Intel or AMD?

[alicemw]

I have two bare-bones systems I'm considering turning in to a pfsense box for my house. I usually have 15-20 network devices running at one time and I have fibre running to the house with a gigabit connection and a 24 port gigabit switch hooked up to a surfboard SB8200. The one bottleneck is a 2 year old lynksis ac router that badly needs replacement (that's where pfsense comes in).

The first system is a custom build
AMD A6 5400K
8gb RAM
64gb ssd
1tb hdd 7200rpm

The second is a dell optiplex 7010
Intel i5 3470
8gb RAM
64gb SSD
1tb hdd 7200rpm.

I think both systems are probably somewhat overkill but I'm not sure as I've never used pfsense.
Whichever doesn't get turned into a pfsense box will become a 2nd home server.

Which one would be the best fit for pfsense?

Thank You!

[jahonix]

AMD A6 has 2 cores whereas the i5 has 4.
The pure performance seems quite equal http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-3470-vs-AMD-A6-5400K

Only if you want to run lots of packages that benefit from multiple cores then I would use the i5 for pfSense.
But a NAS usually is bored to death as well.

[Grimson]

What type of NICs are in those two? If only one has Intel NICs use it for pfSense. Avoid Realtek NICs on pfSense, especially if you want gigabit performance.