I never felt FreeBSD was up to date with wireless, always some steps behind. The steps grew bigger. Knowing what FreeBSD is used for mainly it shouldn't be too big a surprise.

I am fan nº 1 of the now old am1 platform. My previous (and first) pfsense rig was build accordingly, that is, affordable, with good perfomance and low tdp. The asus board is super stable, and for a 500mb connection is more than enough. For gigabit realm another kind of muscle is needed. You are absolutely right. G4400 would be more than enough. But i was rather curious about kaby lake, and it seemed to have very good tdp in idle, so i went for it. Has i said, Xeon was my plan, but money doesnt grow on trees and i chose i3. If i got a Xeon, my firewall cpu would be better than my main desktop pc. Seemed quite weird. Besides help and feedback, i wanted to help to share the idea that a cheap cpu can give the perfomance for this «new» gigabit speeds. Anyone planning an upgrade for a SOHO environment can go the pentium way, or others more tdp friendly. Does not need to spend a fortune. I was surfing amazon and newegg for supermicro and asrock boards with c2758 and D-1520 cpu's, but here in Europe they give a new definition to «pornography» when we talk about computer parts prices. Got a server board(although Asus) with ipmi, it can be a security issue but gives me options for remote administration for about 180 euros. 4 ghz give me a short future proof for IPS/IDS and AV. The appliances selling at pfsense store are top notch, would be my first optin, but it is just my home network and i wanted to build it myself. The am1 cpus are becoming scarce in amazon.es, amazon.de or amazon.co.uk. The new 5370 is more recent but not near the perfomance of the newer cheap Pentium line. Lets see if Ryzen brings any surprise. I repeat once again, i am satisfied with this build. The isp guy that came to do the install of the service, last December, told me the faster he had seen was 950 in a top rig of a gamer that had invested a fortune on his rig. Its not a competition, but im able to squeeze 940 out of my connection, in a consistent way. My next (planned dreaming) addition will be 10GB nics, but only when i believe the high price being asked for them. Maybe i get results more close to the 1000.

Do you have an available PCIe x16 slot?  If so, just grab something like this: https://www.amazon.com/HP-NC364T-Gigabit-Server-Adptr/dp/B000P0NX3G. You don't need the x16, but you do need a slot capable of housing an x4 card, which the x16 will.  Otherwise you (probably) only have x1 slots and there's a dearth of server NICs available for those. Oh, and to answer the rest of your question, yes, that hardware will be quite suitable for pfSense and your FIOS connection.

A managed switch that supports 802.1q ( POE+ would be a bonus ) if you require multiple wireless networks & APs. Check out https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=124407.msg688249#msg688249 I use a Linksys LGS308P. You can put the captive portal on the Ubiquity equipment, the AC Lite is cheaper but im not sure of the power requirements. If your just prototyping maybe a SG-1000 as it includes pfSense Gold, a $99 value. https://netgate.com/products/sg-1000.html

@kroko: Can hold 8GB RAM or more (as pfSense 64bit version would be used & RAM is cheap) 32bit was in a way a sidenote if anyone is listening to my monologue ^_^ I do not use 32bit OSes for yeaaaars (except for RTOS when doing some programming for Cortex-M) and if somebody says, he should, my comment is something in the lines of "get new hardware then". Anyways, thanks for the comments. Updated my public notes.

@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