Been messing around with this a bit, from claims like "PowerEdge R300 has up to
26%better performance than the ProLiant DL320 G5p " even in Dells own literature was worth investigating.
http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/pe_t300_r300_march2008_v5.pdf
From the looks of it, having now installed the pfSence on both, the Dell is far superior.
Main things i am seeing is 12% CPU use under the same load the HP took almost 70% CPU use. (Saturated 250 down/25 up at the same time, 300+ connections).
Also even though the r300 is running from a USB stick vs the HP's SATA drive, the WEB ui is literally instant compared to the few seconds of load time for page changes with the HP. (I expected the Opposite running from USB)
Don't know why but its running a lot better on the r300, cant see a X3353 CPU being this much stronger than a X3210… dunno whats causing the performance gap.
Really amazing performance with this unit. if the R200 in the pfSense store run anything like this they are an awesome deal.