Hardware required to saturate Comcast Gigabit Pro (2gbps + 1 gbps)

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That board has no Intel QuickAssist, but it comes together with TurboBoost and so did you
enable the PowerD (hi adaptive)?

I did indeed. And although it doesn't have QuickAssist, it does have AES-NI on chip. For the small amount of encryption I'm doing for home, it seems to be plenty.

An Intel Core i3 or i5 will do the job too, but the Xeon E3 is more electric power saving.

I'm not a expert, and I could very well be completely off base, perhaps you're correct. I'll just say I'd have to see it to believe it. An i3 doing IPS inspection at 1Gbps seems like a far stretch to me.

I have an i3 @4.1 with snort and suricata(for testing purposes) and i get 950 of a gigabit link with 40/50 % of cpu usage. If they are correctly configured, it proves that one must not underestimate an i3.