I am in the market for a hard-wired router, I am willing to spend $100 US. I want to stay away from Linksys and D-link Products.......I would do the extra PC thing and set up iptables on it but I dont have an extra PC lying around.....and besides that consumes way too much power as opposed to a small unit. I was told the SMC Barricade router was good but I'm sure there is some router that I have not heard of it which is good?

if you go with the linksys WRT54G or GS then you can use the hacked firmware from sveasoft. It will allow you to customize every aspect about the router, and has some nice features. Check it out http://www.sveasoft.com/modules/phpBB2/index.php

you might want to reconsider linksys if you like this firmware.

yeah, i've got the Linksys WRT54G and it's good. i haven't had any problems with it or anything. definitely take a look at that link shmude gave you.

by the way, don't by wireless cards from Linksys, they die on you really easily. their routers are good, just not the cards.

if you're still not interested in Linksys, go with Belkin. my friend has a Belkin router and it's ok, it's just not as good as Linksys in my opinion.

In my initial post I said I want a hard-wired router, meaning I dont want a wireless router....and I also said I want to stay away from Linksys & D-Link :\

i just mentioned linksys's wireless router because it's a linksys router i've used it and know it's good. if you're completely set on not using d-link or linksys, the smc barricade looks good. if you don't want to spend as much money, the Belkin Cable/DSL Gatway Router (Part #F5D5231-4) is pretty good also. but you'll get better quality with the SMC router, for about $30-40 more.

I understand that you wanted to get away from linksys, but i thought i might mention that firmware anyway so you can see some of the features it has. I know its a wireless, but you can turn off the wireless if you wanted to, so it just becomes a wired router. So what is the big turn off from linksys and D-link?...if you dont mind me asking?

If power consumption is a big problem, you could easily build a firewall on a VIA embedded system. They have extremely low-power C3 CPUs and the whole board (CPU, embedded NICs, embedded video, etc) cost less than $200. Of course you would still need to get a case, and maybe a CD-ROM (unless you can setup a net-boot server)... Also, you can buy barebones systems for next to nothing, and if you only got a 250W PSU it wouldn't be that much power.

If you stay away from Linksys and D-Link you're going to get even worse hardware quality (Belkin, yuck!) and probably less functionality. Those two are the most popular for a reason.

Another option would be to buy an old SPARC or SPARC64 box off eBay. If you get an Ultra5/10/30/60 system it should take normal PCI NICs, and the PSUs aren't that large. I think U5s are 200W. As a bonus, the U5s have a fairly small desktop profile and you can run them headless (no keyboard/monitor/mouse).