C2758 or i7-3555LE

Douglas Haber

All things being equal, I'd chose the one with the best single thread performance. i7.
But its a tough call. The 8 core atom is really nice but the memory is usually expensive enough to make you cry.
What about the i7 board? What memory does it use?

Memory is not that bad. I got it for like ~10/gig just a couple weeks ago for the Atom. For the SM C2758 board.

jasonlitka

@Douglas:

@kejianshi:

All things being equal, I'd chose the one with the best single thread performance. i7.
But its a tough call. The 8 core atom is really nice but the memory is usually expensive enough to make you cry.
What about the i7 board? What memory does it use?

Memory is not that bad. I got it for like ~10/gig just a couple weeks ago for the Atom. For the SM C2758 board.

$10/GB is a pretty good price for ECC SODIMMs. I think I paid about $12/GB when I got my C2758 box.

kejianshi

Contrary to popular belief, price is an object for most people, but were it not I'd chose the 8 core atom also.
I just can't overlook the fact that an old tired i7 for cheap will easily match the performance of the fastest 8 core atom board though.

Electricity here is 2.5x as expensive as USA, so over time (alot of time), power would be my biggest argument for the atom.

messerchmidt

Get the supermicro 8 core Atom with 4x gigabit nic and regular ddr3 dim slots in itx. Not much more than than the 4 core or variant with so-dimms. Add 16-64gb of ddr3 ecc, and you can use it as a pfsense router and m some other servers on there if need be. Do it once and right. The i7 is good to go, but uses more power ND supports less ram. If you are not transcoding, there is no point. If you want to cheap out, go amd 5350 on an asus board with ecc ram and a Intel nic or two.

NTMMFTS

Anyone know if there are any install/driver issues with 2.1.5 or 2.2 with the supermicro c2758 board? I want to build one and just want to be sure of what work I may have to do to get it running. Please share any info you're aware of.

thanks!
Jay.

Wolf666

No problem with my A1SRi-2558 running 2.2

kroberts

I'm a pfSense n00b (haven't installed it yet) but there's something some of these guys don't seem to consider.

The c2758 processor has hardware encryption acceleration (QuickAssist) which the i7 does not have. Granted it isn't utilized in pfSense yet, or in pretty much anything else AFAICT, but it will be and at that point I'm betting VPN performance on any c2*58 processor will hands down beat any i7.

It might be worth your time to look up what QuickAssist is before you make your choice. The fw7551 and c2758 already get pretty good VPN performance when using AES encryption, the QuickAssist does that for a lot more encryption types and for compression as well. The hardware encryption features are in the CPU itself.

I just ordered one of these: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Atom/X10/A1SRM-LN7F-2758.cfm

Unlike the earlier products it takes either ecc or non-ecc memory, up to 64g. 7 lan ports, all intel, plus an IPMI.

Edit: For that matter, when I was buying memory for this system I chose 2x8g modules, and registered ECC memory was only $4 a stick more than non-ECC memory. Is cost really that big a deal? The box cost around USD $1000, can't say for sure because I bought other hardware at the same time.

Back to QuickAssist, if you have a bigger box and want QuickAssist on it you can spend USD $1000 for a QuickAssist adapter if you want, the only one I've found is at Mouser electronics.

NTMMFTS

For anyone that doesn't need lan bypass and wants usb 3.0, the board is also available that way.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Atom/X10/A1SRi-2758F.cfm

This one doesn't take non-ECC ram, but I think ECC is a better choice for a network router.

And it's ~$333 compared to ~$436 on amazon.

And thanks for the feedback, Wolf666, that there should be no install issues with 2.2.

Jay.

kroberts

I looked really hard at that board too.

I found too many reviews complaining about it freezing on boot. That's not OK for me.

I assume this sort of thing would be fixed by a BIOS upgrade but I saw no evidence of such an upgrade, and I've been burned in the past by an assumption that a bios update for what I considered a critical bug would be released which never came around. Not for networking-related hardware but for VT-d support in that case.

In my case, this box will be used for a home network which will (hopefully soon) get gigabit Internet, and which I need to have an insanely fast VPN on. The VPN will only be needed part of the time, and this box will be running a virtualization hypervisor (either kvm or VMware ESXi) and the router/vpn/intrusion prevention software will run inside one or more guests. I will also have other VMs as necessary and as the capabilities of the board permit.

Today the i7 will be faster. But in the future, likely in less than a year, you're gonna want the cores.

Trust me. ::) :-X