Wan performance of wrt1900acs vs Netgear R7800

Hello,
is it possible to say how WAN ports of these routers will perform lets say when 500-1000mbit is on WAN port from provider?

wrt1900acs comes with Marvell Armada 385 88F6820
r7800 is Qualcomm IPQ8065

I am looking for a good performance router on WAN 500-1000mbit, ethernet 1gbit and good performance of wifi in AP mode.

I also assume r7800 can be used as mesh as its wave2.

Thanks

The Linksys device is able to handle nearly ~1GB on WAN. The Netgear device can handle about ~400-600MB. But the Wifi performance of the Netgear is much better than it is on the Linksys device. You could use both devices if you want both worlds. As an alternative you could use a cheaper Mediatek based device for WAN like Ubiquity Edgerouter-X and the Netgear R7800 for Wifi.

@pwned is it possible to say what is that 400-600mb bottleneck? also can edgerouter-x handle nearly 1GB?

appreciate

the ubiquity edgerouter-x has only
MediaTek MT7621AT 880 Mhz

what about Brume (GL-MV1000)


CPU:
Marvell Armada 3700LP 88F3720
CPU Cores:
2
CPU MHz:
1000

also one more question has wrt1900acs or wrt32900acs more powerful CPU as Brume (GL-MV1000)?

thanks

Well, I don't have a1GB line. Just a 500MB for testing on a friends line. I own the ER-X and the same hardware as R7800 based device NBG6817. So I cannot confirm those numbers by myself respectively only the own perception that they reach the 500 MB on WAN. For the NBG6817 I saw only 400 MB with OpenWrt. While I got ~ 500 with stock firmware.

But there are clips to reach those performance numbers. For the ER-X you have to enable hardware offload and drop any bandwidth management (like sqm) on the router. You can reach ~900 MB on the ER-X based on that what you can find about the device in www.

The same would apply (I don't know) to the Linksys device. Hardware offload is not available for most devices! The Linksys device should perform slightly better then the ER-X.

There are some threads on the forum about the performance of this devices.

The differece between the R7800 and the 1900acs is probably (I can guess only) the CPU and the missing hardware offload feature on the r7800. Most likely the last one only.

But there are other ppl. here on the forum with deeper knowledge then me which could provide more about this.

For the GL-MV1000 I cannot say anything. Its a newer device (others above are ~5 years+ old) and specs are looking better. But be aware the Chipset must support hardware offloading and OpenWrt must support it as well!

the worst thing is that 1900acs has marvell as wifi chipset ... so its disaster. Thats why I go for R7800.

ER-X you have to enable hardware offload - that can be done via Luci or terminal or some more sophisticated hacking needs to be done?

But performance wise - can you compare ER-X agains wrt1900acs? I mean WAN throughput is one thing, but if you want to run some services / vpn etc you also need some CPU. Right?

I am thinking what pair with R7800 for fast WAN/Ethernet: ER-X, wrt1900acs, or that GL-MV1000.

thx

I don't know if DD-WRT is better here. Maybe its worth cause they have access to the manufacturer's drivers.

It is easy to enable. Just two clicks within firewall settings.

Personally I cannot compare and give a verdict from first hand (I don't own the Linksys device). But from what I've read at all about both CPUs the Mediatek CPU is less beefy then the Marvel CPU. And if you take the core speed as indicator in addition (880MHz vs 1,6GHz) then its clear what is better comparing this specific devices.

For VPN the single threaded power is important. But keep in mind that VPN will drop the output on WAN to like a half or more because of traffic encryption. For a 1GB connection utilizing VPN you would need a "real" CPU with AES support included.

As a reference to give you an idea:

For the Linksys I didn't find similar. Might be it is better or worse.

For "Services" in general RAM becomes more important. 1900acs (512MB) vs. ER-X (256MB).

So overall the 1900acs looks better then the ER-X.

image

Netgear r7800 has the additional two nss CPU cores for hardware offloading and can do wired NAT at line rate (940mbps) and fq codel (NSS cores) at just under line rate (~900 ish). There is a long thread in the developer section and several folks that build images. If you have a r7800 you can try it for yourself:

1 Like

@ACwifidude so officail openwrt doesnt support it? also in that case it can do ~900mbit there is no point to have separate edge router?

Yes, there is no official support. You have to make either your own build or use any community build like that from @ACwifidude linked above.

Yep - what pwned said. You’ll have to build or use a community build.

I have asymmetric 940/35 internet service and I’m using a r7800. :sunglasses:

Not yet tried with openWRT but on a R7800 with the Voxel firmware I've reached 910 Mbps and 200-300 or more in upload

@wireless what exactly is voxel firmware?

@pwned does wrt1900acs support hw offload? cant find it ;/

@pwned i was told its same driver, so no change on the AP side.

@pwned does wrt1900ac v1 support hw offload?
@pwned i think comparing edge-x, wrt1900acs and GL-MV1000 - it looks like GL-MV1000 has the best CPU & RAM and 8GB emmc +sd card storage, compare to wrt1900ac which has only 512MB

@pwned for what is good IPQ806x NSS Drivers ?

@pwned also it looks like there is no stable/official openwrt firmware for GL-MV1000

@ACwifidude are there also bin images if i dont want to build it manually?

I don't know. I don't own the device. On paper it has as far I as I can google.

If OpenWrt support it I cannot find information. Might be it supports "software offload" "only" to reach the 1GB on WAN side. Which is good enough.

Y, I've mixed up the fact that a lot of Linksys devices are Broadcom (which have poor driver support) driven. This device is not. Sorry.

See above. There is a community build ("DavidC") for this devices. Maybe its better to ask there ppl. owning this device.

About this point I would be very carefully. I doubt that a "newer" "Armada 88F3720" running @1GHz can equal out @1,6GHz of an older one. But that's a personal opinion!

As far as I know there is sth. like "Fastpath" technology for Qualcomm devices available. NSS drivers are giving access to this technology and you can max out WAN speed. The link was intended as a reference link for the build @ACwifidude has posted.

Y, the device was released in Sept. 2019. The chances it gets into stable 20.xx are good. When it will be released I don't know.

The link @ACwifidude gave is pointing into the binary folder directly.

Wifi on WRT3200 is fine (from what I can tell it's pretty much the same as on WRT1900ACS), at least 5Ghz however I've only used Qualcomm and Intel clients so your milage may vary. If you're concerned about hitting Gbit I'd suggest that you look at a decent ARM SBC such as the RockPro64 and pop in a dual port Intel Gbit NIC. It hits Gbit speeds without any issues in general however I don't know how well it's supported in OpenWrt and it will lack WiFi but you can use pretty much anything you like as an AP running OpenWrt.

that's maybe ot, by the way... It's a custom firmware made by user Voxel of this forum.
It's add features and upgraded packages to the original firmware. I'm using it with kamoj plugin that expands the numbers of features supported.

@pwned so this device has better support in DD-wrt?

Yep. You can load those builds directly from OEM (factory) or from an OpenWRT build (sysupgrade).

No. It should be equal because its driver base is the same. Driver base is different for Broadcom chipset based routers only. WRT1900acs is not Broadcom based.