Well, if you're in the US, Walmart has had the Belkin RT3200 at $63 for the past few days. Depending on how much you're willing to spend it's pretty reasonable to just grab one for experimentation. (Despite identical internals, my searches show the Linksys E8450 is typically priced almost twice as high as the Belkin, and only differs in that it has a black case instead of the Belkin's white one.)
Experience: I've installed two RT3200s (sister's for almost a year and son's for about 6 months, both as their main routers) and they've been rock solid. I have another one sitting on the desk here (next to a couple x86 routers) that I use for configuration and development experiments, never had any issues with it. (The RT3200 was pressed into service for our main WiFi AP for a couple weeks when I screwed up the standalone WAP.)