In addition to limiting all-ports routing speed, lack of Fastttack might also limit single-stream performance, e.g. http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/ccr1009-7g-1c-1s-single-stream-tcp-performance-limit-with-queues/117121/1 I expect you can’t buy a Mikrotik with enough CPU power to achieve certain single-steam performance goals (or multiple high-throughput streams, where the number of streams exceed the number of cores) without hardware assist. Offload is the only answer.