Hi, I have been using my trusted WNDR4300v1 with OpenWrt and a 120Mbit connection for quite some time. Now I upgraded to 500Mbit - and I am stuck at about 260Mbit that the WNDR4300 can get through to the providers cable router.
I am not looking for a low priced replacement - wired - WiFi performance is not important, since I have two wired access points.
Any recommendation?
Raspberry Pi 4. You'll need a USB-to-Ethernet adaptor and a switch as well, but it still all comes in at the same price (if not less) as you'd be paying for a router with the performance you're after.
Thanks! I like the idea...
I would say that the Nanopi R2S fits better than the RPI. It's cheaper and it has 2 Gbit ports, so you just need the switch.
RockPro64 with a dual PCIe NIC will be much better better in every way 
turn on software offloading
Will it? Or are you just paying more money for potential additional performance which you'll never realistically need/be able to use?
You have several interesting design issue with the RPi4 and I don't think anyone will argue about PCIe (especially Intel, Broadcom etc) being a lot more reliable than USB dongles from ASIX and Realtek (which is what you'll probably find). The RockPro64 is priced very resonable given he performance.
Such as?
Has anyone done any testing on this? Or is it just a 'feeling'? I've got Realtek USB-to-Ethernet dongles which have been running for over a year without a single issue. How are you defining reliability?
https://www.abelectronics.co.uk/kb/article/1035/raspberry-pi-3--4-and-zero-w-serial-port-usage (mini uart interesting "quirk"/broken design)
https://twitter.com/QwertyEmbedded/status/1200274725311664128 (SPI)
There are probably more issues but these are the ones I can recall from top of my head
Not a design issue but might be worth taking note of,
Network chip doesn't have any documentation available
As for USB vs PCIe, there's a reason why pretty much any network gear uses PCIe instead of USB despite USB being cheaper in many cases. There also concerns of build quality as most are built to be cheap (search for rx and/or tx errors for instance). You can find a lot more information about this if you do a search on Google. At best I think you can consider USB NICs equvalent to using a spare tire on your car as a premanent solution.
So to sum up, you can think of 2 issues which are irrelevant to using an RPi4 as a router (and which appear to have workarounds if you were going to attach something to the RPi4 by serial).
And you don't actually have anything concrete to back up the assertion that using a PCIe network card would be any more reliable (as is necessary for a home network) than a USB-to-Ethernet dongle. I can probably find plenty of google results for issues and errors with PCIe or embedded NICs, nothing is perfect.
Magic - thanks - I got 500Mbit
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Thank you for making me aware of the rockpro64. I always dithered on implementing the pi for the reasons you cited and I am partial to rockchips. Didn't know a rockchip board that had a pci e implementation in their current class (A72)! Was too focused on rockchips A76 future products and was unaware of openwrt support.
Looks like support was added recently to openwrt back in April. Was too uninformed!
Definitely going to swap out some routers with this rockchip64 board!
I forgot to mention that RPi4 lacks hw crypto extensions.
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