Netgear Nighthawk X6 R8000

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

Hi
Please inform if Netgear Nighthawk X6 R8000 is fully supported by openwrt / lede firmware 17 or the latest dev. builds 18.

If it is not supported then please suggest any good router apart from R7800 and linksys 8652

Thanks

2

I have been using R8000 with LEDE successfully since quite some months.

3

Yes the R8000 target is "bcm53xx". You can get the latest build here, OpenWrt 18.06 RC1:

http://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/18.06.0-rc1/targets/bcm53xx/generic/

Not sure how well it's supported. It's not as popular as the big ones like the C7, R7800, WRT3200ACM.

4

Is nighthawk R7000 used by someone with OpenWRT and can tell about the performance?

5

Please don't mix up the r7000 (BCM4360 softmac wlan, which won't ever get decent support; only very basic support by b43, no HT modes (54 MBit/s max.)) with the r8000 (BCM43602 fullmac wlan, fully supported by brcmfmac). While both are based on the same SOC, the wlan situation makes the r7000 unsupportable as a wireless router (although it should work in a wired capacity).

2 Likes
6

Thank you very much for this hint! So is it a good idea to buy a R8000 to use it with OpenWRT or do you recommend an other device? - Is there beside the Linksys WRT-3200 and WRT-1900 a cheaper high performance choice with OpenWRT?

7

The r8000 should work well, but it's not a very common/ popular device among OpenWrt users, which means bugs and problems aren't found as quickly as for others targets/ devices. Personally I'd favour QCA ipq40xx/ ipq806x or mvebu (Linksys WRT32*) over this device, depending on your (performance) requirements, but it should work.

8

Meanwhile the R7000 has excellent support in DD-WRT. But yea when it comes to OpenWrt lately I would recommend R7800 or WRT32X.

9

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