@VAMike: v5 would be somewhat better for VPN and is somewhat more power efficient. If you get a great deal on the v3 it's not going to be a bad choice. If you're paying about the same I'd get the skylake. Thank you VAMike. I'm leaning towards the Skylake.

Avoid Marvell controllers unless you're absolutely sure that the board offers an option (BIOS option) to run the controller in AHCI mode. Pure AHCI controllers are no problem for FreeBSD but Marvell ones in their proprietary mode may not be supported at all.

Hi, Did you eventually used GA-H170N-WIFI? Do both NICs work on pfSense 2.3+? What about the bundled WiFi dongle? Thank you!

I think there is no important differences in any of the 121x intel nic's. I think they only bump the model number for marketing reasons. So e.g. on my haswell motherboard I have a 1217 nic, but skylake boards have the 1219 nic, so it must mean its better right? :)

So… I bought the APU2C4 as recommended here, but now I have troubles setting it up. See the separate discussion here. Help is highly appreciated.

@Mr.: These people break about every European law  :-[ [/quote] While I believe that they are not violating the law (1 year guarantee / two years "Gewährleistung" are normal in Germany), I agree with you that they should display more confidence in their hardware quality and offer additional voluntary guarantee.

@VAMike: @toyebox: My apologies, i do plan on using it for VPN. I will try running a VPN through it now. Do you have suggestions on what tests to perform? Do exactly what you did, except with a vpn server set up in the middle? Okay! Will do!

SSD will have a performance edge and have a clear power saving but i/o performance is not important for pfSense. The SAS setup you have however gives you important redundancy. So its a choice between power usage, noise of device vs redundancy. Of course you could keep redundancy by doing something like a ssd mirror setup on zfs.  So you get the best of everything.

My experience with realtek is it works ok providing checksum offloading is disabled and the load is not too high, I would expect for a consumer using pfSense on a home network it would not generate a high enough load. Interestingly someone on the FreeBSD forums discovered there is a newer driver direct from realtek which can be manually compiled and is more stable than the one that ships with the OS. So yes the issue is the driver not the hardware.

Hi heper, I've just contacted the team. Regards, Nick

@whosmatt: @darkarn: I will need a new build eventually as all these hardware are on loan; I will have to eventually return them. I asked mainly out of curiosity of the state of drivers in pfSense and also, to see if I need to order more Intel NICs seeing that I have only one dual-port and another single port card (that I may want to deploy to a NAS instead) Got it.  If buying new hardware and not looking for embedded, I wouldn't be afraid of a motherboard with an onboard Realtek, especially if you plan to use it for your slower connection.  Then again, there's always hardware like the HP NC364T at around $40 on Amazon right now.  4 1Gbps Intel NICs on a single card, and cheaper than anything except the bottom of the barrel cards you can find at Fry's or some place like that. I am trying to use what I have first before ordering more stuff from Amazon due to shipping and currency issues adding to the costs, but that's really tempting! Depending on what hardware I can get, I may need more single NICs that are PCIe 1x though

@stiflermt: Was basically running it trough speedtest.net IMO a more reliable WAN speed test can be found at http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest

@MarioCaires: MSI AM1I AMD Mini ITX Motherboard AMD APU Sempron 2650 Dual Core Processor, Socket AM1, 1.45GHz, 25W DDR3 4Gb RAM What do you think of this in terms of performance? Is it going to be enough in terms of the APU? Yes!  I had exactly those parts and even at 4x your connection speed it will be more than enough.  It will even saturate your connection with OpenVPN on one core if you want to do that.

If you want to use it as an AP, it's not going to work. From the man page, no mention of hostap iwm supports station mode operation.

You've got 4 options: install realtek's driver buy a new NIC buy a new machine install a different OS

@AndrewZ: What is the problem exactly? As I mentioned multiple times all the 'newer' Huawei modems like 3272/3276/3372 should work. None of the  'newer' Huawei modems does not work reliably. Here the discussion: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=192345 There Patch: https://bz-attachments.freebsd.org/attachment.cgi?id=145319