Which mikrotik hardware to choose for fast home network?

Hardware MikroTik hardware general
1

I want to build a very fast wireless home network based on mikrotik hardware, because I’m tired of consumer based products that don’t work as expected or just kill the bandwitch.

I’ve the folowwing current network setup:
1 PC (wifi n) + 2 notebooks (wifi n) + ipad/iphone (wifi g) + 2 media tanks (gigabit lan) + NAS running rtorrent (gigabit lan)
All of this is connected to 100mbit provider with 20mbit internet connection and 100mbit internal lan (dual access) thorugh l2tp (or pptp).

I’m thinking about the setup like this:

  • RB493G (board, $200) + R52Hn (wifi, $60) + RB493 case ($20) = $280
  • RB411AH (board, $100) + R52Hn (wifi, $60) + RB41 case ($20) + 750G (router, $70) = $250

I don’t mind lot’s of boxes crossed with wires, I really concern about the performance of the overall setup.
In the first setup I will have 9 gigabit router with wifi n all in one box. My concern is will wifi n activity consume big amount of CPU of RB493G (I’m going with WPA2 encryption)? Or R52Hn will take must of the work and performance of the router will not degradate during high wifi activity?

In the second setup wifi ap and router will be on a seperate boards running on their dedicated 680MHz CPU’s, but RB411AH only has 100mbit lan port and 750G has gigabit ports so wifi ↔ lan will be linked by 100mbit connection. I don’t really know what bandwith wifi n really consume - maybe 100mbit link will be enogth?

2

For tcp is enough, but if there is udp traffic, perhaps you need more, but not much more..

I recomend 493G with wifiN. Less wires, less power adaptors.. And you can use it at 800mhz too.


Man, I want a house like yours ; D!

3

Even better.. In 493g you can use 3 wifiN cards, each for 1 pc/laptop… hahaha

4

Thanks :slight_smile:
So I can overclock RB493G? Didn’t think about that! Actually I do incline to RB493G because it has 9 gigabytes ports. If I go with R52Hn I wont have even one free port because everything will be occupied. And even if performance of RB493G wont be enough I could go with RB411AH (when MT will provide gigabyte support for it) and put R52Hn there.
But still I’m a bit concerned about how much cpu wifi activity can occupy.