Overclocking RT-AC56U

[oversim]

650Mhz in an Asus Merlin N66u
Anyone else overclocked this router?

 

[primitivo]

... and it booted!!!!

So I measure the internet speed using 200Mb file download at testmy.net and this is highest ever on VPN: 22.5 Mbps

Turning VPN off, the same site: 24.5 Mbps

This is, ladies and gentlemen, reason I overclock

How is the stability after memory speed bump?
How to overclock it?

 

[Sky1111]

How is the stability after memory speed bump?
How to overclock it?

Stability seems to be fine, it was up all night while another PC was downloading "test" files, and I do not see any issues so far.

saying that - if anyone knows a program to stress test the router, i will gladly try it. Same with PC overclocking - sometime you set crazy clocks, and it will even boot to windows, but the moment you load CPU, it BSODs.

I am thinking to try to download something very fast like Ubuntu or another legit torrent to max out my download speed, but what will it prove it?

regarding how to overclock the memory - I actually updated my very first posts on this thread (to include memory settings)

 

[oversim]

Maybe the best way to stress a router is to download a torrent, a very very fast torrent, using router itself with transmission. This is going to be cpu and ram bound.
A lot of fast VPN traffic is very cpu bound, too.

 

[primitivo]

[...]
saying that - if anyone know a program to stress test the router, i will gladly try it. Same with PC overclocking - sometime you set crazy clocks, and it will even boot to windows, but the moment you load CPU, it BSODs.

I am thinking to try to download something very fast like Ubuntu or another legit torrent to max out my download speed, but what will it prove it?
[...]

It won't prove much since VPN use one core only. You would have to disable HW acceleration and max out the router's WAN speed (240Mbit) downloading huge files all the time. But as you have 10x slower WAN it is not possible. I am on 200Mbps so won't stress it enough as well...... or perhaps I could run VPN excluding some devices, disable HW acceleration and max out WAN speed on excluded devices, while on the other max out VPN speeds

 

[Sky1111]

It won't prove much since VPN use one core only. You would have to disable HW acceleration and max out the router's WAN speed (240Mbit) downloading huge files all the time. But as you have 10x slower WAN it is not possible. I am on 200Mbps so won't stress it enough as well...... or perhaps I could run VPN excluding some devices, disable HW acceleration and max out WAN speed on excluded devices, while on the other max out VPN speeds

primitivo, can you please oc-ing on your very fast internet as soon as you solve cooling issue (hint - Staples might have a USB fan and yes, it works fine from the router port)? I really want to know if getting faster internet will bring any further internet speed improvement...

 

[Sky1111]

and maybe I am wrong, but I'd rather NOT turn things on or off on the router... I would like to stress test it in the way I am using it...

will running torrents on the router itself impact VPN speeds? I suspect it will impact very negatively...

right now I am downloading 2 versions of Edubuntu at 2-2.65Mbs and my CPU load looks like this:

CPU Load Average (1, 5, 15 mins) 0.58, 0.36, 0.22

 

[primitivo]

primitivo, can you please oc-ing on your very fast internet as soon as you solve cooling issue (hint - Staples might have a USB fan and yes, it works fine from the router port)? I really want to know if getting faster internet will bring any further internet speed improvement...

I will definitely overclock it as soon as I buy the cooling solution.
I have been testing VPN speeds (I am with Astrill) and I was able to hit on RouterPro UDP 2.95 MB/s (23.6 Mbit). See here that more than 16Mbps is achievable on non-overclocked router (I didn't manage to capture 2.95 MB/s unfortunately). RouterPro is modified / optimized OpenVPN binary by Astrill. My speeds are not stable on UDP protocol perhaps due to latency of 172ms that I have to their LA server. Speeds fluctuates between 1.2MB/s - 2.95MB/s), while on TCP I get fairly constant 2 MB/s (but never above 2.10 MB/s).

The way I test the speeds is to download a large file from hosting facility with great connectivity using download manager, e.g. DownThemAll addon (Firefox).

PS. You can see more detailed and more up to date CPU Load using ssh, typing "top" and pressing 1. You will see split by CPU. The only thing is I don't know why it doesn't show CPU Load properly for UDP procotol, while for TCP it shows properly.

 

[Sky1111]

...eh... how do you do the SSH thing? (meant to ask you much earlier) - could you kindly show how to do it step by step?

BTW, my temperature under load reached 62 Celsius, which IMHO still OK

 

[primitivo]

...eh... how do you do the SSH thing? (meant to ask you much earlier) - could you kindly show how to do it step by step?

BTW, my temperature under load reached 62 Celsius, which IMHO still OK

Are you on PC or Mac?
If you are on Windows, download Putty and follow the steps from the 2nd page.

 

[Sky1111]

the load on the router:

- a PC with torrents (legit)
- down-them-all downloading 1GB file
- network transfer of 30GB at 75MB/s
- 1080p stream from server to smart TV
- few wireless and wired clients
- CPU load varies between .64 and .71
- CPU temperature - stable at 62 degrees

 

[primitivo]

the load on the router:

- a PC with torrents (legit)
- down-them-all downloading 1GB file
- network transfer of 30GB at 75MB/s
- 1080p stream from server to smart TV
- few wireless and wired clients
- CPU load varies between .64 and .71
- CPU temperature - stable at 62 degrees

SSH per core would be more detailed and accurate.
Anyway, are you in Siberia or in some other cold country?
I have just checked with someone else from my country and his CPU also run at 80 degrees. How come yours and Merlin's differ so much from mine?

 

[Sky1111]

So I finally figure out how to do that SSH thing... this is awful - only one CPU core is loaded, the second one is completely idle!!!!!

All my downloads finished... need to start new ones...

 

[primitivo]

So I finally figure out how to do that SSH thing... this is awful - only one CPU core is loaded, the second one is completely idle!!!!!

All my downloads finished... need to start new ones...

Did you press "1" ?

 

[Sky1111]

SSH per core would be more detailed and accurate.
Anyway, are you in Siberia or in some other cold country?
I have just checked with someone else from my country and his CPU also run at 80 degrees. How come yours and Merlin's differ so much from mine?

no I am definitely not in Siberia... LOL

The room temperature is 24-25 degrees, that probably helps...

 

[primitivo]

no I am definitely not in Siberia... LOL

The room temperature is 24-25 degrees, that probably helps...

I heard that disabling AiCloud and USB server things drops down the temp to 60 degrees. But how to disable them? I didn't enable them in first place.

 

[Sky1111]

man, no matter what we do, this thing just keeps running... which is a good thing!

Now - how do we spread the load between the CPU cores?
I am aware that OpenVPN is single threaded app despite of people asking to make multi-threaded for a while... how about the rest if the load?

Merlin, is there any way to assign OpenVPN to CPU core #1 and the rest of the load to CPU core #2?
If not, what would be the second heaviest app/service running on the router to be assigned to the idle CPU core?

I think by optimizing the workload, we can achieve much better OpenVPN performance on even not overclocked router...

 

[Sky1111]

Did you press "1" ?

yes I did. I see two lines CPU0 at 20% load and CPU1 at 0%

 

[primitivo]

From what I have noticed there is no need to assign OpenVPN to particular CPU, as multi-threading will work if one of the CPU is busy, the other will get load.

Anyway, I was able to reproduce Merlin's (local) speeds over (remote) VPN using Astrill's RouterPro protocol. 69 Mbit over VPN, CPU is a bottleneck. See here. Looks like if I OC to 1200Mhz I will be able to hit 100+Mbit.

What I have done is to connect to the closest server, hence decreasing the latency and reaching maximum speeds. However this is not possible to achieve using standard OpenVPN protocols due to CPU bottleneck.

 

[cvx01]

Great In N66U in nvram we have:

clkfreq=600,300,150

The first value are the Mhz of cpu core, but I don't know about 300 and 150 values.
Reduced speed value? Memory clock?

Now I'm trying 630,300,150...

For N66U users, this might help with the values. Below is for the N66, so perhaps they are similar?

"where 600 (MHZ) is CPU freq, 300 - memory freq, 150 - backplane bus work frequency."

http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/overclock-rt-n66.38326/