I can't leverage 1Gbps, high softirq cpu

The r7800 is certainly a top device, but it's no longer in production and 'only' 802.11ac (and modern 802.11ax successors can be even cheaper than their 802.11ac predecessors). Without NSS, ipq8065 is good for (plain-) routing up to 500-550 MBit/s (which will reduce a tad with DSA in the medium term future), less with PPPoE, SQM or VPN on top. Personally I would not suggest buying any device with NSS (which is very, very unlikely to 'ever' be merged into OpenWrt/main) in mind, if you already own it and can extend its lifetime that way, fine - but just don't rely on its presence as a buying decision.

Simple 1 GBit/s routing (at wirespeed) should be possible with mt7622bv+mt7915 or filogic 830 based devices (sadly not quite with ipq807x, for the same NSS rooted reasons, otherwise these would be great alternatives as well), but if you want more of a margin, you end up at.

OpenWrt on x86_64 and a simple (OpenWrt supported-) 802.11ax AP makes sense these days, see e.g. these for low-cost entry-level devices

Other options (beyond mt7622bv+mt7916 or filogic 830) include

  • RaspberryPi 4, with a second rtl815x based USB3 ethernet card, sadly still scarce and way overpriced
  • NanoPi r4s and similar (supported-) rockchip based devices
  • various 4-port x86_64 mini-PCs (starting new around 180 EUR)

BananaPi BPi3/ BPi4 are a bit more diy devices, but also quite promising.

1 Like