I was thinking about buying a Netgear R8000 to run DD-WRT. Then I got to reading about the R7500. The faster processor appeals to me and my house is all 2.4GHz at this time, so the R8000's additional AC band is not a benefit to me at this time.
I was leaning toward the R7500. Then I came out here to see how the user support and community activity is for DD-WRT (actually OpenWRT, I guess?). It kind of seems like R7500 is in a no-man's land, for example I see Forum sections for R7000 and R8000 but not R7500. (this may not be true - I think I was in a different area of the site - now I see an R7500 area with no posts in it 
)
Also it seems like maybe the use of a different chip would put the R7500 to the end of the line as far as implementation of new releases and features is concerned. For example I saw someone in the firmware download section talking about features not being available, compiled yet, etc. for the R7500.
Anybody wish they'd have bought an R8000 instead of R7500?
I assume that many of the cool features they talk about in the Netgear marketing propaganda are dependent on running Netgear's firmware, but I have used DD-WRT in the past and liked it and I need VLAN (to isolate certain computers from the others), which I don't think is in Netgear FW.
I would think that the additional processing power of the R7500 would be a boon to DD-WRT or any firmware, but a smaller and less active user community is a concern.
I would hate to put this much money into a router so that I could get current features in firmware and then have the features available but not for my particular chip because it is too obscure.
Advice appreciated.
Thanks!
-Marty
Hi,
well lets put it in this way. The Forum was created now for the R7500 so it should be getting also posts. The R7500 is still newer than the R8000 so you will need some more time to get all the firmwares released. Not sure what will be with DD-WRT on the R7500 but I hope at some stage we will see it there as well. The Open-Wrt is working pretty good on the R7500, but anyway still has some limitations (no additional packages, revert back makes some troubles). But in total its working good and the performance you can compare to the native firmware. So When I could decide one time more, I would buy again the R7500 as the CPU Power is really good and better than in the R8000. I did not need really the second AC Band, so I`m fine with the. The Netgaer FW is also running good and Performance and rage is perfect with the latest FW.