A powerful 8-core from AMD: EPYC 3251
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Maybe I am quite late to find this one. Its Passmark is around 12,000. A big step up from Atom C3758 which is only 4700-4800. Its supermicro barebone is from $899 with 4 gig intel NICs. Or an ASRock board with 2-10Gbe intel NICs of $999.
I think if someone wants a gigabit VPN or 10gbe suricata IPS, it is a good barebone/motherboard choice around $1000. And there are some FreeNAS users who introduced it on its forum.
And there is 2 low power cpus, j3160 and j3060, which can replace atom d525. The boxes in aliexpress are under $200 shipped to US.
Still satisfied with atom C3758 and thought I was too early to get the i5-5200u based box which has a little issue of Lan port order.