Hello,
I'm new and very excited to be here. Just starting out with OpenWrt, and would appreciate any insight you all could provide. I'm starting with a TP-Link C7 in a couple of days to get a bit more familiar with OpenWrt. But what I think I want to do is use a spare Lenovo M72e Tiny tower I have and run OpenWrt x86 on it. The device only has a single Ethernet link, but does have a mini PCI slot (currently an 802.11 adapter). I will replace that with an Ethernet adapter. I'll have to mod the case to get the cable out, but I think it may be a pretty good OpenWrt platform. I can then use the C7 as an access point and managed switch.
The built-in NIC is a gigabit Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 06)(that's what my Linux reports). I'm looking at a "Syba Gigabit Ethernet Mini PCI Express PCI-E Network Controller Card 10/100/1000Mbps RJ45 LAN NIC Card RTL8168C chipset" on Amazon for $20 as the 2nd NIC. The PC is a dual core i3-3220T @ 2.8GHz, 8GB RAM, and SSD. Lenovo's are usually pretty Linux friendly, and I have a couple of these PCs running Manjaro/Arch and Ubuntu Server already.
My Internet is currently 100Mbps, so I'm thinking this may be a bit overkill for now, but it will allow me to grow on the same platform as needed. Am I missing anything (other than Intel NICs would be preferable). Thanks.