At my office, we have anywhere from 3 to 6 computers on the network during a normal day. All of them are hardwired through a switch which connects to a Linux box that acts as a router. We are trying to streamline our network setup and decided to retire the Linux box from its router job. In its place, we would like to install a robust yet simple router.

I've used a variety of different routers at my home with varying degrees of success and pain, so I thought I would get an outside opinion on what hardware to look at. The router doesn't have to have wireless capabilities, but it would be a nice bonus if it had such a feature. A basic list of needs is as follows:

• Basic routing from a cable connection to a switch.
• A hardware firewall with solid port forwarding.
• The ability to not choke on large amounts of packet traffic as data is sync to or from the office to remote servers.
• A price at or below $300.

I know that our need is extremely basic, but I have worked with very stable routers that had horrible port forwarding, routers with great firewall rule creation abilities that flake out at any large amount of sustained traffic, and routers that are generally stable but "forget" configuration options at random times.

Does anyone have any recommendations that meet these needs?

linksys with dd-wrt firmware.