Advice Regarding Custom Build

RouterOS General
1

Hi there!

I’m about a week away from having Starlink up and running and I have realized that my poor little hAP Lite will not be powerful enough for the bandwidth I’ll (probably) get with Starlink.

I’ve looked over a few options for an upgrade as I really love RouterOS, but I realized that I have an old PC sitting here collecting dust that I could potentially turn into a router. (i7 4770K, 16GB DDR3 1600MHz, 1TB HDD).

As far as I’m aware, I’d just need to purchase a multi-port PCI network card and then figure out how I go about installing Router OS.

I’m planning on doing a decent bit of Queue Tree shenanigans once Starlink is up and running, so I’d basically need to have hardware capable of traffic shaping on 150Mbps (and probably much higher given that gigabit is the “goal” of Starlink).

What can I expect from a custom Router OS system?
Are there any issues that could arise here?
Any features that aren’t included in version of Router OS software I’d be installing?

Any advice is much appreciated, thanks!

2

Current release versions of ROS are either x86 version or CHR version. x86 version gets installed on barebone hardware but lacks many drivers for modern hardware (including many modern NICs and SATA disks). CHR version relies on hypervisor for hardware drivers and is currently better choice with that regard. In v7 things are bound to change but it’s yet to be seen how much.
Both x86 and CHR need license to run with decent performance … licenses cost quite a few bucks.

Not to forget: a general-purpose PC likely consumes much more watts per bit routed than a decent purpose-built router (like RB4011 or RB5009). Given that routers tend to run 24/7 the extra power costs amount for a few cents after all.