There's a few big players on the wifi-router-soc market. MediaTek and Qualcomm being 2 of them.
The flagship chipsets of those 2 brands are MediaTek Filogic 880 and Qualcomm IPQ5332
The Slate AX and Flint 2 contain chips of MediaTek. The Filogic 820 and Filogic 830 I believe.
The Slate 7 and Flint 3 contain chips of Qualcomm. Cannot find the precise ones.
Each brand makes choices while designing these chips. And apparently Qualcomm does not value the speed of the CPU as highly as MediaTek. This results in lower speeds in VPN speeds, but may redeem itself on other areas.
Let's be honest, the wifi drivers on the Flint 2 were not the best! Possibly the Flint 3 does not come with buggy wifi. Yes, it may have slower OpenVPN/Wireguard. Choices are made.
Hopefully the rumours of a "OpenWRT Two" are true. And hopefully that would beat the Flint 3 in those speeds and all other specs of the Flint 3.
@groentjuh I agree with you. Flint 2 took about a year before the wireless drivers were stable. The VPN performance might improve on Flint 3 as some compilation improvements are made in the firmware to better use the HW acceleration features in the Qualcomm chipset.
I am just SHOCKED seeing this post. I didnt read so far into Flint 3 specs, but obviously was assuming it would have a higher Wireguard speed than Flint 2....
I have just one question towards Glinet: Is this a total absolute joke!?
Glinet was countless times before incompetent in planing new products, but this is a new topping on the cake.
WHO AT GLINET THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA!? WHO IS RESPONSABLE FOR THESE DESIGN DECISIONS!?
What RELEVANCE DO THE 2.5GBit/s ports have with this laughable low Wireguard speed of 650mbit/s!?
I think this is the best and last proof of that Glinet products are not worthy to look into anymore.
@alzhao look at the suggestions from Beta Test for compilation. Personally, I have not seen any limiting factor for Wireguard on Flint 3 in my own testing. I could only go up to 450 Mbps due to my system limitations, but at that speed the CPU load was very low (like 5%) and no system resources were saturated . For some reason, many in the community think that MediaTek is much preferred to Qualcomm SoCs but at the end of the day this choice is often based not just on price or performance but on availability. GL.iNet needs to get ahead of this perception as this is actually a very strong router..... One way of getting ahead of the issue is to ensure Qualcomm support of OpentWRT as claimed by Qualcomm in their product description for this chipset.
When Flint 3 development was announced to be coming with WiFi 7 and what features we would like to see, I asked for 10 Gbps or SPF+ and solid VPN performance.
Instead we got 2.5 Gbps ports and much lower VPN speeds, so I will be skipping this model.
My Flint 1 served me well when I was in a country with censored internet for a year, and then I got Flint 2 for higher VPN speeds (my fiber at that time was 1 Gbps) and it was great.
I am back to europe for over a year now, and I have 8 Gbps symmetric, so my Flint 1 is outdated in terms of speed, but Flint 2 is still working great for me over wifi 6 for some devices, so I don't see any benefit in doing the upgrade to Flint 3 especially because of the same 2.5 Gbps ports.
I am sorry, but I don't see the point of advertising Ultra-Fast Wi-Fi 7 Speeds up to 9300Mbps, and then we don't have WAN at 10 Gbps or SPF+.
At the moment I don't really need Wireguard but I certainly don't want to buy a router that is slower than the previous model in that regard, and at 2.5 Gbps ports it doesn't really matter if we have 1 million Gbps via Wifi 7 because we will never use that, other than for an internal network.
That being said, at this price point, Flint 3 is a good device. It's just that Flint 2 is still better in VPN speeds.
You are correct, Flint 2 is wifi 6 only, but good enough connected at 2.4 Gbps via wifi in 5Ghz. Speedtests are around 1.8 Gbps regardless, so the improvement over Wifi 7 would not be significant, as I would not exceed 2.5 Gbps wan to lan port. Also not all my devices have wifi7, if they did maybe I would consider for the price.
Glinet does that all the time. I have complained about these questionable business decisions since years. Mostly all new products by Glinet have a giant big flaw compared to the previous product. I have no idea who is in charge at Glinet about these decisions, but it is really bad.
They bring out a new version, but then it lacks Wifi6e even it is out since years. They bring out a new product, but then it lacks 2.5gbit lan ports. They bring out a new product, but then it has very low Wireguard speeds. They bring out a new product, but then it lacks this and that which is very important and a giant down grade. Or bring out a new product with another potato CPU, low RAM, missing this or that.
I got my Flint 2 around 3 months ago and I’m very happy with it. It’s far superior than my ISP supplied router.
Flint 3 is definitely not for me but I think I will probably get the Flint 4 as I think that will be a great upgrade compared to the Flint 2.
Just because they messed up with this version doesn’t mean im jumping ship.
Keep up the good work GL-iNet.
If you read the specs, including WiFi speed on the various bands, it's very clear that there are essentially two reasons to get the Flint 3 over the Flint 2:
You use wired Ethernet connections extensively and can benefit from more 2.5Gbps ports on your primary router
You want to be able to use the 6Ghz spectrum for devices with very high bandwidth needs
If you want faster speeds on the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands or if you want the fastest possible VPN speed and you don't care as much about the 2.5Gb Ethernet port availability, the Flint 2 is a better option for you.