[Cerowrt-devel] wrt1900ac v1 vs v2

[David Lang]

On Tue, 7 Jul 2015, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:

> On Mon, 6 Jul 2015, John Yates wrote:
>
>> There are refurbished wrt1900ac units available quite cheap ($10 or $20
>> more than wrt1200ac).  I assume that they are v1 units as the v2 units have
>> only been on the market for a few months.  From lurking on this list I get
>> the sense that these will support full sqm in short order (correct?).
>> 
>> So what are the differences between wrt1900ac v1 and v2?  Is there any
>> reason to pay nearly $100 more for a v2?
>
> v1 has Armada XP chipset which has packet accelerator HW in it that OpenWrt 
> doesn't use. v2 has Armada 385 which doesn't have a packet accelerator, but 
> instead has a much better CPU for forwarding packets.
>
> So basically if you buy a v1 you'll get a third or so in forwarding 
> performance over the v2 with OpenWrt. With the Linksys firmware I could 
> imagine the v1 is faster than the v2. The v1 has a fan, v2 does not.

>From watching the openwrt discussion, it looks like 1900v2 and 1200 share the 
same driver, which has direct openwrt support from the vendor while 1900v1 had a 
closed driver that there was later a source version discovered for.

I would expect the future support for the 1900v2 and 1200 to be far better than 
the 1900v1 (especially as supplies of them dry up)

so the question is if 3x3 gives you enough value over 2x2 to make it worth 
getting a 1900v2 instead of a 1200

David Lang