There is a thread for cheap devices. So I decided to have one for better devices too.
My starting points are TP-Link Archer C7 and C2600. Do you know any other wireless gateways with plenty of RAM (64 MB minimum), enough flash (8 MB in this case, since you can always extroot) and plenty of processing power?
I could also ask this like: If you were about to buy an Archer C2600, what would you rather buy, if you wanted a better, more powerful and better supported device?
This means that gigabit Ethernet is a minimum requirement, as is dual band WiFi.
I'd hardly call the Archer C7 an enthusiast device. The Archer C7 isn't even powerful enough to push 1Gbps.
The Linksys WRT1900ACS and WRT3200ACM have great hardware but their wireless performance is terrible. They perform very well on wired though.
The Netgear R7800 has been spoken highly of for wireless. And the ZyXEL NBG6817 has the same hardware (or near same) as the Netgear so also a strong choice.
You would always and in every case recommend the device over TP-Link Archer C2600?
I used to buy a lot of TP-Link gear. But there was a period where what I was buying would not allow the install of OpenWRT. It was a purposeful decision by TP-Link related to USA regulation stuff (but TP-Link was not required to lock people out; they did it anyways). Anyways, I don't buy TP-Link anymore. I dislike the company now because of the problems I had.
Do I recommend the Netgear R7800 over the Archer C2600? Yes. The R7800 is getting lots of attention and work on it. TP-Link I'm sour on. But the R7800 has better CPU and more Flash MB. If money is an issue, I would buy the ZyXEL NBG6817. I really like the Linksys WRT models but not for wireless, it is a real shame the wireless has so many problems.
Do you happen to remember, what were the exact differences? The price of the ZyXEL and the Netgear are quite equal here.
I think they have the same exact hardware. The only difference is the external looks and design of how the hardware is stacked on the inside (I guess). the ZyXEL is less expensive in USA (consistently) than the R7800 on Amazon.com by $30. The ZyXEL doesn't have as many external lights as the R7800 but LEDE can't work all the R7800 lights anyway.
Actually when we compare the 2 architectures we need to compare products of the same generations.
Most of the MIPs cores we see are decades old IP cores it is really not fair to compare to the newer ARMv7 or ARM64 architectures
Costs $20 and outperforms $100+ devices