I suppose the nettop will be out of my price range. I have a few spare Buffalo's sitting around running on DD-WRT firmware, wondering if any of them will be powerful enough for a task like this ?

All you can do is try them. I used Tomato on my brother-in-law's rather than DD-WRT.

NJH wrote: All you can do is try them. I used Tomato on my brother-in-law's rather than DD-WRT.

Were you able to consume 50 Meg successfully using Tomato FW?

I only have a 10M line. I used Tomato for my brother-in-law's WHR-G125 just because it had a good write up. He also has a 10M line. There have been speed comparisons of Tomato vs Stock vs DD-WRT (2 years ago?) and I think stock won then, but there have been a lot of developments. I don't think the original 54G type routers (Linksys, Buffalo etc) could manage more than 35M but I have just googled and seen a WRT54GL managing 50M.

I tested on an internal network with a PC1 to PC2 transfer:

Code:

External router | |--------------------| | | PC1 Draytek | PC2

Also I was more interested in the VPN throughput at the time. I don't have the kit to test any more.

I think these sort of posts are going to get more common as broadband speeds go up.
The only "cheap" router that has plenty of free bandwidth is the 2920. After that it starts really getting expensive.

I think I will try and do some testing with my Buffalos. I have a WHR-G125 and a WHR-G54S, and they both run custom firmwares. I have used both with Tomato and DD-WRT, so I think its time to take them both out!

I will post some results back here. In the meanwhile, kindly update me if you know anything better.