Trying to decide between Asus RT-AC88U, Synology RT2600AC & TP-LINK ARCHER C5400

[NUTW0RX]

just did. impressive and reassuring.
previously i've seen the rt2600ac specs page (thanks to NUTW0RX) and really liked how technical, clean and informative it was compared to the constant (if obvious) gamey attitude of asus in everything they do.

There's another recent thread with someone considering a new router and not sure if you've seen it, but they're more interested in a nanny state.
https://www.snbforums.com/threads/considering-a-synology-router.37654/


Real gamers use multi-monitor PCs with wired connections.

 

[intraz]

There's another recent thread with someone considering a new router and not sure if you've seen it, but they're more interested in a nanny state.
https://www.snbforums.com/threads/considering-a-synology-router.37654/


Real gamers use multi-monitor PCs with wired connections.

thanks for the post.
since no one but you actually answered the OP there i learned a few more relevant things (and kudos for the mature response on upbringing).
things seem to heat up quite quickly in this forum

for me now it's about taking the time to make up my mind regarding firmware features and firmware future safety.
from all the responses it seems synology give good long term support/updates and other routers get that through open source firmwares.

and i second your real gamers sig...

 

[intraz]

it's been a while but i just wanted to thank you guys for the help.
i ended up buying the rt2600ac. i received it a few days ago and for now i like it a lot.
srm is excellent and lan and wan performance are great (i knew my isp's modem-router was bad. i just didn't know how bad.).
wlan seems fine in general, though throughput on 5ghz was very unstable (jumping around values between 100 and 250 Mbps).
i keep wondering how the ac88u would have been but the same would have been true the other way around.

 

[TheManFromUncle]

it's been a while but i just wanted to thank you guys for the help.
i ended up buying the rt2600ac. i received it a few days ago and for now i like it a lot.
srm is excellent and lan and wan performance are great (i knew my isp's modem-router was bad. i just didn't know how bad.).
wlan seems fine in general, though throughput on 5ghz was very unstable (jumping around values between 100 and 250 Mbps).
i keep wondering how the ac88u would have been but the same would have been true the other way around.

I'm sure after you have accustomed yourself with the settings and tried a few things, your 5GHz will work perfectly.

 

[intraz]

That's the plan. I only had time to do basic setup and didn't yet get to go into all the configurations.
I am wondering if the smart connect feature might be responsible. Would I get better performance if I disable it and configure things myself?

 

[TheManFromUncle]

That's the plan. I only had time to do basic setup and didn't yet get to go into all the configurations.
I am wondering if the smart connect feature might be responsible. Would I get better performance if I disable it and configure things myself?

Personally, I'm having great results with smart connect turned on.

 

[intraz]

I don't have a usability issue since I have only 2 undemanding wireless clients (one of them is a smart bulb )
but I would still love to know that things are basically running well. I am slightly anal this way.

 

[ulaganath]

4k movies are not just youtube or Netflix. There are original movies with size as high as 80gb single file with 10bit HEVC codec and HDR.

So streaming that from NAS itself need one with 300Mbps or 30-40MB/s speed. Which is is heavy traffic.

 

[intraz]

ulaganath, yep that's exactly my use case and I didn't bother getting down to the specific bandwidth number back when I was answered here.
Funnily enough I did get to check them out today at work and 4K (depending on codec, color depth, frame rate, etc.) can range anywhere between 10-25 Mbps (for internet grade videos) and the number you specified and even higher (for high quality video files).
Luckily for the internet/streaming it seems things will get better with Beamr and similar tech (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-predict-video-encoding-technology-explosion-2017-mark-donnigan).

 

[Stepalex]

Owners of RT2600ac, can you test your speed on OpenVPN please? I was about to buy it as love my experience with Syno NASes, but there are reports on Syno forums about abysmal VPN performance.

PS Currently running Merlin on RT-AC68u, buy VPN performance is poor, thus need to upgrade.

 

[intraz]

Hi Stepalex,
pete y testing tested the RT2600ac for quite a while.
I would look around for his posts here and on https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/.
I got it a while ago and am happy with it but I have no need for VPN currently and didn't test it.

 

[avtella]

The Krait-300 Cores in the RT2600 are faster on paper at (3.39 DMIPS/MHz) than the Cortex A9 based Broadcom (2.5 DMIPS/MHz) in the AC3100 plus the Krait cores are running at a higher clock speed (1.7 Ghz vs 1.4 Ghz) as well, to top it off, so I would assume the Synology would be significantly faster on OpenVPN. I'm not sure how the hardware crypto accelerators compare between the two though, which could have a major impact.

 

[System Error Message]

the krait 300 is faster than the cortex A9 in every way. Other than that qualcomm's AC platform is generally better than broadcom so far. Broadcom's offerings has been hyped the whole time (like calling their dual core with 3 accelerators a pentacore). Broadcom did not include everything the A9 had to offer but the krait 300 has been used in phones before.

 

[avtella]

Kong from DD-WRT did some benchmarking:

The following should give you good idea of the performance differences.

Speed test used: openssl speed aes-256-cbc:

AC68U (1.0 Ghz Version) Equivalent:
R7000 (Dual Core Cortex A9 @ 1.0 Ghz):
aes-256 cbc 24490.42k 26560.11k 27234.05k 27310.52k 27374.9

AC88U/AC3100 Equivalent:
R8500 (Dual Core Coretx A9 @ 1.4 Ghz):
aes-256 cbc 34406.62k 37279.08k 38005.37k 38190.44k 38395.90k

RT2600AC Equivalent:
R7800 (Dual Core Krait 300 @ 1.7 Ghz) (Similar to Cortex A15):
aes-256 cbc 53405.87k 59967.87k 61672.11k 61427.03k 61601.65k

Source:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=994407&sid=377c15d45210ec857f1691dc7f256105

 

[sfx2000]

RT2600AC Equivalent:
R7800 (Dual Core Krait 300 @ 1.7 Ghz) (Similar to Cortex A15):
aes-256 cbc 53405.87k 59967.87k 61672.11k 61427.03k 61601.65k

Intel ATOM...

type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
aes-256-cbc      32463.04k   130427.03k   456890.11k  2666487.81k 17616076.80

anyways, I don't this is a decider - the Syno has a pretty useful UI...

 

[avtella]

sfx2000, I was responding to Stepalex's question on OpenVPN performance hence that post, but yeah I definitely agree with you that the CPU alone shouldn't be a deciding factor for a router.

 

[Stepalex]

Kong from DD-WRT did some benchmarking:

The following should give you good idea of the performance differences.

Thank you for the link. However I am getting much lower speeds (~28Mbps), and I wonder if it's down to the firmware, as based on the specs alone Synology should be capable of much higher speeds.

 

[sfx2000]

sfx2000, I was responding to Stepalex's question on OpenVPN performance hence that post, but yeah I definitely agree with you that the CPU alone shouldn't be a deciding factor for a router.

For OVPN purposes - now that's we're seeing higher bandwidth connections, the ARM's at the moment, are falling behind...

Routing, they're doing ok, but for something that is as compute and memory intensive as OVPN...

 

[avtella]

True, can't argue against that.

 

[intraz]

For OVPN purposes - now that's we're seeing higher bandwidth connections, the ARM's at the moment, are falling behind...

Routing, they're doing ok, but for something that is as compute and memory intensive as OVPN...

Is it the architecture that's important or just the capabilities of current ARM processors?
What current processors (for home use) are up to the task?

Thanks