hehehe - you are right !! checked the power consumption, its 42W and I am running it with 10x camera system on it. my main intention was performance and it give me at 42W. Perhaps not the best choice - just wanted people to know it works and worth a try.

probably caused by a different driver giving a different reading.

Thanks!

Newbie with pfsense here but done quite a bit of research before buying so hope it helps. CPU: To max out a gigabit connection if you are considering running any packet filtering / packet inspection services, like snort & having high VPN usage you need a relatively beefy CPU. Also for future proofing and optimal OpenVPN performance you will need an AES-NI capable CPU as the version after 2.4 will work only with CPUs with that instruction set. A Core I3-4005U would be ideal for low to moderate loads (no packet inspection) with a Intel Core i5-5250U being more comfortable with higher loads and complex snort rules. Both support AES-NI so both should work for a decent while. That said for a 100/20 connection the i3 would be more than enough. NICs: Intel NICs work well in contrast to Realtek that are reportedly not so great. So I would aim for a board that has them integrated. Disk: If you are not running any local caching a 32gb minipcie SSD or even a USB stick would be enough. If you do need to run a local proxy, then you will need a large, high quality SSD to serve files as fast as possible. Memory: In a home setting, even with snort running and multiple clients and snort running you should not have a practical need for anything over 4GB ram. WiFi on router: Dont, just don't do it. Any WiFi N/AC access point would be a better solution. I am using my R7000 in access point mode and getting real world 650-750mbps transfers through it to my LAN and WAN from my MacBook Pro. WiFi support in pfSense/BSD is not comparable to a dedicated access point so do yourself a favour and buy a decent one especially if you have any WiFi AC capable devices. Personally having assessed my needs (1Gbit symmetric fiber and wanting the fastest speed I could get) I went with the Core i5-5250U, 4gb ram, 32gb SSD in a fanless enclosure from Aliexpress (Qotom Q355G4). It consumes about 12-15 watts while at low load and spikes to 20-25watts when downloading at gigabit speed. Running 3x OpenVPN servers on it for remote access for me and family and a light touch Snort configuration and the router is sitting mostly idle, spiking to 50-60% when downloading at gigabit speed. If you are intending to stay on a 100/20mb connection I would go with the i3 posted above (Qotom Q330G4). It will be more than enough for what you intend to use it for. However as the difference between the i3 and i5 is ~40 USD the i5 is better value in my opinion. The i5 config would set you back about 260USD which in my opinion is dirt cheap for a super capable router. If you intend to use local caching bump up the hard drive to 128gb SSD and memory to 8GB (326USD for the i5 and 290USD for the i3)

Absolutly stay away from cards with this chipset as on the X540. You wont reach more then 2Gbit/s Troughput on them, and nothing will help except installing ESXi on the host and then pfsense on top. I made my head out with that cards with days trying to debug slow troughput with pfsense trying everything i could find, consulting with people on the pfsense ircchannel and alot more. we finally fixed the issue by replacing the x540 cards with cards that have a qlogic chipset.

Thanks for all help. Cheers

Are these enough to support Gigabit WAN? What speeds are expected over OpenVPN?

Realistically you would need 2 USB nics for wan and lan unless you use vlan switch which at that point you have created more of a mess….

Incidentally this is an HP laptop.

Can anyone help with this please.. ? been reading other post but it just seem to go around in circles :)

It's the mSATA drive which is an Intel 120GB SSD installed by PfSense when unit was purchased. Replaced it with an old 120GB laptop hard drive, reinstalled the OS, then restored the backup. So far everything seems to be working great so far. What's lousy is that the unit was still in warranty when this all started. By the time i was able to troubleshoot and figure things out, the warranty has since expired. What's interesting is that the Intel SSD has a five year warranty. One thing that, from my perspective, which is not fair, to get the image file, one has to pay for support or pay $19.00 for a thumb drive to be sent. Yes, $19.00 is not the end of the world, but waiting even a day to receive the thumb drive is not an option. This has to be up and running now. Since the updates are free, then why can't the image file be free if one can prove ownership of a PfSense device?

I have several of these deployed and they get about 980 mbit on WAN A1SRi-2758F SuperMicro http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/1U/5018/SYS-5018A-FTN4.cfm Your status does say newbie so depending on your purpose for hardware …..for a company I suggest looking at pfSense (Purpose built) hardware....

You are both correct and a much smaller carbon footprint for our future generations. Lol

I hadn't considered just replacing the CPU, but I would prefer to upgrade the motherboard as well.  Most of my NICs are currently PCI.  Plus I'm getting a good deal on the i5. Other than cost, do you think there's a downside to moving to the i5?

It is supported but with caveats: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ral No other drivers that I'm aware of, the manufacturer RaLink doesn't offer any FreeBSD drivers of their own as far as I know. I would instead go for an external AP such as one of the entry level models from Ubiquiti: https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ap-ac-lite/ https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ap-ac-lr/

If it won't boot a 64MB card it's probably not written the image correctly to the card. You might try zeroing out the card first: https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Writing_Disk_Images#Cleaning_The_Target_Disk_.28optional.2C_but_recommended.29 Did it boot the FreeDOS image the one time it did boot? Or the original OS? Steve