Netgear Nighthawk arriving today, firmware tips?

[smapdi]

I took advantage of the newegg rebate that made this router $120. It's out for delivery today which means I get to replace my aging 4th generation Airport Extreme and hopefully improve 5GHz performance on my laptop (among other things).

My question is the following: I have read posts with people complaining about needing to reboot this router every 2 or 3 days. Is this still the case with the latest Netgear firmware? Stability is extremely important (mostly cause the wife will not be cool with random network outages) so I want to plan ahead.

If the stock firmware is not quite baked yet, how is DD-WRT these days? I haven't used it since I gave away my old Linksys WRT310N. Is it a stable daily driver (no random rebooting required)? Is the range of both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands about the same as stock? I know WAN performance hits a wall at ~300Mbps but that's a non-issue for the forseeable future. Are there any other caveats?

If I do go with DD-WRT, I read that the Kong firmware is considered the best for this router right now but the instructions on the DD-WRT forums are (as usual) semi worthless. What IS the difference between the K3_AC_ARM_BT_NEWD, K3_AC_ARM_BT_OLDD, K3_AC_ARM_STD_NEWD, and K3_AC_ARM_STD_OLDD builds?

Thanks for your help!

 

[htismaqe]

The wired/wireless communication issue I and other have experienced exists in all firmware I've tried from 1.0.2.164 initial release all the way to the 1.0.3.56 firmware released last week.

If you're looking for stability, DD-WRT is where it's at. Lots and lots of favorable reports both here and over on the Netgear forums. Very little performance difference and none of the issues people are seeing in the Netgear stock FW.

The differences in the files really come down to two things:

NEWD builds contain the latest Broadcom drivers. OLDD contains the most recent stable set of drivers. I believe the main difference there is that the new drivers do not allow setting of Tx power but people have been having good 5Ghz performance with them despite that.

 

[smapdi]

The wired/wireless communication issue I and other have experienced exists in all firmware I've tried from 1.0.2.164 initial release all the way to the 1.0.3.56 firmware released last week.

If you're looking for stability, DD-WRT is where it's at. Lots and lots of favorable reports both here and over on the Netgear forums. Very little performance difference and none of the issues people are seeing in the Netgear stock FW.

The differences in the files really come down to two things:

NEWD builds contain the latest Broadcom drivers. OLDD contains the most recent stable set of drivers. I believe the main difference there is that the new drivers do not allow setting of Tx power but people have been having good 5Ghz performance with them despite that.

Ok, so I'll be going with DD-WRT and since stability is the name of the game, OLDD I guess. Now what about the 2 versions of OLDD? STD and AC makes me think that STD does not have the 802.11AC stuff enabled?

 

[htismaqe]

From looking at the builds available now, I don't think he's doing the STD and AC forks anymore. Not sure about that though.

And just so you know, the IDEA (theoretically) is that NEWD is bleeding edge and OLDD is "last known stable".

However, a lot of people have reported that NEWD is rock solid and stable in and of itself.

 

[Razor512]

I have not tried the latest firmware, but one version lower than the latest has been running for weeks with no issue or reboots at all.

I just wish netgear would release a firmware which adds openvpn support for mobile devices

Range and performance is awesome (with an AC1300 client, I have been able to hit over 700 mbit/s sustained using ixchariot high performance throughput script, after finding the optimal distance that is as close as possible without receiver overload )

 

[smapdi]

I have not tried the latest firmware, but one version lower than the latest has been running for weeks with no issue or reboots at all.

I just wish netgear would release a firmware which adds openvpn support for mobile devices

Range and performance is awesome (with an AC1300 client, I have been able to hit over 700 mbit/s sustained using ixchariot high performance throughput script, after finding the optimal distance that is as close as possible without receiver overload )

Latest DD-WRT or latest stock?

 

[htismaqe]

I have not tried the latest firmware, but one version lower than the latest has been running for weeks with no issue or reboots at all.

I just wish netgear would release a firmware which adds openvpn support for mobile devices

Range and performance is awesome (with an AC1300 client, I have been able to hit over 700 mbit/s sustained using ixchariot high performance throughput script, after finding the optimal distance that is as close as possible without receiver overload )

If you're running 1.0.3.24 with zero issues, consider yourself very, very lucky.

 

[RogerSC]

I've been using the dd-wrt firmware for several months now, it makes the R7000 stable and perform well for me. Wouldn't touch the Netgear stock firmware any more. I do try out new stock firmware releases, but they never fix the problems that I've reported, so no point in using them.

For the dd-wrt firmware releases, they all have wireless-AC (of course).

However, there are 2 dd-wrt versions that include bit torrent functionality, and two versions that don't. The "STD" versions don't include the torrent functionality, the "BT" versions do include torrent functionality. Also, the STD versions include zabbix, and the BT ones don't include that.

The other variable is whether you want to use the older ("OLDD") or newer wireless drivers ("NEWD").

The version that's been working best for me is the "STD" "NEWD" (no bit torrent functionality, newer wireless drivers). I find that the newer wireless drivers perform better for me, and I don't see any instability. Some people, due to the hardware that they're using or router functionality seem to see some router instability with the newer drivers that they don't see with the older wireless drivers. So people generally start with NEWD and if that doesn't work for them, go back to OLDD. Or people that don't want to try newer drivers just start with the OLDD drivers. Your choice *smile*.

The other 4 files that you see in Kong's firmware repository are checksums for the 4 firmware binary files.

For more on the fine points of this, see the Netgear R7000 dd-wrt user forum.

 

[smapdi]

Thanks @RogerSC, right before I read your response Kong seems to have added a .txt file to the repository giving a brief explanation of what each bin file actually is.

 

[irev210]

Thanks for the replies - this is helpful for me as well.

 

[RogerSC]

Just an added note. I had flashed my router to the latest Netgear stock firmware to work with Netgear support on an issue that I reported. Netgear blew me off on the time that they promised to call, I waited over an hour for them to call, or at least tell me that they weren't going to call.

Anyways, I've gone back to dd-wrt firmware on the R7000, and am very happy with the stability and performance of it again.