For our new house I was thinking about a router with 4 or more lan ports. We have 3 camera's a QNAP nas, Honeywell Evo and several PC's First I stumbled upon the PC Engine APU4D system. This system seems to deliver quite a bang for the bucks.But then I found Teklager. Because they seem to be more focused on the Scandinavian market I searched a little bit further and then I found these devices on Aliexpress.
Even a I5 7200U seems to fall in a price category I can afford and you can order them with 6 LAN ports.
But I'm reluctant to buy from Aliexpress, What about safety (backdoors) and do the numbers meet the given specifications.
Who has traveled this adventure before me and can share his or her thoughts?
What are your recomendations.
Since you are going to be installing your own software, I don't think backdoors are a big issue.
I wouldn't recommend an i5 though just because it's probably more power consumption and not really needed. If you can get something like a J4xxx series you'll get a good bang for your buck and low power consumption.
I haven't actually bought from aliexpress, nor do I have one of these newer devices, but I do have an x86 built based on a J1900 and I certainly would upgrade to something like a 4 port x86 if I were replacing my current system.
the 6 LAN ports is really not as big a deal as you might think. I wouldn't use the device like a switch but rather I would actually use a managed switch. The managed switch will keep the router from having to use its CPU to forward packets between LAN machines. At a minimum something like the sg108e from TP-Link... going up from there I might look at one of the 16 port TP-Link jetstream switches or a 24 port ZyXel (which I have and it works well).
at a minimum the device should have 2 LAN ports, but most of them you can get 4 ports for not much more money... I'd probably look at the 4 port devices and consider maybe doing a bonded WAN and bonded LAN, mainly for the redundancy because you probably don't have a 2Gbps WAN.
EDIT: looking at aliexpress it seems like the j3160 quad core devices are more or less the best available... the faster 4xxx series seems to be more concentrated in the desktop/media PC market... 3160 is relatively fast compared to my j1900 and certainly enough for all but multi-gigabit WANs, and quad core is better than 2 core... so I might be looking in that sweet spot.
Keep in mind that under normal circumstances you'll route (process) the traffic between all the ports on a computer which will require quite a powerful CPU. I would also recommend you to look at a managed switch like the Zyxel 1900 or higher series. As far as performance goes you probably want something equal to a i3 7-8th-gen or so if you want some headroom. The APUs have really old hardware just be aware of that.