Throughput, 100Mbps, OpenVPN => Quad vs Dual core?

[netphreak]

I have a 100Mbps WAN connection at home, and plan to connect to several locations (office, and some customers) with OpenVPN and pfSense. Throughput is crucial, and wonder what hardware I need. As far as I can tell, SSL encryption is the resource hog here concerning CPU usage. Will pfSense benefit from a quad core over a dual core Intel i7? I plan to use a GA-H67N-USB3-B3 motherboard, and a good dual 10/100/1000 Intel PCIe ethernet card.

Can I expect 100Mbps over OpenVPN with this setup? Even if shared over multiple VPN tunnels to different locations? Where's the bottleneck?

[Nachtfalke]

with

openssl speed

you could do a speedtest with several encryptions.
100MBit/s = 12.5Mbyte/s.
This is normally no problem wie actual mainstream CPUs.

[JaY_III]

I think you would be better with an i5 over an i7.
The only difference is HT support and 6MB L2 vs 8MB L2 cache
I honestly don't think 4 extra threads will be needed or that extra 2MB L2.

That $100 you save, would be nicely put towards some nice Intel Server NICS

[netphreak]

Thank you for your inputs. Alright, i5 it is then. openssl speed is a little difficult to run before you buy hardware? ;)

Will pfSense benefit from quad cores over single/dual cores?

[Nachtfalke]

@netphreak
You are right, but building up a pfsense in a VM on a normal desktop PC with Core 2 Duo will give you a hint how fast it could be on you new hardware ;-)

As far as I know the pfsense firewall isn't able to use multicore BUT if you run other services like squid or OpenVPN then these services will use the other free cores/threads.

-edit-

Take a look at this thread perhaps:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,35669.0.html