Got a great new piece of hardware
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how about amlogic tv boxes ?
most of it have about 2gb ram with quadcore cpu, 8gb storage..some has dual band wifi, just lack of ethernet ports
with the price of low-end routers, higher performance than high-end routers
wifi sucks so no usage as router
my favorite router for now is Newifi3 D2. its a capable hardware handling gigabit connection via hardware offloading, has gigabit rj45 ports, and all the wifi goodness. and all of this I can buy this for around 20USD or less at least here in my place.
getting this device loaded with openwrt is really easy, you dont even need fancy tools for ttl or open it up. just follow this one youtube video that enables telnet and load a .ko file which what it does is flash the bootrom with breedweb.
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Mine would have to be the Raspberry Pi 4...the 1GB or 2GB version along with a case can be had for $30-40, and the quad-core Cortex-A72 CPU + gigabit LAN is a great combination, particularly if you run it in a router-on-a-stick VLAN setup like I do.
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Do you really mean enthusiast device? $20-$40 usually means cheap, no?
Favorite cheap openwrt devices
some might feel enthusiastic at 200$+ 
like r7800
Ehh, I guess you could call the RPi4 both cheap AND an enthusiast device. The Pi itself may be cheap although you might need to end up shelling out an extra $20-30 for a managed switch, and possibly more if you want a PoE-capable setup.
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what is the advantage to have vs router??? I thought Raspberry was more like mini computer, not router
You can get with 1,2,4,or 8 gigs of ram
4 cores at 1.5ghz
SD card of any size
With a TP link ue300 gigabit adapter as a secondary gigabit you will get 980mbps thruput even with shaping
Just set one up and Iām quite happy with it so far
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A router is in fact, exactly like a mini computer.
Not sure what you mean would be the difference.
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Probably the r7800.
I have to say, as a first device with, NetGear R6350 was a breeze to work with with installing & configuring OpenWRT, everything works as expected or better than expected. There is more than enough room for extras & the refurbished price was perhap 50% less than new. All sugar & spice & everything nice for that device.
USD 20 for Newifi3 D2 is very cheap. Where are you from?
I check Aliexpress minimum around USD 45, excluded shipping and import duty and taxes. I really want to get one.
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I recently got an XCY Mini PC: i5 8365U, 8GB Ram, 256GB SSD with 2.4G wifi. To replace my old aging WRT1900ACS V2 router. I got the XCY on sale at aliexpress. I'm going to upgrade the wifi card to a wifi 5 or 6. I just need to buy the antenna connectors.
It runs really cool, much cooler than the WRT1900ACS V2
My XCY Mini PC is going good so far. I just bought some antenna connectors for wifi 5Ghz.
2x IPEX MHF4 to RP-SMA.
I hope the wifi will work well.
I've finally retired the WRT1900ACS V2 router. It's just a switch now.
Interesting shelving there, a bit Faraday-cage-esque perhaps?
The rack works fine.
I just got the Compex WLE600VX wifi card, I bought it cheap on ebay (used). Wifi 5Ghz works well. Probably could use two more antennas. I may mod it to have 3 or 4 wifi antennas in the future with wifi 6??? Not that I use Wifi at all now days, but it's good to have if I ever need it.
At this current time my connection is HFC 100/40 Mbps. I may upgrade one day to 1000/50 Mbps HFC
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https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/A2SDi-8C-HLN4F
Mini-ITX 8-core x86_64 25w TDP
16GB of ECC RAM
256GB SSD
Custom build on master using glibc with port of Intel Quickassist drivers and software
overkill 
well, maybe not so much. sqm on a 1gbps link and sqm on a second backup link + netflow + snort
EDIT: the RAM is definitely overkill - most I've seen it use is about 1GB with another GB for cached. But then, with a router lifespan of about 4 years, it's better to buy 2 DIMM modules in case 1 of them goes south. Compatible RAM is hard enough to source when the motherboard is new. 4 years down the line, it's virtually impossible to find, so better to buy it now. If one DIMM goes, I'm ok with the 8GB on the other DIMM....
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By chance, I was able to test OpenWRT 21.02 snapshot (r16430 07/04/2021) on a rather old D-Link 860L (mt7621 chip, 866MBit AC Wave 1 device with 2x2 MIMO and OpenWRT Hardware flow offloading support. The 860L also said to have rather weak internal antennas):
350 - 450 MBit/s on WiFi towards a AC 2x2 client device (2m distance to Access Point)
700 - 790 MBit/s WAN-LAN routing (1GBit cable Internet provider), hardware offloading enabled, SQM disabled
150 - 170 MBit/s with soft offloading plus piece of cake SQM
The SQM power is of course not impressive (the CPU is just old), but the high WiFi and high non-SQM routing throughput really got my attention.
Since throughput on my WiFi and cable Internet fluctuates a lot and since unfortunately SQM heavily relies on precise settings of max bandwith, SQM has limited use for me so far.
As long as SQM is off, my regular WRT32X (still considered "enthusiast") with 19.07 shows no advantage towards a nearby 2x2 WiFi client or a LAN client. Towards a 3x3 MIMO client, the WRT32X still measured a little bit faster (but the 2x2 mt7621 was pretty close in throughput to the 3x3 WRT32x).
Probably the WRT32X can beat that a bit on longer WiFi distances due to higher TX power, but I have not experimented further. Also have not yet tried 21.02 on the WRT32X.
What I mainly want to point out: I might be testing incorrectly, but the WiFi driver on the MT76 feels hugely improved in 21.02 snapshot. I still remember LEDE running with ~120 Mbit/s and OpenWRT 18.06 with ~180 MBit/s on MT7621 WiFis.
I also have noticed several new MT76xx ACwave2 devices with 3 or 4 external antennas seem to have started onboarding with 21.02. If someone already has some practical results with them, it might be interesting to hear here - their WiFi and non-SQM routing power could be very promising, if even age-old MT7621 devices like the 860L show rather impressive throughput with the upcoming OpenWRT 21.02.