Hi everyone!
I recently successfully traced some network issues I was having in Counter Strike back to my QBittorrent client having too many open connections. Global maximum was set to around 500, with a 100 max per torrent. This caused major jitter and packetloss in-game.
My current router is an Asus N18U which has Asus-Merlin on it.
The issues kept coming back even with a smaller number of open connections to the point I had to shut down the client.
I can’t remeber having these kinds of issue on Windows (current system CachyOS wit latest kernel), but I can ne wrong.
For what kind of specs should I be looking in a router for this kind of task? Would a MikroTik hEX refresh (upgraded RAM and CPU) be enough or overkill?
Thanks!
The router you need depends on your connection bandwidth and whether it uses pppoe. Also what worth considering: Do you want the router to host any VPN tunnels? Do you want some headroom for the future?
The hEX Refresh test results show that it could handle maybe 600 to maybe 800Mbps, depending on the traffic and configuration (looking at somewhere between the 512 and 1518 byte result for mixed traffic routing). It will do less with pppoe overhead. And less still if it’s hosting one end of a tunnel. But the price is good. Honestly I don’t think it would be overkill for most connections.
For me I would probably also consider the hAP ax S at this performance level. A little bit more money, but with wifi.
If you want more performance the hAP ax2 is the next step up for not much more money. It will handle gigabit fiber without a problem and also has wifi. But unlike the other two it has no USB port, so you won’t be able to expand the storage, if that is important to you.
Wifi isn’t that important to me, since I would keep my old one and use it as a brigde for phones. All other hardware (pihole, etc.) would be connected with an ethernet cable. I haven’t considered VPNs as of yet. My only consideration is it handling a lot of traffic or at least the traffic I currently have. Having to turn things off just to play a game is kinda stupid…
Where I live, there is no gigabit infrastructure :-/ I am stuck with 120 Mb/s for the forseeable future. 600-800Mb/s is plenty for me.