Hi, is there a list of know router and what speed they could support or should I say at what speed they cap when you have Smart Queue Management SQM QoS enable.
And if you use them as a VPN router.
I been considering the Turris Omnia, Edgerouter 12, Zyxel Armor Z2.
US market, I have 100mb cable, but would upgrade to 400Mb or 1Gb fiber in about 4-6 months.
I say budget top $350-400.
Thank you.
You budget seems realistic for "gigabit speeds" with more than just NAT in play.
My recent testing indicates that even a desktop-class x86_64 with AES-NI can't handle more than ~500 Mbps for OpenVPN. It will, however handle the ~900 Mbps throughput limit of WireGuard over GigE. This is without SQM. I have not yet examined SQM performance alone, or in conjunction with a VPN.
I don't have any mvebu-based units that I can similarly test. It doesn't look like the Edgerouter 12 is supported by OpenWrt at this time.
I don't know about the CPU performance of the IPQ806x as I don't own one of those either. My gut feeling is that it isn't up to passing a gigabit (or two, if symmetric) through the main CPU. While I have read that it has network-acceleration cores, I don't know the status of their drivers. See further IPQ806x NSS Drivers
For recent discussion of gigabit-speed processing, see the linked post and following
Correct, ipq806x isn't up to routing/ NAT beyond ~400-450 MBit/s (without SQM; you might hit up to ~650 MBit/s in synthetic benchmarking, but not in practice) without the help of its NSS/ NPU cores - which aren't available for OpenWrt, yet (and may never be).
Would the budget have to go up?
What you guy know that would perform pretty good maybe if it handles only about 800Mb on a 1Gb connection.
Thanks.
The budget is fine. Just go for a x86 with AES-NI solution with those requirements 
Qotom is a budget friendly beast but Protectli has great hardware also and AES, just pricier.