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  • I tested the router at the office, and on the 8MB connection lost about 12% of the bandwidth.

    I tested it at home on a 100MB connection, and still only lost 10-15% (varied on multiple tests, but never outside of that range) of the bandwidth.

    The rule of thumb is that the VPN will slow your connection by at least 10%. So this router is hitting the highest throughput it could.

    Could it continue to hold up to 200MB? I doubt it. The router gets damn hot when I run it at full bandwidth for a while (downloading seriously huge files in a constant queue over several hours).

    So I would definitely suspect it will drop off and cap out very soon after 100MB.

    As a counter-point, I tried my old router and that capped out at 12MB throughput, and represented a near 90% overhead. It basically couldn't do any more. The embedded CPU was a piece of shit and the designers of that never expected it to be used for encryption, just scheduling.

    Once you hit the max throughput everything else is loss, but if you're only losing 10-15% then you're in the accepted overhead range.

    If you used a mini PC you would definitely exceed the capabilities of the router, but at the cost of setting everything up yourself, having the heat and power go up, and needing to configure it as a gateway to your router, etc.

    How much is that last slither of bandwidth worth it and essential to you?

    I couldn't foresee, that if Virgin kept bumping the speed, that I'd actually use that last nth percentile. So I'm fine with an effective 85-90Mbps throughput, and if that proved to be the cap then I'm still happy that I got a reasonable balance between cost and performance.

    Of course... if your home computer is always on and it's a Linux, you could just set that up to be the gateway and VPN. But I know what my computer power consumption is and wouldn't want this thing on 24/7

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