[1love]

Ok I bought a Linksys wrt54gl a few days ago since it was on sale. I flashed Tomato on it immediately, since it turned into $500 router.

Anyway I've been messing with the settings QoS and such. And I boosted the wireless singal to 251mW which is the max. I told my friend who lived 3-4 houses down the street to to test it and he had full signal. I thought it was awesome since with my old router I couldn't get a signal in my basement now I can get full bars anywhere, even few houses away.

Is it safe? Or will it overheat later on?

[DaRkViEt73]

70mW should be fine, I wouldn't go higher than that. Regardless of whether it'll "overheat" or not, you're not gaining anything by setting it any higher. On the contrary, you're just introducing/amplifying noise and making the router spew out a noisy, crappy signal which (while it'll appear stronger), it'll just get alot of transmission errors.

[thatguy]

hey i bought a wrt54gl a while back to but i flashed it with dd-wrt instead. ive heard about tomato too how is it? ive tried messing with the settings but didnt touch anything i didn't know. i did hear that you can kill the lifespan of your router if you put some things in max setting though. i agree it is way better than the stock firmware.

[1love]

^

Tomato's QoS (quality of service) is better than dd-wrt and it's easier to configure the settings. Also Tomato firmware is faster than dd-wrt.

Put it this way:

dd-wrt is for professionals who knows what they are doing, the settings can get best performance out of the routers.

Tomato is for the basics and people who wants a stable router.