Struggling with Pi Ethernet, looking for an OpenVPN/Transmission box, will this work?

[andsoitgoes]

Hi everyone,

So I’ve been working to set up a SBC torrent box for a while now. I have a pi 3 up and running with Libreelec that’s has add ons for OpenVPN and transmission. It’s working quite well, except for one major issue: internet speed. I am running into bottlenecks downloading and connecting to manage any downloads. Once the internet’s throughput hits 3MB/s, I can no longer connect to transmission and I’m sure this has to do with the fact that the internet is capped at 100mbps and that the transmission daemon is writing out to my networked NAS drive (and an external hard drive)

But I see that the tinker board may solve this as it doesn’t seem to rely on sharing it’s Ethernet and gigabit would just hit exactly what I need. 

So that said, a few questions. 

I don’t desperately need the tinkerboard to do much. I can use my Pi 3 for any media serving through libreelec, that’s a non issue, but I need something that’s solid and stable to run OpenVPN and transmission with allowing a kill switch. I know there’s a setup for this on the Pi, but again I’m limited in my speed here. 

I’m comfortable with doing some medium complexity Linux tinkering, but I’m not an old hat at it in any way and tend to hit stumbling blocks. 

The other question is if the tinker would work, should I just get the base model or the S? Again the tasks I’m throwing at it would be fairly basic and hardly tax the cpu on my Pi (the biggest drain is Kodi which is a bummer)  and Libreelec is the only kodi fork that works well with my personally ripped 3D ISO files. 

I have 300mbps up/down and would KILL to come close to that, even half would make my day. 

But is the software available in a relatively basic form? And from what I understand the tinker board will fit inside most Pi 2/3/3+ cases, of which I have extras. 

Thanks in advance!! 

[Im4Tinker]

I'm accustomed with the forum's normal writing. Yours hurts a bit, please would you mind to rectify ?
Regarding your matter, I'd simply say:
TB(s) != RPi3
So there might be some fiddling to get the solution. So, if the Internet is a bottleneck you should blame that part of the issue, unless you'll find a particular fault on setting the transfer rate.

[BeauSlim]

A little late to this, sorry, but, yes the Tinker will do what you want.

I ran my Tinker for a long time doing pretty much exactly what you describe. LibreELEC + OpenVPN to NordVPN + Transmission. Both the addon version and the docker version of transmission work fine.

The only issues I had with my setup were that the Tinker runs hot, is power hungry, and has lousy wifi. A big heat sink, a good power supply, and a cheap USB WiFi dongle fix that. If you are using a USB-powered external HD, you may also need a powered USB hub.