Hi all, I'm about to purchase a new router for open wrt experimentation. I have a few on a short list and would like some feedback/ recommendations from the experts. I have been googling for many weeks but have found a lot of conflicting and confusing information. I was going to go with Asus and merlin but while reading reviews on amazon i find that asus seem to have a large problem with quality control plus their hardware is very expensive.

The next best seems to be TP Link, and so my shortlist is as follows:
WDR 3600
WDR 4300
Archer C5
Archer C7

I have seen some very good prices on the archers and with the AC and more flash they seem to be the wise choice, but having said that I have read on this forum that there seems to be a few problems with them - namely with flashing and with the 5ghz band, and so it would seem to me that the older 3600/ 4300 machines may be more reliable with a tad less specs. I would prefer to have the AC standard if possible but not willing to put up with flaky performance to get it.

My goal is to learn about networking with open wrt on this router, i hope to also run a pfsense machine and eventually set up a vpn server amongst other things. I guess absolute blazing performance while very welcome is not my primary concern. I would prefer to have consistency and reliability then high performance.

Any and all suggestions/  help with this would be very gratefully appreciated.

WDR3600/4300 have been supported for much longer and have been tested more thoroughly. They're more or less the same, with 300 vs 450 mbps speeds on the 5 GHz band.

Archer C5 & C7 are also basically the same from a hardware perspective. The AC support is more recent and isn't totally fleshed out - for example, there is no support for AC configuration in Luci as of Barrier Breaker 14.07 (but available in trunk I think).

Personally, unless you really need AC support (like a lot of high speed transfers on your local network), I'd go with the WDR3600/4300.

I had the same question a few weeks ago, and came up with pretty much the same list of possibilities as you. I decided on the Archer C7 out of the four you listed, it seemed like the most future-proof. I only wish it had external antennas for the 2.4g radio so I could upgrade them or remote install them. I had no problems putting OpenWrt BarrierBreaker on it, just a simple download and click to install. A few days later I moved to a trunk build so I could get 802.11AC support in LuCI. Even with several optional packages installed including StrongSwan IPsec suite, my 16MB flash is only half full. So much easier to work with than my old TP-Link with 4MB flash.

NOTE: If you decide to go with a current (as of this post) trunk build on the C7, you will need to manually install the ath10k pkg for the 5ghz and then redo your wifi detect to get the radio loaded. I also noticed that LuCI only showed 17db as the max for the radio transmit power until I manually set it to 30 via UCI. After that, LuCI showed all values up to 30db.

Thanks for the info. I went for the archer in the end.

I have not flashed it yet but will update this post with my findings when i get round to it.