Router Recommendation - is R7800 the best one to get?

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

Hi everyone,

Here is another router recommendation question.

From what I can tell R7800 is still top router recommended.

Will R7000 be fine too (I believe one can install Tomato Firmware on it also - if one needs to). Though I have one router at home TP-LINK Archer C59 v1 running Openwrt but 5ghz kill the network down. It is running on 2.4ghz. Office actually has R7000

Now - lets not worry about budget - I can little more but not exactly near Turris Omnia price ($334). Little below that is okay by me.

Which router has the works when it comes to performance

Here are few Questions that I have answered for you

  • How fast is your internet connection?

Internet is at 75/75Mbps but I might upgrade to 150/150 or 200/200 Fiber Optic

  • Do you need Wi-Fi? *(2.4GHz only, both 2.4GHz and 5GHz?) - 100% Yes to 2.4 and 5Ghz.

I really want rock solid 5Ghz

  • Do you need Gigabit Ethernet? that would be great if possible.

These days isn't everything gigabit ethernet

  • Do you need USB ports? How many? USB 2.0 or 3.0? Do not really care about this.
    I haven't ever had the need to use USB Ports

  • How many family members/devices must the router support?
    2 at home but if guest comes it can go to 5-7 people

  • What other services do you want? (Do you need VPN, media server, web server, etc.?)

VPN service is requested - OpenVPN or WireGuard etc

Downloading.

I do download Large data like DCS, MSFS2020 etc. Lots of large data.

Thank you

2

It is a solid router that can be recommended, but only up to a WAN throughput of around 500-600 MBit/s (less with SQM enabled).

No, not at all, its BCM4360 radios are effectively unsupported.

The r7800 will do 200/200 fibre easily and its WLAN is good, but it won't route at 1000/1000.

3

Isn't R7800 few years older. Isn't there something which is eve top dog on the router list. If not, then I shall get R7800 but I was hoping to see something newer

4

With a not-so-recent snapshot (r13342, from May 24) and software flow offloading, I consistently get 750+ Mbit/s

5

I'm a bit late on the thread.. be prepared to be disappointed by openvpn performance. Wireguard should be better if you're prepared to go that way and understand it's immaturity.

I found in practice the R7800 maxed out at about 35mb/sec for openvpn on my full fibre connection. If you want gig level performance you need intel x86 CPU with AES extensions. The R7800 would make a good AP for that though.

6

Would a RPi4 work for this use case? Use the R7800 as an AP with it?

7

For OpenVPN no. At least not until release 2.5 which, I believe, will allow you to use ChaCha20-Poly1305 instead of AES to encrypt the tunnel. In the meantime Wireguard is plenty fast on a RPi4.

8

The r-pi might well work a little better. I've got one with openwrt but I use it as a travel AP. I hadn't thought of using it for the site-to-site bridge but maybe I'll give it a go myself. I'm not expecting it to great but probably not bad for what it is.
The game changer for high performance openvpn is the intel AES instruction set so that means x86 (but you must check the CPU supports it). Openvpn needs real grunt if you don't want it to be your bottleneck. If wireguard can suit your needs though either should be good enough though.

9

nah, openvpn suck with only singlethread, wireguard is light faster

10

No idea what you're disagreeing with.

The question was about the capabilities of the r7800 for this users specified proposed use cases. I'm sure there must be a more appropriate thread somewhere for openvpn sucking.