Merlin's firmware is built on the original Asus stock firmware, with additional enhancements. The RT-AC68U and RT-AC1900P (successor) is supported. In addition to this, you can also load Merlin's Asuswrt firmware on an Asus router depending on which model you have. Even with a 1.4 Ghz processor, I expect you to take a hit on the maximum throughput with the VPN running.Īsus provides built in support for OpenVPN and here is Nordvpn's instructions for setting up the VPN in an Asus router: You really want the fastest processor you can buy in a router as the VPN processing will slow the throughput down considerably. I bring this up as you want to run the VPN in the router, and that takes horsepower. That has a Broadcom BCM4709C0 (1.4 GHz, 2 cores) processor while the C7 uses a Qualcomm Atheros QCA9558 (720 MHz), so the 1900P processor runs almost twice as fast as the C7 processor. My personal opinion, depending on the time window, would be to return the C7 if possible and pick up something like the Asus RT-AC1900P at Best Buy. I ran across an Australian post where the poster was using an Archer C9 with DD-WRT loaded, so, it looks like it's probable that the C7 would run DD-WRT. DD-WRT firmware supports OpenVPN so that would make it fairly easy if DD-WRT was loaded on the router. The Archer series modems don't show up on the DD-WRT supported list, unless those modems also have a normal TP-Link TL-XXXXX number. So, OpenVPN is required for Nordvpn and this router's firmware doesn't support it. If I remember this correctly, L2TP only redirects data without using encryption and PPTP is not secure anymore.

You still within the time window where you can return the TP-Link router? It looks like this only has passthru settings for L2TP and PPTP.

Vpn router nordvpn