OpenWRT on Cudy WR3000s

Installing and Using OpenWrt
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Hi there! Hope everyone's doing great.

I recently bought a Cudy WR3000S router for my network and was having some problems with its official firmware. While the base firmware, released in mid-2024, provided excellent performance (speeds up to 942 Mbps for both local and Internet exchange (IX) traffic), subsequent firmware updates with bug fixes caused my IX internet speed to drop to around 700 Mbps. Interestingly, local cached game files from my ISP still maintained full speeds of about 942 Mbps. I've tried every released firmware version and found no solution, leading me to suspect a packet shaping mechanism in the newer firmwares.

Because of this, I've decided to upgrade to OpenWRT. I'm wondering how much performance I can truly get from this router with OpenWRT. Could anyone share statistics on the router's WLAN and LAN performance (with or without hardware/software offloading)? Additionally, a key reason for wanting to upgrade to OpenWRT is to gain 160 MHz support, which the official firmware lacks.

Thanks in advance

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Hi.
First you must know that Cudy firmware is based on an OpenWrt snapshot. Hence the situation is just a comparison on Openwrt versions.
I've been using a WR3000S with OpenWrt for about 6 months now. I can use the device to full possibility. LAN to LAN, and WAN to LAN top at full Gb. Wifi with 160MHz width also tops at full Gb. It's just an extraordinary device, also considering its price.

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3

Try it, it's very easy to go back.

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4

Thank you very much for sharing your experience. I would love to ask:
Which firmware version should I install? Did you notice any range drops compared to the official firmware? I play many co-op games and need UPnP. Will it be supported on OpenWrt?

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Installation procedure here. It's fast and easy. As @frollic mentionned, you can easily return to Cudy is you want.

I didn't use the official firmware. I just proceed to basic setup than immediatly installed OpenWrt. Cudy Firmware is based on OpenWrt anyway. They added support for extra features (VPN ...) and a nicer web interface. But you don't have total control like a vanilla OpenWrt.

Wifi range and performances are excellent. At least with my tiny config (one device, sometimes 2).

UPnP is deprecated. You better set port forwarding if you need so.

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6

Thanks a lot for clearing it out should I go with 24.10.0 or 24.10.1 ??

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Latest is always best. 24.10.1 works wonderfully.

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{A681260F-B897-45CC-8558-C9C29B28D416}
{A681260F-B897-45CC-8558-C9C29B28D416}964×401 7.5 KB

I have completed the setup and configured the router; it's running flawlessly. Would you suggest any tweaks to further improve its performance? ( irqbalance etc. ) Thank you very much from the bottom of my heart @badulesia.

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I have just generic tweaks to suggest : set the country in wifi settings, choose wisely the channel to profit of 160 MHz width (I set channel to 36). Otherwise the device works so well that I didn't had the need for advanced tweaking.

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Possible tweaks:
in Network > Firewall > Flow offloading type enable either Software flow offloading or Hardware offloading
in Network > Interfaces > Global network options > Packet Steering set either Enabled or Enabled (all CPUs)

Don't know if latency plays a role in Co-op games, but if it does you can test latency (under load) with https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat - when latency increases vastly under load you can mitigate that with SQM (in exchange for bandwidth) https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/sqm

Geomate could be useful as well (?)
*https://github.com/hudra0/geomate
*Geomate - Geographic Game Server Filter for OpenWrt

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11

Yes eventually. Mostly depends on the OP's ISP bandwith.

It is set by default.

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With hardware flow offloading, I'm reaching Gbps speeds, and it seems to help a lot. Also, even without SQM, I'm getting an A+ on the bufferbloat test, which is surprising.

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