Dell R300 VS HP Proliant DL320G5

[foonus]

Seeing the Dell R200 for sale at the pfSense store, along with the comment below from another post; I am trying to decide between these 2 units which would make a better pfSense firewall.

@cmb:

The R200s were donated in bulk by a supporter of the project. We use somewhere around 20 of them for testing and development purposes internally…

This got me thinking if the R200 has been used for development the R300 should run quite smoothly, However there will be some changes to the stock hardware with the addition of an Intel Quad port server NIC (ET2). http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/network-adapters/gigabit-network-adapters/ethernet-et2-multi-port.html

Considering the machines would also be using the same Quad core 2.6G CPU and 4GRAM in this scenario, both machines to be configured with embedded version (From USB key) with no saved log files and only basic routing functionality. here are the options:

Dell R300 http://www.dell.com/downloads/ap/products/servers/r300_spec_sheet_new.pdf
Initial observations.. Intel 3400 Chipset, Intel I/OAT support in BIOS (Intel ET2 NIC supports not sure about FreeBSD8.3/pfSense)

THIS is also a serious security consideration with the Dell server:
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/servers/f/956/t/19538727.aspx
http://www.bitdefender.com/security/nsa-hacks-dell-poweredge-server-bios.html

HP Proliant DL320 G5 http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12854_na/12854_na.pdf
Initial observations.. Intel 3210 Chipset, no I/OAT support in BIOS.

Given this scenario which would you select? Anybody familiar with both?

[foonus]

Been messing around with this a bit, from claims like "PowerEdge R300 has up to
26%better performance than the ProLiant DL320 G5p " even in Dells own literature was worth investigating.
http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/pe_t300_r300_march2008_v5.pdf

From the looks of it, having now installed the pfSence on both, the Dell is far superior.
Main things i am seeing is 12% CPU use under the same load the HP took almost 70% CPU use. (Saturated 250 down/25 up at the same time, 300+ connections).
Also even though the r300 is running from a USB stick vs the HP's SATA drive, the WEB ui is literally instant compared to the few seconds of load time for page changes with the HP. (I expected the Opposite running from USB)

Don't know why but its running a lot better on the r300, cant see a X3353 CPU being this much stronger than a X3210… dunno whats causing the performance gap.
Really amazing performance with this unit. if the R200 in the pfSense store run anything like this they are an awesome deal.