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):
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
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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.
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.
well he started this ... first he writes about Gigabits then turns out quotes speed in Megabytes. Net speeds are always given in somebits per second. Just check any speed testing website, but ok my bad, should be more careful about troll's traps. Anyway ... 25 mbps easily on that wdr with 256 aes cbc with no dpi of course
Looking for a more reliable replacement for my C7... I don't need USB or any fancy stuff, all I need is a reliable AP with maximum dual band wireless performance and gigabit ethernet. Everything else is taken care of by a proper firewall. Any recommendations that don't break the bank? Cheers
https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_864_ac-wifi_gbit-eth
Can we now please come back to "recommending your favourite OpenWrt device" (that's what this topic is about), instead of "asking which device should I buy for my special usecase"?
ipq40xx are in the same price range as the archer c7, but based on ARMv7 and generally much newer and slightly faster (and with better wlan). Depending on your location, AVM Fritz!Box or ZyXEL NBG6617 would be the prime candidates.
Edit: sorry, this is less of an enthusiast device - just a modern replacement for the Archer c7 (which may have been an enthusiast device in the past, but doesn't really fit its reputation anymore, as there are better devices for less money).
My favorite OpenWRT device would actually run something like Ubuntu Server or PFSense, to say the truth, since it would be a desktop or server motherboard.
Sorry, I do not have enough experience to have a favorite OpenWRT device, only a dream OpenWRT device (preferably a modular one, with M.2 slots for WiFi, cellular, and storage (that last one can also be swapped with a U.2 header).
In my case a mikrotik router is a perfect replacement. I can use the full bandwidth (600-800 mbps) and the WiFi also strong enough for my three room flat. It can also manage dumb mikrotik ap’s if more range is needed. It was around usd 90. The only issue is the terrible documentation if you want to dig deep. I’m using stock firmware atm
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Hands down, highly recommend Netgear R8000 or R8000P (the second generation of R8000). Great compatibility with LEDE/OpenWrt, three WiFi radios, plenty of RAM and flash storage. I have been deploying these to all of the small businesses that I provide IT/network admin services to.
They have been rock solid stable, other than the occasional "bad" version that seems to have bugs (for example, LEDE 17.01.1 seemed to have some sort of memory leak that was causing the R8000s to run out of memory and lock up every hour, but 17.01.2 and Chaos Calmer 15.05.1 did not have that problem).
Aren't these broadcom based? Not well supported by openwrt at all!