Have a look at the Fractal Design cases: https://www.fractal-design.com together with Noctua FANs they are pretty awesome. If you want to extend your build to a big VM host the Define R6 is really nice with plenty of space for disks, and you can use the 5.25" bay for a temp/fan monitor of your choice.

It seems unlikely but I guess it could be. Some small variation in the components. If it works reliably connected that way I would just move on TBH. Steve

What hardware is that on? Specifically what NIC? When do you see that? Is it actually causing a connection problem? Steve

Nice! Just ordered (with Voleatech since I'm located in Germany).

I would be very surprised if it is not but you need to know the PCI-ID of the card to know for sure: https://github.com/pfsense/FreeBSD-src/blob/b964e7355f44df566d5906568c7598e7f9313da0/sys/dev/ixgbe/ixgbe_type.h#L84 Steve

That is true, it will only boot 2.4+ due to the UEFI requirement. There are some pretty detailed write-ups out there for compiling Coreboot. There is also (or at least was) a third party BIOS that enabled legacy booting on the original Minnowboard max and Turbot. Steve

yes you are right...put a gigabit switch on lan and everything is okay...many thanks

Probably the powerd settings. Adaptive rather than the default 'high-adaptive' will run the CPU slower on average in variable load conditions resulting in marginally less power consumption and hence heat. No fan at all with the same heatsink would concern me. It's a smaller heatsink than the MBT-2220 which is entirely passive but a greater potential power dissipation. Steve

Multiple queues should exist for ix or ixl interfaces by default. You can configure a fixed number using those options if you wish otherwise the system will add as many as the driver supports or your have cores for. You should see the queues in top -aSH at the command line. Steve

It will pass >200Mbps with 1500B packets using AES-128-CBC. More than that if you can use AES-GCM. Far more if you can switch to IPSec. Steve

Great, thank you!

Hmm, well if you use Squid/Squidguard to do web filtering I would want to see 2 cores there really, at least. Steve

Seems like you're hitting the legacy console issue which is known in 2.4.4+ though it would not normally reboot by itself. Either boot the device in UEFI node which should give a working console or do this: https://www.netgate.com/docs/pfsense/install/upgrade-guide.html#upgrading-from-versions-older-than-pfsense-2-4-4 Specifically the section regarding Atom systems with Intel HD graphics. In your case your device appears to have a serial console so you could also install using that which does not have this problem. Steve

970 is a bit overly optimistic ;) I think hehehehe They need to do some works on their maths maybe ;)

Even Gigabit will be no problem. -Rico

so you need a half card? Or low profile? What is the exact make and model number of this dell box? and we can take a look to what you could put in it if anything.

@stephenw10 Thanks for the Powerd clue, i guess the cpu was not "bursting" to 2.08Ghz without it on, not sure yet but it has gained me another 100Mbps , closing in on 900 now..

Yup, test it and see. But beyond that it's probably more of a Hyper-V question. Steve

@tman222 said in Hardware opinion with Gigabit fiber.: Even though you already purchased the hardware I just wanted to chime in here quick as well and mention that I have been using that exact same system with a symmetric gigabit fiber connection for almost two years and have been very happy with the performance. I basically have all the things installed that you mentioned in your post, although I don't use IPSEC anymore these days. This is a very capable little box and that will even scale beyond gigabit (I have done some basic 10Gbit testing with it). They back-ordered it so I am still on the hunt for one at a good price but thanks for the confirmation!!

I have a 4m version of that that worked OK. That actually looks newer/better than the one I have. Steve