Anyone know if some of the TP-link or other Chinese brand routers will let you change the firmware to something better like Tomato or DD-WRT?

Whats your budget?

300-600?

Does it have to be a to be a Chinese Brand?

I would go for a Netgear R7000. Or one of the other routers of their Nighthawk series. You can flash most of them. Just double check at the openwrt/dd-wrt website.

If you want to go cheap, you can search TaoBao for 可刷路由器 or 已刷路由器. Around 100-200 for second hands. Just make sure it has at least 8MB of flash and 64MB of RAM.

Chinese manufacturers like to strip down most of their routers, so also double check what version (i.e. v1/v2/v3) you get. Where as an international version of a TP-link would run openwrt, the Chinese version, just because the lack of flash, would crash during boot.

I don't have any concrete evidence, but I feel that the Chinese ISPs might be doing something to cripple performance and reliability non compliant routers. At least, my POS free "Mercusys" brand router seems a hell of a lot more stable than my WRT-54Gs.

Asus AC87U

I found some answers. Just use this:

dd-wrt.com/support/router-database/

There are many TP link models on the list.

Your budget?

Hmm, I'm picking up a Ken M type of trolling vibe from jakefinn.

The downvotes on my last post have made me realize that all of jakefinn's posts to date are completely and totally normal.

Move along folks, nothing to see here...