and it seems that the overall speed is a bit slower (I've done a couple of speedtest, nothing special for now). Also, it seems to be slower on LAN, too: I've transfered a couple of big files on my PS4 thru the Linksys; I didn't do any speed measurement, but I've transfered the same game with the Asus and It took something like 15 minutes less than with the Linksys.

Haven't tried Wireguard yet.

The question is: is there still anything to "fix" on the Linksys, that has for sure a better hardware than the Asus, or maybe the Asus has a "more friendly" harware configuration for OpenWrt?

Thanks in advance for the reply!

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While both devices are roughly meant to do the same (ignoring the tri-radio bit of the ea8300 for now) with 802.11ac radios, it's hard to compare them them 1:1.

mt7621a is -in comparison- on the computational side probably a tad slower than ipq40xx, but it has the very well optimized/ accelerated network drivers on its side. In regards to the RAM, yes, the ea8300 has more RAM, but ath10k also needs (a lot) more RAM (especially with three radios) to function than mt76, so that probably comes out more or less equal.

On the wireless side, I'd probably favour the ea8300 over the rt-ac57u, for the simple reason that qca4019 is a wave2 chipset, while mt7603e+mt7612 is a bit older - and mt76 wasn't quite on par with those chipsets (fragile in noisy environments, etc.).

You should certainly get both 5 GHz radios to work, but there have been threads about optimizing that in the past (selecting the correct BDF (board support-) file), maybe that helps with range and speed.

In the end, all you can do, is try and test what works out best for you - I have the technically rather similar asus 'lyra' map-ac2200 myself and it has been working very well for me, but I don't have anything with mt7603e+mt7612 to compare again (but I'm pretty happy with mt7621a+mt7915DBDC, which obviously wins over ipq40xx because of its 802.11ax support).

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Well, thanks a lot for the reply!

About the two 5ghz: I really don't need both working at the same time. I need a more "normal" 2.4-5ghz dual band configuration, but I've noticed that even this config seems to work better on the Asus.
You told me that the ea8300 has a newer chipset, so it should work better. It seems that coverage for me is a bit better on the Asus, but maybe I should check better for WiFi power or something like the correct BDF file. I'll look for it today, I didn't know anything about BDF.

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Have you measured any speeds / throughput on 5GHz / mesh? These are cheaply available for me, but i was putoff by several reviews showing slow 5G wifi mesh speeds, on stock fw and openwrt. Eg:

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It's within expectations for a 2x2 802.11ac/ wave2 device, but I don't have benchmark figures handy right now (and there has been a pretty serious improvement in regards to enabling the rf amplifiers in recent years).

If performance is a considerable motivation for you, 802.11ax does roughly double it relative to 802.11ac - so those will always win easily (and there are cheap options around in the likes of dap-x1860, covr-x1860, wsm20, not tri-radio though). That's just normal progress, wifi6 killing wifi5, which killed wifi4, which in turn killed wifi3, 2, 1…
By now we are at a point that we have a quite decent selection of OpenWrt supported 802.11ax devices, and compared to their predecessors (802.11ac) we do find pretty nice specimens in the lower price brackets, just 'exotic' features (6 GHz or tri-radio) remain scarce and expensive (if you compare ipq8072a and higher, mt7622bv+mt7915, filogic 830 against the likes of wrt32acm/ r7800/ nbg6817 they are sometimes offered really cheap - and the aforementioned 15-20 EUR devices are already quite capable).

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