The Marvell platform is more mature and is in mainline while the IPQ isn't (still true for 4.19 afaik). It's probably a dead race in the end as it will depend on your clients and environment regarding wifi. The IPQ platform is slightly faster than the Marvell but it's negligible in the end, not sure how well USB3 and eSATA works on IPQ but it's very stable and reliable on Marvell. IPQ does seem to have some quirkness with ethernet currenty but that will probably sort itself out in the end. Also, the Zyxel Z2 gives you a better bang for the buck than X4S in the end if you can live without eSATA. Its also currently cheaper at least on Amazon.de
I recommend Netgear R7800 as well, I have no issues with this device and 1GB ethernet ports are a minimum these days. I almost bought a router with 100mbit ports, I'm lucky I noticed that.
EDIT: However I read that people had problems maxing the WAN port if they have 1GB internet speeds, I can't verify this tho' as I don't have that internet connection speed myself,
I think it's really rare case these days when people have such speeds at their homes. For home use r7800 excels at what it does IMHO. Or maybe I live under the rock 
I've got a 350/350 fibre connection at home, my C2600 (ipq8064) have no problems maxing it. The ipq8065 in the R7800 is faster I'm sure it can do 500+ with flow offloading. SQM is a different story, but who needs it with speeds like that
Apparently your ISP is better than Comcast, where SQM is a definite benefit even with DOCSIS 3.1. Without queue management at the router the latency goes into tenths of seconds.
Do you get full speeds over wifi too? and what sort of CPU load do you see when your connection is maxed?
They can potentially handle higher speeds: IPQ806x NSS Drivers
Not everyone will be happy with using a closed "core" for acceleration, but if one wants to squeeze every bit of performance and still have the main CPU at 1% load, those NSS cores can potentially put IPQ targets in a new league.
https://people.netfilter.org/pablo/netdev0.1/slides/IPQ806x-Hardware-acceleration_v2.pdf
Haven't done any wireless testing as it's not so important to me. As for CPU load have a look: https://imgur.com/a/Z3Bh7iA
Around 40MB/s there's 40-50% load on both cores. I'm using my own build compiled from master recently, flow offloading is on.
Yup. Hopefully DSA switch comes soon and you get another offloading boost just in time for your next speed bump.
I have a C2600 but its retired, I use an mt7621 router now which felt like a downgrade, but it seems mt76 is where most OSS wifi efforts are going.
I think that's a pretty major downgrade, no? Why would you retire your C2600 I would only trade it for an R7800 but can't justify the effort for a minor upgrade.
I think you're right about the OSS status of mt7621 though, I think I read somewhere that it supports hw offloading?
Yup, the C2600 could do more. I suppose I like to use whatever seems most active dev wise.
mt7621 supports hw offloading but that doesn't work with SQM, although like you said at fast symmetrical speeds one doesn't really need SQM, not a home user anyway.
NSS cores seem interesting though, in addition to general traffic (ipv4/6, pppoe..etc) they can also accel qdisc. I'm most interested in crypto-accel and seeing vpn/openssl numbers. Porting all the codeaurora modules to work with current kernels is a lot of work.. and in the end its to offload to a closed blob 
, so that will never be accepted into master.
And there's IPQ807x now too..
My top picks would be in order of price (high to low):
- PC Engines APU2c4 (Quad-core + 4GB ECC RAM) - https://openwrt.org/toh/pcengines/apu2
- 8 Devices Jalapeno (802.11ac Wave2 support) - https://shop.8devices.com/wifi4things/Jalapeno%20DVK
- GL-iNet GL-AR750S-Ext - https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-ar750s/
These looks great, however I'm no sure if any of them can support 1GB WAN and the ac wifi is just basic comparing to some more expensive one. I've got some real Chinese travel router (similar for your last one) for around $25 if I remember correctly, and of course I've replaced the fw with Lede
L:
You'd be wrong. I suggest you read the links, these aren't cheap chinese routers.
The APU2, even with 2 GB RAM models will easily manage 1GB WAN, it's one of the fastest SoCs you can install OpenWRT on.
Thank you for the heads up. I'll check APU, but it seems significantly more expensive than some of the previously mentioned product also supports 1G WAN
WNDR3700v2 - had this beast of a router for what i swear would be more than 8 years.....
Rock solid. Absolutely blown away about how it holds it's own against its contemporary brethren....
Short of usb3, external ant.... maybe a card slot ( all of which are really not so mission critical.... maybe the antennas which is fixable )......
It's seen 3 generations of WAN technology come and go.... absolute beast......
Special shoutout to the LED setup on the beast. The blue wifi is a deft touch. Top work netgear.
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I run x86 OpenWRT on a fanless Chinese N3050 "PC" which is fully reliable, no moving parts and draws less than 10W. It kills any ARM routers when it comes to OpenVPN due to AES-NI. It will route 1Gbit all day long and have one core left to do 256Mbit VPN @ 15MB/sec. If you have Gbit connection, run OpenWRT and are really serious about performance, x86 is best game in town.
tp link wdr3600 can manage 15MB/s 256bit aes openvpn from public vpn providers like pia or nordvpn
I suspect you are confusing Megabit with Megabyte. wdr3600 is most certainly not "managing" 15 Mbyte/sec with 256 bit encryption. I used TP Link Archer C7 for OpenVPN prior to ditching it for x86. It has similar SOC as wdr3600 (maybe little faster) and it topped out @ 17Mbit/sec using exactly the same encryption (AES-256-GCM) in perfect condition (add latency and it got worse). Also, when its CPU was busy running OpenVPN, routing slowed down despite having bandwidth left on fibre, being single core.
N3050 tops out @ 142Mbit/sec using same encryption and has one core to spare to run NAT thru. It is roughly 8 times faster than TP Link Arm SOC with basically slowest/cheapest 4W TDP Celeron CPU you can buy.
A 2012 router, with an old 560 MHz MIPS-based SoC, what appears to be only a single Ethernet phy, only 8 MB of flash, 2x2 and no 802.11ac can hardly be considered an "enthusiast" router, or even be seriously considered for purchase new (or even used, as the Archer C7 runs circles around it as as used device for AP or non-enthusiast use).
Edit: as @Gruntruck notes, 17 Mbps is almost certainly in bits, not bytes. 17 Mbps is consistent with what a reputable manufacturer claims for a current-production device based on a QCA9563 at 775MHz SoC.
Agree fully. I have Gbit fibre and fiddled for a long time with Archer C7's. In the end, I got tired and just bought chinese fanless x86 and bam: full Gbit up/down regardless of how many firewall rules, 10 times (!) VPN throughput compared to C7. Archer C7's make great AP's though. Mine are now repurposed as very beefy and versatile 5GHz AP/edge switches.
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