Agreed... You really cannot beat TP-Link for the money, and the vast majority (but not all!) of their routers are OpenWrt supported.
I buy literally thousands of them for work (we re-purpose them as network measurement devices, running OpenWrt), and the models we use are as follows:
* TL-WR741ND - 100M ports (can saturate the WAN link).
* TL-WDR3600 - 1G ports (LAN-WAN can hit around 500Mbps with careful tuning, but I don't know how that changes when NAT is enabled)
* TL-WDR4900 - 1G ports (LAN-WAN can hit around 900Mbps, and that's even without using the NAT co-processor, which OpenWrt doesn't support)
Ones I would avoid - WR1043ND (very popular, but old now - it was the precursor to the WDR3600), WDR3500 (100Mbps ports - yuck), WDR4300 (very little difference to the WDR3600, but more expensive)
The TL-WDR4900 really is blindingly quick, largely because it has a PPC CPU inside rather than the MIPS CPU, but it's also double the price of the 3600.
Unless you need the horsepower, the TL-WDR3600 really is the way forward.
I would avoid the 802.11ac models at the moment; they're more expensive, and there's no 802.11ac driver for OpenWrt yet, so you'd be wasting your money.
I buy literally thousands of them for work (we re-purpose them as network measurement devices, running OpenWrt), and the models we use are as follows:
* TL-WR741ND - 100M ports (can saturate the WAN link).
* TL-WDR3600 - 1G ports (LAN-WAN can hit around 500Mbps with careful tuning, but I don't know how that changes when NAT is enabled)
* TL-WDR4900 - 1G ports (LAN-WAN can hit around 900Mbps, and that's even without using the NAT co-processor, which OpenWrt doesn't support)
Ones I would avoid - WR1043ND (very popular, but old now - it was the precursor to the WDR3600), WDR3500 (100Mbps ports - yuck), WDR4300 (very little difference to the WDR3600, but more expensive)
The TL-WDR4900 really is blindingly quick, largely because it has a PPC CPU inside rather than the MIPS CPU, but it's also double the price of the 3600.
Unless you need the horsepower, the TL-WDR3600 really is the way forward.
I would avoid the 802.11ac models at the moment; they're more expensive, and there's no 802.11ac driver for OpenWrt yet, so you'd be wasting your money.