You would be best reading the Watchguard X700 thread here, all 24 pages of it! The X500, X700, X1000 and X2500 are all identical hardware. People have used CF and HD but CF is easier as there's no mounting hardware for a HD. There isn't a graphics card onboard, but there is a PCI slot if you have a card, so most people use serial. The front ports are individual Realtek NICs. They all have crypto hardware, mostly SafeNet SafeXcel-1141 which is supported by FreeBSD but there are mixed reports of actually getting it working. Check on Ebay for the more recent X550e or X750e or the much rarer X5000, X6000 or X8000. All great hardware. Steve

I picked up something really basic, some Atheros based card I think, whatever Titan Wireless was selling. I was pretty much able to get the full kit from Titan, I think.

@mhab12: I was under the impression that the newer Intel cards (E1G44HTBLK) were supported in 2.0 as it was based on FreeBSD 8? The 8.0 (and 8.1/8.2) HCL says 82576 is the newest supported.  That might not be accurate though. @lifespeed: @jasonlitka: 3. Unless you have a reason to push LAN-LAN traffic through pfSense, you're better off just using a switch. I would likely apply QoS based on DSCP tags to LAN-LAN as well as WAN-LAN traffic for a mixed voice/data network.  Can you be more specific about why I would not want LAN traffic going through pfsense? Because any traffic that is LAN-LAN will seriously drag down your system.  It takes a LOT of power to push 1000Mbit/s through a box.  You're better off using vLANs and an L3 switch to keep your local voice & data traffic separate.  Keep the pfSense box out of the way so it only has to deal with LAN-WAN traffic.

Thanks, but I had been.  Come to find out it was two bad card readers, and one was brand new.  One of my guys took it home and plugged it into his card reader and it worked fine.  Such is life.  Thanks again for the tip. Suite9

So a few more months then. On a related note, the specs just changed.  Prior to their site redesign it said 600MHz-1.6GHz and 512MB-2048MB of RAM, now it caps out at 1GHz and 1024MB of RAM unless you order a "custom configuration" (probably in bulk).

You need one that directly angles without extra vertical extension. Something like this: http://cgi.ebay.com/PCI-E-164Pin-Slot-PCI-Express-16x-Protector-Riser-Card-/170609116901?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item27b91886e5

Is there much community experience with PFsense 2.0RC and the new AMD Fusion boards?  I would be interested in assembling a router using the GA-E350N-USB3, but am not too keen on the bleeding-edge guinea pig role    :-\

Which version of pfsense are you running? There have been issues with the em driver in the 2.0 snapshots.

I run Askozia on the X7SPE-H (lacks IPMI compared to the -HF model) with no problems. I run pfsense 2.0-RC1 on a X7SPA-H and other than some em driver issues which are being worked on by the devs, it runs fine. I haven't been able to look at these two boards side by side, but I have yet to see a single difference between them. The X7SPA-H/F are popular boards, so I think anything you read about them in these forums can probably be applied to the X7XPE-HF.

I had similar issues with a Dell PowerEdge 1750.  Whatever brand CDRom Dell put in those servers has major issues with burned discs.  I finally resorted to swapping out the drive for a slim CDRW which has no issues.

this also looks interesting …broadcom NIC's though........ http://www.steatite-embedded.co.uk/mini-itx/mini-itx-motherboards/kino-9654g4-mini-itx-motherboard-with-intel-q965-chipset.html 4x Broadcom BCM5787M PCIe GbE chipsets If that chipset works this could be a very interesting board - especially installed in the T1200 dual mini itx 1 U rack mount case ($225.00 USD) With this you could build a redundant PF setup.

I just put in an order for the X7SPA-HF-D525 yesterday. I'm currently using an old Compaq P3 800 MHz PC with 300 megs of RAM and a bunch of cheap no name gigabit nics. Its using 75 watts so I was looking to replace it with a lower energy use machine which would also gain more throughput. I'm using a 120 mbit down/10 mbit up cable internet connection at my home. This old machine manages to pull a little over 100 mbit/sec through it. Connecting my PC directly to the internet connection pulls out 122 mbit/sec, so it's not keeping up with the last 20 mbit/sec. Ibor Daru, thank you for sharing your screenshots showing your performance ratings. I'm a bit disappointed though. You're saying you have a 90 mbits down connection and only manage to pull a sumere 50 mbits through this board? Must be more than that. What did you use to fully load your internet connection? I can recommend using www.speedtest.net or download the 1 gigabyte testfile from BBNed. If you're on a Ziggo cable connection, you could also use Ziggo's speedtest.

I only see the 1.1a bios on their support site, which is what shipped on the board.

aha, good to hear others think its just a huge fad and waste of money! I never bothered to delve into the reasons why the N1 crashes so much but its interesting to see why! As for you choice, i picked exactly the same parts and saved the linitx basket. waiting for my next student loan to role round in a week or so to take the plunge. For the other parts i was going to source out an old cheapo laptop or desktop hard drive; as the space doesn't have to be huge to support pfsense and I'm not doing anything that's hard drive intensive. Regarding heat, i don't think it would be to high within the case to warrant needing a fan to cool down the HDD, but depending or placement a tiny one would probably help all round. Wifi you can get on the board from what i've read by using a mini-PCIE card with external antenna connectors and using it in G mode for the time being until fully supported? plus the N1 as a backup. MY plan was to use any provide holes to mount the screw connectors, or use a drill to widen or create new points on the top of the case, tho i was ideally trying to find a tri antenna mini-PCI card Hope this helps, and i will defiantly be updating when i get this build going !

@hbvdh: Does PFsense 2.0 RC1 support the PCI Linksys WMP600n? This card is reported to use the Ralink RT2860 chipset which is not supported by FreeBSD (and consequently it is not supported by pfSense). There is an independent group which has produced a driver. @hbvdh: If not, witch a/b/g/n card is supported? FreeBSD (and consequently pfSense) does not support "wireless N" beyond supporting some "wireless N" capable interfaces in "wireless G" mode.

OK then thats it then - low cost ore 2 DUO CPU will do the job at hand with room to spare. Thats great because Ebay is full of them for not much money. Seems to be a good way to get a powerful appliance - Socket P board with 4 X Intel 82574 G/bit NICs on board + low cost used Core 2 DUO CPU. The socket P board is pricey but when combined with the low end second hand CPU the cost is very reasonable and it will handle all the packages i want to run. Is there any reason to not run the 64 bit version of PF ? Or is it wiser to stick to 32 bit for now? Is there anything obvious I'm missing here? I want to put together a number of these. appreciate the input.

@Bai: What kind of tweaks did you do to it?  And are you running any of the heavy packages?  I have a 1.6G P4 that I was using.  It sat at 55W, but I'm not sure it'll be enough power to run snort, etc on a faster connection. I replaced the cpu with one that had EIST and enabled powerd. I replaced the PSU with with a DC-DC type. I adjusted the cooling fans to more appropriate speed for the new power consumption. There are processors without speed step?  I didn't think any existed anymore. I know, shocker! It's true though that the desktop Atoms don't. All the best power reducing technologies are used on mobile cpus as battery life is so important. I'm using whatever came with the machine, currently.  I've mostly been using Dell machines that I had sitting around.  So not sure what the PSU rating on those is.  I'll have to look at getting a lower rated power supply. I'm still not sure what the deal is with PSU wattage, though.  My GTX275 requires a 550W(I think) PSU, but the system only pulls around  200W from the wall. PSU manufacturers like to write big numbers on the side of their boxes! In reality I doubt that psu could sustain 550W output but it has to able to handle large peak output if everything comes on at once. Steve

@stephenw10: @naddie: BTW, according to Intel, the D510 doesn't even have the ability to step down in clock.  I wonder how pfSense is able to do it (or maybe it's just reporting incorrectly?). Like I said what you are seeing is CPU throttling using ACPI 'T' states. This is where some instructions are replaced by a 'clock stop' instruction and no processing is carried out. It doesn't actually reduce the CPU frequency. Surprisingly hard to find a decent explanation but here is something. To stop it using throttling you can add hint.acpi_throttle.0.disabled=1 to your loader.conf file. Other than enabling speedstep the biggest single thing I found to reduce power consumption was to replace the PSU with a far more efficient one. Steve Thanks for the link.  That helps explain things alot.  Since you're not reducing power consumption, I guess it doesn't matter if powerd is on or off except the potential to reduce performance if it's left on and soemthing goes awry.

Is this still available? If so I'd be interested Shipping to Chicago Thanks