Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite Vs. High End Consumer Router

[alienplatypus]

I'm trying to create a new network setup for my home, which is currently using the rented gateway device from Comcast with the wireless disabled, and an Ubiquiti ap. I was looking into the Edgerouter Lite because Ubiquiti is a company that I trust because my ap (which was given to me by a friend) has given me no issues for years, and my friend has several in his home with similar results. I have also heard many great things about the ERL, even so far as to say that I would not be able to find a better router for under $300. If I were to get the ERL, i would pair it with a new ubiquity ac pro ap. Now, onto my problem.
It seems to me that many consumer grade wifi routers have far better technical specs than the ERL. For comparison's sake, I will cite the netgear nighthawk x6, which sports a 1GHz dual core processor and three offload processors which I imagine amount to some form of hardware acceleration. The ERL offers less in the way of processing, but also offers some vague form of hardware acceleration.
The only problem I'm having is that I was under the impression that a SMB router like the ERL would outperform consumer grade devices, but is this not actually the case? I was hoping to get the reliability, customization, and scalability of the enterprise option, but sacrificing performance would be unacceptable.
The bottom line is, on a near 200Mbps internet connection, which device would perform better overall with about 5 concurrent wireless devices, and a hardlined gaming PC which would be prioritized through QoS? If there isn't a noticeable difference, then I'd probably go with the ERL, but if the netgear is significantly faster, or if the ERL with AP AC PRO would actually bottleneck me in some way, then this would change my decision.
This is a problem that I have really been struggling to find definitive answers to, so I thank you in advance for any advice or experience you may be able to share.

 

[bill001g]

If all you care about is throughput there likely is little difference both can pass 1g of nat traffic. The cpu would only matter if you did VPN on the router. The difference may be if you were to say have 200 unique machine behind it. The testing sites always test a single large file transfer to see the maximum rate. It is a very different load profile for 1 machine to transfer 1g or 200 machine to transfer 50m each. My guess is the ubiquiti would handle the multiple user traffic better but it is hard to say since nobody test consumer router that way.

You will also note that the ubiquiti rates speed more like a commerical router. It state rates in packets/sec rather than mbits/sec. The traffic load is very different if you were to send 1gbit of traffic all made up of 64byte packets than 1gbit of traffic at 1500bytes. Most consumer routers only look at the rates with max size packets or worse ignore the overhead of the packets completely.

QoS is pretty much a waste of time because you can not really control the download side if things. The ISP is in full control. By the time your router gets involved what can it do if the ISP dropped the wrong data it can't recreate it. Both routers you mention have some QoS you can configure to partially control it but it really is a method to trick the end machine into requesting less.

The main difference is the ubiquiti device is a actual router. The consumer device even though they are called routers have no ability to really route traffic. Their only function is to take a single lan subnet and translate that to a single WAN ip. The ubiquiti device can have multiple subnets. It can actually even run routing protocols that are used when you have things like redundant data connections.

If you only use of the box is share a single internet IP address with your lan connected device then it likely makes no difference.