ASRock Rack E3C226D2I

Medallish

Thought I'd post my experience with this board if anyone decided to be as crazy as me.

I decided I was going to build a router to last and with some expandability, I was looking at the ALIX at first and they are really nice, but getting them in Norway wasn't that easy, and in general they seemed to not perform that well once you considered adding a bunch of features to it, I could be wrong on that I just did some googling at the time that suggested to me it was the case.

So here's what I built.
Mobo: E3C226D2I
CPU: I3-4130
Memory: 2x4GB ECC 1600MHz memory
HDD: WD Mobile Black 7200RPM 2.5"
PSU: 430W Corsair PSU
Case: Cooltek Cube case

Now a few things I should probably explain, the I3 was chosen because that's the cheapest way you can use ECC memory, so far I've seen it peak at 1% use so yeah it's definitely at the moment completely ridiculously overpowered for the task, and because it's the 22nm Haswell so I expected some great low power Idle, and I went with this motherboard because it had two Intel 1Gb NIC's on board, and a full PCI-E slot in case I want to do something even more crazy, like fiber or something.

So far the experience has been really nice, I bought a UPS not too long ago and it was super easy connecting it through the USB. I really love pfsense since I started using it about 3 months ago, the features are awesome, I have had a few problems with setting up Proxy and the HAVP antivirus, but other than that, it's stable as a rock only downtime it's had has been power failure or me disconnecting it when I needed to connect a UPS.

So yeah hopefully someone can use this, you can save a lot by going with a Pentium or Celeron CPU(and no ECC memory), and even more if you go for an AMD APU solution, I just wanted to keep the PCIE slot free so I was specifically looking for something with two Gb ports onboard.

0x10C

I'm looking to do almost the exact same setup. Same motherboard, Pentium Haswell chip. May I ask, what's the power consumption like from your UPS? It's an unknown for me and I'd just like to get some idea.

Thank you.

henrik_meyer

Do you have some iperf performance results on this machine?