The Xiaomi Mi 4A Gigabit and similar direct from China models are in your price range. Initial OpenWrt installation is complicated but once that is done you have a good basic home router with speed performance much higher than a WR841.
iperf3 runs at least 500 Mb on a local GbE link, it increases to 800 with -A 2 for higher CPU affinity.
This looks like a nice solution. Looking at the OpenWRT install - it does appear to be a bit of a challenge...
I notice warnings about the possibility of bricking the router when installing a snapshot version. Which is the default one for the gigabit version. I'll try and order both the gigabit and 100M version.
Do I need a chip programmer? Any recommendations for such a device - there seem to be many around...
Finally, not quite sure what you mean by it increases to 800 with -A 2 for higher CPU affinity
Thanks!
A bit of feedback.
A while back I ordered both 100M and the gigabit version of the Xiaomi routers. Flashing the 100M version was a bit of a journey. The Gigabit version went quite smooth.
Both routers can measure the speed up to 100 Mbps without problems, the Gigabit at much higher rates. In a lab setting (two Dell PowerEdge R210 connected via a Xiaomi) measured about 940 Mbps on the original firmware. The OpenWrt firmware showed an average of 920 Mbps in upload direction, 560 Mbps in download direction. So there appears to be a bit of a performance drop, but not enough to hinder our measurements.
I ended up getting 10 more of the Gigabit variant that I am installing at key points of our network.
Good advice! Thanks again mk24!
I've just moved my EdgeRouter-X SFP to OpenWRT (previously on stock firmware).
So far, so good, and has enabled me to sort an IPv6 issue that I couldn't fix with the stock set-up.
Connection being upgraded from ADSL (17/1) to VDSL (60/15) shortly, so will report back with some performance numbers.