Which Router is best for OpenWrt in 2021?

one question that i get quite frequently in the comments of my videos or on the discord server is mark can you recommend a specific router hardware for open wrt the short answer is it depends the long answer is in this video where i will compare three routers the d-link dr-2660 the linksys wrt 3200 acm and the tp-link archer c7 stay tuned [Music] quick reminder folks this is the breakdown for this episode please use the chapters if you want to skip parts or fast forward if you're in a hurry the chapter markers are here on the timeline and also in the description of the video many thanks why did i choose those three models to compare well first i have been using the tp-link archer c7 for a very long time and i was always very happy with it actually i have three of them in my home hardware versions one two and five i was then looking for something more powerful in order to replace them slowly and compare different models my criteria were mainly the amount of memory and the cpu power all three models have one thing in common and that is that they are very well supported by open wrt in this video we will focus on two things first the ethernet performance and then the wi-fi performance that's probably what most people are interested in on top of that we will have a look at the ease of installation a brief look at the technical data of each model the price point the possibility for extensions a hint on the power consumption or in other words the cost of owning and running it and last but not least i'll try and give recommendations for best use cases let's go the first thing that you should always do before you buy a device for open wrt is go to the open wrt website and check the table of supported hardware you can filter on vendor model and many other criteria from that table you can then easily go to the hardware page that outlines details not only on how to flash open wrt to the device but also how to de-brick it if you accidentally broke the device or how to go back to the stock firmware if ever you wouldn't like open wrt the technical details page gives information on the hardware that is inside the router such as the cpu the number of usb ports the chipset used for the switch and the wi-fi and so on a nice and easy way to obtain open wrt is actually to go to this new firmware selector here and just choose the open wrt version and start typing the brand and or model name that gives you a direct download link down here little tip here select the open wrt version first and then start typing if your device is only supported by the latest version then it will not show up in older ones okay so we checked the hardware page and we got a copy of the right open wrt image please be aware that there is usually a factory install image and a sys upgrade image if you're installing open wrt for the first time on the device then you need the factory image if you upgrade from one open wrt version to another then use the sys upgrade version next let's have a quick look at the flashing process all three routers can be flashed using the web interface and just uploading open wrt from the stock firmware upgrade page the d-link procedure is a bit different in the sense that the d-link devices have a built-in recovery gui the steps to do this are very well outlined on the device page in a nutshell you need to switch off the device then hold the reset button while you switch it on and then browse to this page on 192.168.0.1 from where you can then upload the factory image that's pretty much it you can also use this page if your device is bricked very handy so all three are very easy to install from that perspective that's good some other router models require serial connections or a tftp upload netboot and the like please make sure that you check the device page before you buy one quick tip here if you are totally unsure which device you want to buy then you may have a look at the open wrt.org cites site statistics here you get an idea what's popular at the moment and what others are using for instance we can see a lot of downloads for mediatek like the d-link the second most popular group is the tp-link archer series but now let's have a look at ethernet performance in order to evaluate the ethernet performance we will have a look at two test scenarios first we will test the switch performance so basically run a performance test from one pc to another in the same subnet which should actually not put any load on the cpu but rather use the integrated switch hardware next we will look at nat and routing performance this is where the cpu and other features matter let's start with the d-link first let's browse to the status page of lucy here we see the make and model of the router the firmware and kernel versions as well as the available memory on the d-link we have roughly 177 out of 250 megabytes free further down we can see my two test machines that are connected one with a 210 address and the other one with a 234 address the test setup is such that we have two terminal windows here at the bottom i'm running h-top on the router which is a nice way of showing the cpu usage we can see that the cpu is mostly idle here below 10 roughly we can also see four cpus the media attack has two cores with two threads each so four virtual cpus in total in the top window i will launch an ipad 3 client to the other pc this way we can see the test results as well as the impact on cpu launching iperf3 to that other pc gives a quite stable 940 megabits here so very close to a gigabit and as expected there is no cpu load as the traffic goes over the switch let's now move the second pc out into the wind zone and run the same test that actually shows the first impact on cpu the rate we get here is roughly 650 megabits and one cpu is used at 100 so that seems to be single threaded not good but wait let's try hardware and software offloading what this means is that rather than having the cpu track all connections there might be hardware in the router that can do that and remove the load from the cpu in order to check we go to network then firewall and tick that software flow offloading box and the hardware flow of loading box which only appears once we have ticked the first one let's save and apply and then go back to the test setup and ta-da magic happens all of a sudden we get roughly 935 megabits and we have zero percent cpu utilization that means that hardware offloading is supported on the d-link awesome this router can route a gigabit at zero percent cpu utilization let me quickly show you the difference with software offloading only going back to lucy unticking the hardware offload box and going back what happens now is that the ethernet performance is roughly unchanged but the load is handled by the cpu just now the load is spread over two cpus rather than being single threaded we do of course prefer hardware offloading because that frees up the cpu for other things i'll talk about the impacts later for the next test we want to test routing without nat in order to do that i defined a second interface in a different subnet but inside the lan zone that will force the router to rot rather than just switch but there is no nat or masquerading in between again without offloading we get to roughly 800 megabits with high cpu then we enable the software offloading and we get to 920 megabits with even higher cpu ticking the hardware offloading box we get a whopping 940 megabits with close to zero percent cpu utilization awesome pretty much same behavior like nat so we will skip this third test on the other two now let's test the linksys on the status page we can see that it has an arm v7 processor that's much more powerful than the mediatek of the d-link and also it has more ram roughly 300 megabytes are free here let's first do the switch test pretty similar to the d-link 940 megabits and zero percent cpu you can see that we only have two cpus appearing here but don't be fooled they have much more juice we will see that in the second test with nat we get an average of 933 megabits at roughly 45 cpu let's check offloading we can barely see the effect because the speed was so high without offloading hence the cpu utilization has only slightly changed from 45 before to roughly 35 to 40 now but the speed remains the same 933 megabits the performance gain with software offloading is related to the fact that what it does is that it just forwards packets of already established connections without fiddling with them too much what does that mean in essence flow offloading is kind of a promise that the router makes in the sense that it says i know where this packet belongs to it's an established connection i won't modify it but just move it on that's the thing to keep in mind you might not be able to use smart queue management sqm with offloading enabled so if you need quality of service then you might not be able to use offloading that's currently true for all devices either way on this device we don't really need it as the cpu has enough power to cope without it right now let's give the archer c7 a go the older hardware version v2 which i'm testing here has roughly 70 megabytes of ram free and it's running on a qualcomm cpu first the switch performance that's fine we get 940 megabits cpu is low that's quite okay now where things will be different here is when we go for the nat test as you can see here we can get an average speed of about 280 megabits per second with a cpu being maxed out so let's see what offloading brings spoiler there is no hardware offloading for this device neither only software and that's quite dramatic right software offloading still has the cpu maxed out but we can get to 935 megabits here that's fine you're still a good router after all these years i'll keep you so let's sum up the ethernet tests quickly all devices can easily do gigabit ethernet inside the lan which means over the switch as long as you don't subnet and hence need routing there will be no cpu load the only device that can route gigabit ethernet without offloading is the linksys because it has the most powerful cpu the only device that currently supports hardware offloading is the d-link because it uses mediatek hardware but keep in mind that if you enable offloading then you can't use quality of service another thing to keep in mind is that if you want to run crypto software such as a vpn client or server on the router then you would need a model that has corresponding cpu capabilities in essence it all depends on your internet speed if you have like i do 100 megabit connection to the internet then everything's fine you can use any of those devices if however you have a faster internet connection or maybe even gigabit to the internet plus you wanted to do quality of service so you couldn't really use offloading then there is one important thing to keep in mind here that is heat if you have a device that is constantly running at high cpu then that device will become hot so if you are looking for a router to use let's say with openmp tcp router in order to build a gigabit connection out of many slower connections then that device will have to cope with nut plus crypto and that means you will need not only powerful hardware but also good cooling you have been warned awesome so far for the wired connections now let's test wi-fi the test scenario consists of a 5 gigahertz wifi with wpa2 pre-shared keys or psk encryption on channel 44 with 80 megahertz bandwidth so the maximum theoretical speed for one device would be 866 megabits i'm running two instances of iperf3 in server mode on different ports on a wired pc inside the lan my iphone is very close to the access point and runs an ipaf 3 client a second wi-fi client is a bit farther away and will connect to the wi-fi later and then also run an ipaf3 client on the second port first the d-link as we can see one single client on the wi-fi gets a quite good 600 megabits connection the total cpu load is i would say at about 60 to 75 percent when we add a second client then the performance of the first one goes down to roughly 300 megabits and the other one gets around about 250 megabits now i admit that i was quite surprised by this because the router has four antennas and each device has two antennas so i would have expected the multi-user mimo to provide two data streams to each one of them and get close to let's say 400 megabits per client now i assume that single user mimo would probably have covered that but ultimately i would have had to run two more tests maybe test multi-user mimo with newer client equipment plus test single user mimo with four antennas but i don't have any equipment other than another router for this i'll make a note of that and maybe do additional wi-fi tests in the future based on mimo anyhow the connection is stable and fast for both that's what counts in the end cool let's have a look at the linksys pretty much the same scenario maybe a bit slower on the total numbers but overall excellent performance looking at the cpu load no surprise as we already know that this cpu is really powerful now if you want to use the wrt 3200 acm as an all-in-one device that means use it as a router and also as a wi-fi access point then there are a couple of things to be aware of the wi-fi drivers or rather the wi-fi firmware is quite picky with regards to the configuration here's some best practices for the configuration that have helped me run stable wi-fi on the wrt 3200 acm including fast roaming and the like first off as you can see here there are three wi-fi adapters in the device now you might say awesome i could use that for wi-fi mesh or multi-channel or the like but don't be fooled the third adapter here the 8887 is not very powerful it does not have good antennas attached plus it can only support i think 10 users or so the reason is that this adapter is used for weather radar detection and it is not meant to be a real access point hardware so in a nutshell it's not really usable most people actually switch it off since i have switched it off things are actually running stable second i couldn't get fast roaming to work with that marvel chipset on open wrt21 and to make things even worse if you enable and then disable features in the wi-fi settings it might be that the wi-fi stops working completely that's true for open wrt version 21 but with the last stable release 19.7 it worked well so my next tip here is to use the stable release for the time being don't forget that version 21 of open wrt has moved to linux kernel 5 and that's actually a profound change from a driver's perspective last but not least make sure that you set the country code or the so-called regulatory domain of the remaining two radios to the same value i'll put the commands to run into the description for me doing those three things actually led to stable and reliable wi-fi with multiple ssids multiple bands and fast roaming just be warned that if you don't follow the best practices then you might run into unexpected issues here i even opened the router's case at one point in order to see if maybe i could replace the wifi hardware with something that is better supported by linux but inside all components are soldered to the pcb so you can't really customize anything here last but not least the archer c7 the hardware versions above v1 all use the atheros ath 10k driver so that's actually very well supported and i do know out of personal experience that things like fast roaming etc do work very well with that device looking at the performance we can see that we get to a maximum of 345 megabits here and that's related to cpu power the built-in wi-fi hardware could easily do more the 5 gigahertz wi-fi is actually an mpcie card inside the router so it can be removed or replaced very easily that's actually quite unique please keep in mind that the archer c7 is quite old and also only has three times three mimo meaning it has three five gigahertz antennas so definitely not something you want if you are striving for gigabit wi-fi but given the low price point of the device i would say it's still a perfect device if your internet speed is let's say 150 megabits or below great so let's sum up from a wi-fi perspective the d-link dr-2660 seems to be the clear winner given the complexity of wi-fi on the wrt 3200 acm still the archer c7 is a great solution if your speed is 100 megabits or below given the low price so to answer the question from the beginning which hardware is best for open wrt it really depends on what you want to do are you looking for a cheap device for let's say 100 megabit internet take the archer c7 do you need a powerful router for gigabit vpn but you don't necessarily need wi-fi on that device use the wrt 3200 acm are you looking for a good all-in-one device maybe try the d-link dear 2660. the archer c7 currently sells at the street price of thirty to seventy dollars the d-link roughly eighty to one hundred fifty dollars and the links is one hundred thirty to two hundred fifty dollars also keep in mind that the d-link is only supported since version 21.02 really which was still pre-release date at the time of making this video so you might want to wait for the 2103 or four at last furthermore be advised that the wrt 3200 acm consumes much more power than the other two that means you can't power it with normal poe it needs more than 15 watts i didn't have any issues powering the other two with poe the d-link and the linksys have usb3 while the archer c7 only has usb2 that might be something to consider as well but please i need to point this out once more what's decisive here is not the vendor i can't really say that one vendor is better or worse than the others what's much more important is the hardware that is used inside i mentioned earlier in the video that you might want to check the open wrt side statistics and if we observe this over the last months then we can clearly see that there is high demand for the mediatek architecture based on the mt7621 or mt-7622 chips so it looks like those could be the next everybody's darling that's one reason why i opted for the d-link dr2660 just another tip here there are many models that seem to be compatible to the 2660 namely the 1960 the 2640 and even the 3060. i recently bought a 3060 second hand on ebay for 50 bucks so if you keep your eyes open then there might be opportunity to get one for cheap and i'm very happy with the wi-fi so far that's it for today guys i'm currently in the process of assembling my own router with different router boards i will try the banana pi r64 the microtech router board rb m33g and the pc engines apu d4d board they all have mpcie slots for wi-fi and sim card slots for 4g lte hardware so that's going to be an interesting episode please make sure that you subscribe and also check the bell or reminder button so that you get reminded when that episode comes out until then many thanks for watching liking commenting subscribing and sharing the video with us stay safe stay healthy bye for now you

Channel: OneMarcFifty

Views: 36,632

Keywords: Best router for OpenWrt, D-Link DIR-2640, D-Link DIR-2660, Flow offloading OpenWrt, Linksys OpenWrt, OpenWrt, OpenWrt Hardware, TP-Link OpenWrt, WRT32x OpenWrt, Which Router is best, Which router OpenWrt, d-link openwrt, d-link router setup, linksys wrt3200acm, tp-link ac1750, tp-link archer c7, wrt32x openwrt wifi

Id: wP1ZcQBLL1k

Length: 22min 43sec (1363 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 28 2021