Went Down a Rabbit Hole and Now Need Hardware Advice (1 gigabit PPPoE Build)
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I recently picked up 1gigabit service from CenturyLink and I realized afterwards that my R7000 could barely do 500Mbps down. That's when I started doing my research into what was going on, what router do should I pick up to get me 900+, and now I'm here wanting to build a pfSense box because rabbit holes are fun.
The biggest area of concern for me right now as I waded through various forums is the fact that I'll need higher end hardware to achieve decent throughput because my connection uses PPPoE. Some of the suggested builds were pointing people towards lower end i3s, but in the same / other threads recommending C2558 boards.
I have no plans of doing anything intensive like QoS, deep package inspection, or packet filtering.
My two biggest factors right now for a build are power efficiency and noise. Fanless is better, but not a requirement. As a hold me over I picked up an RT-AC86U and it's working for what I need it to do, but building something new is way more fun.
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Check out the qotom topic. A cheap Intel-NIC-based i3 box with 2 or 4 interfaces will do the job. It costs less than that R7000.
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If you want to build your own check out a modern low end Pentium build.
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If you want to build your own check out a modern low end Pentium build.
Yeah, that works too. There are also boards (ITX) with Atom communications series SoCs on them, they are pretty good as well. Just make sure you get Intel network cards.
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Going down this same rabbit hole just now having had my service upgraded! My current Zotac CI3323nano has AES-NI acceleration but Realtek NIC and was hanging fine with 100/100 service but chokes to 500 and was even dropping a link altogether requiring a power cycle to recover under the new load :( A BIOS flash has apparently got it running better so it's at least surviving a speed test but I'm testing to half my max speed which is reachable outside the firewall.
I'd like to stick to a mall fanless box like this one and might actually purchase from NetGate to get a tested box <sigh>Intel NIC really do seem to be the way to go for max speeds, Realtek has bitten me for a second time lol. I'll be very interested in what others suggest but building a full sized box for this just seems wasteful so here's hoping a nano PC of some sort can be found!</sigh>
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Building a mini itx box with a pcie nic could still be very small, fanless and low power. DIY will just about always be cheaper.
I believe there are some very small mini itx cases out there that require using pcie risers to move the nic around and also using Pico PSU
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By the way, keep in mind that PPPoE with 1Gbit/s is rather intense for a CPU (it doesn't scale well). So getting a CPU that has a good single core / single thread performance will help you.