[Make-wifi-fast] Making wifi really fast...

[Jonathan Morton]

> On 4 Feb, 2017, at 18:26, dpreed at reed.com wrote:
> 
> Motherboards with enough I/o performance to handle at least a couple of gigabits per second, chopped into smallish packets.

This shouldn’t be too difficult or expensive.


Consider this AM1 Mini-ITX build as a baseline:
	https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Zz9Ff8

The long PCIe slot is electrically x4 v2, but will accept any size card.  There’s a Mini-PCIe slot for wifi, and built-in GigE.  The CPU is weak but efficient, and genuinely quad-core, giving you the option of dedicating cores as you describe.  The whole shebang can be powered with a laptop brick instead of a conventional PSU.  Best of all, AMD graphics are the least troublesome out-of-the-box with Linux.


Even cheaper and quieter, but might not be stocked any more:
	https://pcpartpicker.com/product/Vm8H99/asrock-motherboard-qc5000itxph


If you insist on a true x8 slot, then we need to move up a step:
	https://pcpartpicker.com/list/G9jpdC

Here the first long PCIe slot is x16 v3, as good as you can get.  The second one is x4 v2, but is disabled if you use the M.2 slot.  Ether way, there is a spare x1 slot and an old-skool PCI slot besides.  The CPU is faster than the AM1 build, but is much less efficient.  It’s quad-core, but uses CMT, so the cores are not totally independent; I don’t know how much that matters for you.


If you prefer Intel, this is an inexpensive build:
	https://pcpartpicker.com/list/DJTwCy

However, this is a 2C/4T CPU rather than a true quad-core.  Again, that might or might not matter in practice.


 - Jonathan Morton