Refurbished NETGEAR WNDR3700 N600 Router $55

How is this compared to http://www.newegg.com/Product/Pro...BlkFri2012

No bother at all.

I'd rule out the WNDR3700-- you'll likely receive v4 (the newest), but only v2 (not v1, v3, or v4! works with CeroWRT. I'm actually not as excited for CeroWRT now that I know the BufferBloat / CoDel stuff was copied into OpenWRT as well.

The RT-N16 is definitely really nice. It uses Broadcom chipsets which mean its also stuck on Linux 2.6 (or 2.4?) like WNDR3700 v3/4. CoDel only works in 3.3+. That said, you might not *need* codel. The most important part is to keep buffers small. I haven't been able to find much on Tomato RAF, but it looks like there's some "reduced bufferbloat" builds for Tomato that reduce the size of the outgoing buffer "txqueuelen". I don't know much about that in the tomato world, but this article looks very helpful:
http://ordorica.org/blog/tomato-f...ufferbloat

It could be that Tomato RAF already has that, I'm not sure.

As for me, I just got my TL-WDR4300 (just dropped to $38.99 AR). I'll see if I can get Codel working.

From a QoS perspective, I'd prefer something that can run Codel (which for now means Atheros chipsets on OpenWRT). There's definitely a lot of *other* factors when deciding what to buy, though! You should definitely buy something you want

Other than not being able to run Codel, I can give my wholehearted recommendation to the RT-N16. Its an awesome router, and super hackable (it has 32MB of flash so you can run all kinds of fun software on the router). Its also stable and has a great reputation. You might be able to find some accounts online of how well the "reduced bufferbloat" versions of Tomato work. That may very well be just as good (small txqueuelen).