How much routing power does the Netgear WNDR3700 posses?

[RamGuy]

I'm about to get a dedicated fiber optic link connected to my house in the next couple of weeks, providing me with a 85/85mbps connection!

The big question is, whether I want to go for the provided D-Link DVG-5802S Gateway, use my NetGear WNDR3700 or the self-built DD-WRT router I'll be building in the next few days?

I've mostly decided to NOT go for the DVG-5802S, as it's weaker, slower and more unstable than the WNDR3700.. This I know for a fact, because I've had experience with one before!

So the question is, will the WNDR3700 posses enough routing power to handle whatever number for simultaneous connections etc.. I can possible be throwing at it? I know that the DVG-5802S came a little short when we had it for a while ago, but then again it's a Ubicom based hardware which is supposedly much weaker than the Atheros based WNDR3700? The DVG-5802S is basicly a A3 DIR-655 with a few more gigabit ports and other firmware.


So would I want my WNDR3700 configured as my gateway for my upcoming fiber optic network? Or would I want to use my upcoming home built router consisting of:

- Zotac H55-ITX WiFi (H55ITX-A-E)
- Intel Core i5-650 @3.2GHz
- Crucial DDR3 1600MHz - 7-7-7-20 2x2GB
- UBIQUITI SR71E Mini-PCIe Atheros AR9280 Wireless NIC

Running DD-WRT Mega firmware on CompactFlash card



The whole point and plan behind the self built router, is to build something that cannot go wrong, which can't possible get crippled by all my connections etc..


But would the WNDR3700 be enough by itself? Rendering my whole plan of building my own router useless? Would running DD-WRT X86 on that kind of hardware actually be somewhat unstable, because I doubt it's been optimized for such hardware?


Any thoughts on this matter?

 

[thiggins]

The WNDR3700 is certainly fast enough at over 400 Mbps. Its weakness is in number of simultaneous sessions, which is about 2K.

If you want something more robust for a homebuilt router, look at Untangle or PFSense.

 

[RamGuy]

Do you have any router you could recommend me?
Something that can handle 100mbps connection with ease, and be rock solid even when tossing quite a few simultanious connections at it?

Doesn't need to be wireless, just have to feature 1x Giganit WAN, atleast 2x Gigabit Lan and sone stable and desant firmware!

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

If you want something that will handle pretty much anything you can throw at it, and have an insane amount of max concurrent connections...check out PFSense. Tim did a brief writeup on it, do a search of the main site.

Snag a properly supported dual core Atom box with a couple of gigs of RAM and good Intel NICs..and you'll have an unstoppable router that will give you performance abilities of some high end $25,000 router that ISPs and huge enterprise companies use....with superior QoS/traffic shaping so your network is still usable like...you can still surf fine and play online games lag free while your some other PC goes crazy with torrents.

I've run PFSense at home for year, I run it on an old IBM Thinkpad laptop, with a PCMCIA NIC as the 2nd NIC. I just bought another house that I'm moving to, will be having fiber in there..and a branch office offsite data center tied with my main office..so I'll be having a little server cabinet in there..and I'm using PFSense for that...in a 1U SuperMicro Atom D510 chassis with a pair of Intel gigabit NICs. The success of *nix distros is often based on which NICs you use, you want good hardware controller based NICs like Intels, not "software" controller based cheapo NICs like realteks.