Metal case is just enough. It is a passive heat sink, so it gets hot but nothing to worry. With it i have no problems with temps, you can stress it without worrying about throttling
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That's its wireless rating. And those are link speeds - not (ever) actual transfer rates.
Great! Thank you, really appreciate the given suggestion about the nanopi 
Good point, any idea how can i find out the actual rates apart from people's comments?
Half if you're lucky. Wireless is half duplex and there's still some protocol overhead to account for as well (just like with Ethernet).
E.g. a transfer here with an 802.11ac 2x2 radio will net me 47 MBps more or less (peak speed), which translates to 375 Mbps, which is almost close to half of 866 Mbps, the theoretical maximum on a two-stream AC radio.
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I was actually asking about wired performance, routers usually advertise the wireless speed i.e. 2.4 + 5.0 max rates = XXXX, how do i know the real numbers for wired?
With OEM firmware they're usually full gigabit for NAT, for gigabit devices. This is an excellent thread about wired speeds on OpenWrt:
The Archer A7 i mentioned earlier doesn't get a full gigabit as an example, that's why i asked in the first place
But that thread you added is really really good, the A7's SOC is there and the test results are accurate, too bad the thread stopped getting updates but generally it's good.
@EnfermeraSexy
Since you have a nanopi, do you mind running the test mentioned by @Borromini
This is the git for it
It's doesn't have that SOC in the thread so i'm just curious here.
You mean on OEM firmware you don't get full gigabit on wired LAN to WAN NAT?
Correct, Capped at 460
Sorry but i don't know how to run that test or the necessary dependencies it needs. Nanopi R2S route gigabit speeds without problems and i get like 100 Mb over openvpn running on it.
Take a look at this topic NanoPI R2S is a great OpenWrt device - #74 by _FailSafe
The only dependency is flent but it's ok, i will try my luck in that thread (really good info there)
Thanks again
I have the same requirement (but no wifi since I use a separate AP). My candidate is Banana Pi BPI-R2, it is 78 USD. OpenWRT is supported on it, and allegedly it can do NAT in hardware. It has 4 GigE LAN ports.
I used NanoPi R1S-H5 before, it is a nice little but powerful device, capable of 300 Mb/s data rate. The R2S plus a switch could also be a good option.
That's costly for me, especially when the shipping is high right now due to covid-19
But i guess for an all in one device it's a fair price for what it provides.
So the R1S is capped at 300 but the R2S can do 1000?
The R1S has USB2 to Gigabit Ethernet, here the USB sets the limitation. The R2S has USB3 to GigE with full speed, as the specs say.
I believe the archer c7 is available at Target. It hits gigabits speeds on wired with ease once you enable the proper offloading. I use gwlim’s build on GitHub. There are some other devices too. Definitely worth it imo.
True but i was talking about the ethernet ports and it seems R1S and R2S both have 2 ports that support Gigabit so there shouldn't be a difference in that regard, the only questions is if the HW (SOC) can support that speed to the max or not.
Offloading is new to me but based on what i've read so far you send the load to another device say a switch or a router so basically you have more than just a C7 to pull this off.
What's the difference between that and using something else as a router and the C7 as an AP ?
The Ethernet ports are internally connected by USB, that is why the Ethernet ports are limited to USB speeds.
Which for USB2 case is 480Mbit/s therefore limiting the GigE.
For USB3 it is 5Gbit/s so the GigE is not limited and would be the better choice.
Oh, well that's that then.
Thanks for letting me know.
While digging more i now understand that it is actually the process of sending some of the needed operations from the device(router) to the client (PC for example) which is similar to Distcc in compiling which distributes some of the work to other machines. BTW does the router use all the clients equally for this or how does that work?
Offloading is what it does on the stock firmware. The CPU by itself is not enough to hit gigabit speeds. Offloading takes some of the NAT work or other stuff and moves it to another chip (NIC?).
I get 900 Mb/s down constantly on Cox Gigablast wired and about 250-400 down using the Ookla app and the local Cox Speedtest node.
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