Looks at old Archer C7
Honestly my old device is keeping up thanks to the SFE offloading and mild overclock. I have Cox Gigabit but I of course can’t do SQM.
Yea but the point is that's without SQM... My WRT32X also handles 1Gbit without SQM, and with SQM Cake it's perfectly reliable at 600+Mbits, while also doing 100MB/s USB 3.0 NAS, Adblock, WiFi, Samba, etc. (I think now that the R7800 NSS offloading works it has similar performance.) The point of the post is that people shouldn't expect an SQM capable OpenWrt router to handle 1Gbit for a long time. Router CPUs just aren't fast enough right now and both the hardware and software support is a long ways off.
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Curious - - - - your last sentence " . . . both the hardware and software support is a long ways off.", for 1 Gbit service.
Are you saying that OpenWRT is not up to 1 Gbit connections?
Please advise.
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what he's saying is that there are complexities due to multicore operations and proprietary offloading mechanisms that leave them with arbitrary limits...
vendors in effect... both fine tune and in many instances deliberately cripple at the same time...
3rd party firmware (generally) catches the flipside of both the above...
One other option is to use old used hardware .. eg a 800 watt Intel Xeon server 
..I did buy some used R7800 routers for 60-80 EURO .. i've now 3 abound the house and are perfect.
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The OP is a masterpiece. Months ago I replied here to a similar question by sharing my solution to the same problem. Let me re-post the relevant parts here:
I use a rooted Homeware (proprietary fork of Openwrt) router for gigabit WAN, it does its job for 20€ in total. Most drivers are proprietary and closed. You cannot rebuild or replace the kernel, nor the main squashfs. It's still some of Openwrt in the end, so everything you compile for userspace works, and some kernel modules work too. I run both Transmission (an USB3 SSD is attached for that) and strongswan roadwarrior server on top of it and it just works. Every proprietary driver is integrated into UCI so you always do things the openwrt way, including VLAN and multiple SSID setup. [...] There exist multiple models with different specs: mine (20€) can do SQM (at ~180Mbps) and has STA capable driver for the 11ac radio; others (20-30€ too) have newer firmwares, quantenna wireless, and hw crypto; I won't recommend the older ones with older SoC and wireless chipsets, but they may have matched your requirements as well. Almost all of them have VoIP ATA capabilities, sometimes you also get an FXO port or DECT radio. Depending on what you want from an Openwrt router, this could be a damn cheap and effective solution.
If you want a real Openwrt experience then x86-64 is the way, as someone told here. Leave Rpi4 to makers, it is not meant for networking and it is very expensive for what you get.
Meanwhile, since that old post of mine, I set this things up for my relatives and I succesfully got asterisk, F2FS driver and even hw-crypo running for IPsec. Recently, I started testing even newer models with integrated GPON (yes, up to 2,5Gb/s is possible), 11ax wireless and even ARMv8 64-bit dual-core processors at 1.5Ghz. The old prices I mentioned were referring to second-hand market, nowadays those old models halved in price. I don't know how much the most powerful CPU could get on SQM, but if you really need full SQM bandwidth then I think spending 300/400$ for professional single-function equipment is the way.
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I considered to buy a WRT32X a few weeks ago, but opted out because of it's cost (about $100), power consumption and lack of software support (no longer developed). That's a really good choice for non-WIFI routing anyway.
Also considered the use of extra switches, but who knows what software (or spyware) they are running if I cannot install OpenWRT.
Finally I cheaped out for a Netgear R6350 for only 150Mbps non-SQM WIFI bandwidth.
Anyway, for those who use a x86 box: why don't you use OPNSense or pfSense instead?
Because I prefer the flexibility of Openwrt. I can customize it pretty much however I want.
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waste of good hardware and CPU cycles ? 
With that said, I don't use OpenWRT as a router, I leave that to Fedora, and run OpenWRT on my APs.
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Neither of those do WiFi terribly well, IIRC, and neither supports SQM...
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I didn't say that. OpenWrt devices can handle 1gbps and I listed a few that can, WRT32X, WRT3200ACM and R7800 are just a few examples. I'm talking about running that throughput with SQM Cake, most of them struggle and will not quite reach that. That is the entire point of this post is specifically running SQM at >=1gbps.
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Yea it's abandoned by Linksys which is a shame because it was their top router. I wouldn't recommend any router from Linksys if you are only using OEM firmware. However OpenWrt is very well supported and it runs awesome on the WRT32X with everything I throw at it (500+Mbit/s with SQM Cake, Adblock, Wifi, Samba, USB 3.0 storage 100+MB/s, etc.). Kernel 5.10 already runs great too. I got it "renewed" a couple years ago for $120 on Amazon and love it.
Hi everybody, there ia something I can not understand fully, here. Maybe others have and will have same doubts. Sorry me if questions or considerations are dumb.
Some machine such as the r7800 can manage gigabit line... Or (why) not? Actually you have to use some tricks to activate nss cores to do this: in any cases, I reach usually 650 mbps with peeks of 950, via wire.( Wireless peeformance are worse). More than 500. And I payed 60 euro for a r7800.
I ve noted you are speaking a lot about sqm, which I dont use and - my fault! - I do not understand what exactly does and why you need it.
I evaluate rPi4 but you need a box, a mini sd card, an ap... It cost more than 60 euro. For what more?
Of course if you have budget unlimited and energy in your country is almost free... x86_64 will be my choise (my provider tells me I will have 2.5 gigabit, so I'm interested in this kind of threads).
Really only an x86 based device will do this level of speed. You need 2.5Gb or 5Gb or 10Gb ethernet ports, which are just not available on all-in-one devices that I know of. The RPi4 is maybe able to handle this if you use a LAG group in a switch with high speed ports. But those switches with high speed ports are like $300-500 by themselves.
Honestly, I would just not sign up for more than 1Gbps at the moment, the advantages are just not that much compared to the cost in hardware needed to properly handle it.
As for what is SQM, there's plenty of info about it in the wiki
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To illustrate @dlakelan's answer, here are two mini-ITX x86_64 board that will do these kind of speeds. Typically you won't find > 1Gbps ports in low end motherboards. And at these speeds, if you want to use SQM or anything other than basic routing, you need a couple of cores anyway...
Here's one with 2 10Gbe interfaces: £400
https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/A2SDi-H-TF
Here's one with 4x 10Gbe interfaces. £800
.
https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/A2SDi-H-TP4F
And you'll need the switch as well....and rewire your house with cat6. And get a motherboard for your PC that has a 10Gbe interface. Otherwise you may as well just stay with a 1Gbe connection
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In addition, if you have 2.5Gb ISP equipment and then 1Gb motherboard/switch, there will be a severe download bottleneck between the ISP equipment sending to your 1Gb motherboard so you will be at the mercy of the ISP's queue management algorithm unless you run SQM on ingress. It will make SQM very important.
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I setup a X86 KVM OpenWrt and test with SQM.
In my old hardware, it can get an A on delay with ~300M up and ~600M down.
I wonder what kind of hardware can do 1G SQM reliability.
Why is download more susceptible to delays than upload?
How to get better SQM on KVM setups?
I will try to run OpenWrt in bare metal to compare, just need to learn how to boot it up.
There is also something called Hardware Offload, and it supported by most of chipset vendors.
This includes NAT/PAT, ACLs etc...
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Hello. The new Qualcomm SoCs seem to be quite powerful. Can one expect them (e.g. IPQ8071A) to route at 500-1000mbps with SQM once they are supported (which does not seem to be too far away)?
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Hi,
I am one of the lucky users which has a 1000 MBit/s download and 100 MBit/s upload internet connection.
I had the same problem to find a good OpenWRT router to support my full bandwidth.
I ended up using a Teltonika router. This router can do the 1000 MBit/s without any problems using NAT up and down.
To test the router I have connected two Linux notebooks to it 1x to the LAN interface and the other one to the WAN interface so that the traffic was forced to use NAT. I measured the bandwidth using iperf3.
There are two models, one without WiFi and one with Wifi.
Without Wifi about 125 USD (without TAX)
With Wifi about 155 USD (without TAX)
Maybe this is interesting for others too.