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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Ok... not what i thought but thanks for the explanation 
The approach I take is to look for AC routers on ebay, I then tick the sold listings on ebay and look at the price range they have been going for. I check any cheap ones are not cheap for bad reason.
Many do not get bids because they require collection, but if you PM the seller they are happy to box it if you arrange a cheap courier.
When I find a router I like, I look at the page for that router on OpenWrt site, I look at how many hardware revisions there are. what CPU and memory increases there work and whether the chipset is easy or a pig.
Often these pages tell you if there was a leap in performance or whether there is a bug, e.g. a cap on fibre
Once I have one I like I go on the hunt to see if I can get one on the cheap.
Sometimes I go cheaper than cheap, I put an ad out on Freecycle asking for the router saying I want it to repair one I already have.
I also subscribe to freecycle as you get all kinds of good stuff on there.
This is a good approach i use the same for other things i buy but for a router i'm not sure it's needed as the price for a new one is quite cheap and you rarely need to swap one.
I appreciate the provided info regardless and it should be useful for anyone who finds this thread.
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