I have been running an IPcop firewall on an old PC for ages with three network cards. Just about to replace it with this small thing, also with IPcop, and it runs on a 4 watt power supply. I have realised that by downsizing my servers etc in the basement, now when they are a bit overkill (moved most stuff to a cloud solution) I can save enough electricity to power an electric car for most of the use I would make of it with what I save.

http://www.firewallhardware.it/en/alix_pfsense_embedded.html

The Raspberry Pi is gonna suck as a router due to the "Ethernet on USB". You'd be much happier with one of the boards that chrissnell mentioned above.

Personally, I use a "Maxxwave 1106" running BSD I had laying around but it's on the more expensive side. If I was putting something together for myself, I'd get one of the small Atom boards with a couple of onboard Intel NICs.

I've been running OpenWRT on an PC Engines APU board (4 core x86 based w/ gigabit ethernet). According to the website[1] the power is "About 6 to 12W of 12V DC power depending on CPU load." Before my APU I ran an Alix board[2] for years.

It's a little bit more complicated to get running since it requires a custom compiled OpenWRT, but it's great to have more memory and disk space than I'll ever need in my router. I used to run on OpenWRT on reflashed consumer routers and I always had to be real careful about what I installed and ran. With the APU I can just install real `bash` and `less` and not have to deal with the crappy busybox emulations.

[1] http://pcengines.ch/apu.htm

[2] http://pcengines.ch/alix.htm

As mentioned, the ethernet interface is too slow for this. One could use one of the BananaPi variants for that, afaik there is one which has four independent ethernet ports for use as a router.

I use a standard BananaPi as NAS and are very satisfied with it. It comes with a SATA interface and 1Gb ethernet.

I'm a backer - but I don't know if that app would work with any OpenWrt based installation.

No idea what your current setup is, but I'd guess that this router is more powerful - and comes with the advantages we discussed here: The hardware is open (you can even get one with exposed connectors/a serial cable to mess with ~everything~), the software is open, you get a 'distribution' with updates by a NIC.

It's worth the money for me, but I understand if you're considering a generic OpenWrt based setup good enough. That's what I'm on right now, what works for me until this box arrives. And for me, an upgrade to 11ac was planned anyway, so this just came up when I was looking at new hardware anyway.

At the "discounted" $275 (2GB version + EU shipping), it's more expensive than embedded x86 solutions (APU2b4 or Celeron N) while being less powerful and flexible (the power consumption is the same).

Still a nice toy to play with, especially with all the connectors it offers and I can see this being a hit with iOS fans since it's supposed to be super easy to administer using their custom GUI and video tutorials, so worth the asking price.