Upgrade 2nd Gen i5 to 2nd Gen i7?
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The only reason this is even on my mind is what this doesn't cost. If the 2nd Gen i7 was 30 bucks more, I'd not even bother.
BUT a 2nd Gen i7 is 50 bucks shipped.
I have a Dell 390 Tower for free. Someone I know who did like we've all done and upgraded our computer equipment. Then was left with a decent well cared for "legacy" PC no one wanted.
Perfect for a PFSense router.
There's at least 2 Dell's that I've found are perfect of PFSense. Are because they have several PCI-E sockets/slots so can install very fast PCI-e NIC's. The 390 has four of them.
Do I think going from a 2nd Gen i5 to a 2nd Gen i7 is going to be night and day?
Nope. The "faster" may not be all that discernible. I get it.
But 50 bucks?
Already cranking with 8gb ram. The hard drive is serial ata, not ssd, at 320gb. Both are more than PFSense needs to run very well.
Firmware updated to what was the last fw, A14, which updated CPU microcode so it can use the 2nd Gen i7. Can't use the "K" versions but wouldn't overclock anyway. Can;t use 3rd Gen Intel CPU's.
The other Dell I'd use for PFSense is the model line after the 390 and can use 3rd Gen cpu's and the tower version also has several PCI-e sockets/slots. IF I had to buy one, would probably have bought the one that can use the 3rd Gen CPU's. Even if had to buy one, they're just over 100 bucks easily found around me on Facebook Market or Craigslist. Amazon even has them.
i7 faster, 4 cores and 8 threads instead of 4 cores, 4 threads.
So i7 for 50 bucks?
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Personally I would not bother unless you know you're hitting a CPU limit. If you hit that at some point in the future swap it then. Those CPUs are unlikely to be getting more expensive anytime soon.
Steve
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@stephenw10
From what I've read it is very unlikely I'll hit a CPU limit with PFSense and the 2nd Gen i5. I'm routing, nothing else.What's amazing to me is for the cost of 3 2.5gb NIC's, I have a router that, even IF I could buy a premade router with the specs of just a 2nd Gen i5, blows away even the most expensive Asus, Netgear, TPlink, etc.
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Exactly. So save your $50 towards something else.
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@stephenw10
Yes but I don't get to wear the I have an i7 Geek badge. -
Ha, well that's also true!
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@jsmiddleton4 said in Upgrade 2nd Gen i5 to 2nd Gen i7?:
don't get to wear the I have an i7 Geek badge.
Where do you get such badges? ;) I want my i9-11900K badge for my new screaming PC hehehe.. Not used for pfsense - but still I should still get to wear the badge ;)
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I'd say you have to ask in the right forum then. Nice PC.
I imagine if you put PFSense on there at boot you'd not have a chance to see anything go by. On, boom, done.
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i7? Naw, unless you are running symmetrical gig in an office with like 40 users... and at that point you would want something newer anyway.
However, spend half that 50 bucks and get like a 120 or 128gig ssd to replace that spinner. Less power use, less heat in the box. I'm also assuming that the existing drive(s) may be as old as the PC or darn close. Install PFSense with ZFS on it- supports trim/wear leveling. Faster for things like when it downloads new block lists for PFBlocker or just when saving changes in the GUI. I picked up some Kensington 120s for like 22 bucks each earlier this year and use the as boot drives/scratch drives in my servers and they work well for this task. Probably the best upgrade I could have made, makes PFSense snappy.Tzvia
Current build:
Hunsn/CWWK Pentium Gold 8505, 6x i226v 'micro firewall'
16 gigs ram
500gig WD Blue nvme
Using modded BIOS (enabled CSTATES)
PFSense 2.72-RELEASE
Enabled Intel SpeedShift
Snort
PFBlockerNG
LAN and 5 VLANS -
@tzvia yeah exactly - such a powerful cpu would be way overkill for all but the most intensive scenarios.. You would really need to be pushing some real traffic to need something anywhere near current I7 I would think.
Only reason I got the i9 was "why not" hehhe - when I realized my old pc was 12 years old.. It was time to upgrade. That was only a i5, many many generations behind. It really did everything I asked of it - and could of continued to do so for awhile I am sure. The biggest reason I upgraded was to get better transcoding of video.. My old gt710 while worked, and could do x264 in hardware.. That was really the latest gpu I could put in that aging machine. New box has a 1660 ti, and it freaking screams in comparison when transcoding my video at x265 even.
But for my day to day stuff the i9 is way overkill, but hey if I'm going to buy myself a xmas gift.. Why not make it a good one.. I sure didn't need 32gig of ram or a 1TB nvme either ;) hehehe
But I sure wouldn't think to use such a powerful setup for my pfsense ;) hehehe. Now my old box sure could of leveraged as a pfsense box.. But it even is way more than needed and power hungry compared to my sg4860.
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I’m barely pushing PFSense.
Been reading about ZFS. The drive is not new but its not ancient. Tested it thoroughly to make sure it is reliable. SMART enabled in PFSense to keep an eye on it. SMART is very happy.
I may even have an extra SSD around. Like in an external drive.
I’ll have to get steps for ZFS and copying PFSense to new drive.
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@jsmiddleton4 I run my plex off my nas, just a ds918+ and it does fine.. But being a bit ocd I guess. I like my stuff to a standard. And with trying to keep space low, etc. I try and do everything via a mkv container, with either x264 or x265 with x265 being best. And AC3 for audio vs AAC. But it would take hours to change to x265 with my old setup.
Now with shiny new rig, I can a transcode a 1.5-2 hour movie to x265 in a few minutes ;)
I am slowing now going through where I can save the most space and transcode to x265, and also finding stuff that was still AAC vs AC3, but that is a easy fix with ffmpeg and never took more than a few seconds anyway.
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@johnpoz said in Upgrade 2nd Gen i5 to 2nd Gen i7?:
@jsmiddleton4 I run my plex off my nas, just a ds918+ and it does fine.. But being a bit ocd I guess. I like my stuff to a standard. And with trying to keep space low, etc. I try and do everything via a mkv container, with either x264 or x265 with x265 being best. And AC3 for audio vs AAC. But it would take hours to change to x265 with my old setup.
Now with shiny new rig, I can a transcode a 1.5-2 hour movie to x265 in a few minutes ;)
I am slowing now going through where I can save the most space and transcode to x265, and also finding stuff that was still AAC vs AC3, but that is a easy fix with ffmpeg and never took more than a few seconds anyway.
Does it make sense to get a faster/modern CPU for pfBlockerNG and insane amount of lists? I mean really insane amount of entires. Like 10M+. With at least 32GB of RAM of course. I currently have 8GB of ram, and im hitting a hard limit in pfBlocker. Not sure if thats because of CPU or having just 8GB of RAM.
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@jsmiddleton4 said in Upgrade 2nd Gen i5 to 2nd Gen i7?:
Yes but I don't get to wear the I have an i7 Geek badge.
Well, we all have to make our sacrifices.
BTW, I run pfsense on the computer described in my sig. It has no problem keeping up with my 500/20 connection.
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I looked at SSD's and going ZFS. The hard drive now is a 7200 RPM Seagate. Searched for date of manufacture but would have to get to its label to verify. Not pulling it out for just that.
SMART continues to be exceedingly happy.
Might over time, maybe if move to 2.6.x. Save backup from current config to a thumb drive, clean install to new SSD, restore.
Only thing I'll have to play with is the boot options in the BIOS for UEFI, Legacy, etc.
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I used ZFS for this system. I also recently bought a 1 TB SSD for my ThinkPad. It provided a significant performance boost.
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@jsmiddleton4 Go for it, you'll get a better pleasure for your pfSense box knowing it got i7 cpu for just $50...and/or, bump it up to 16GB RAM
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Funny.
But I did go for it. 40 bucks though. Which was just too hard to pass up.
Also figured need to clean and renew thermal grease and new fan. Would make no sense to put old fan back on.
Its kinda sad I’m doing the swap expecting to notice nothing.
