Looking Fanless build yet powerful enough!

Sandman

Hi Guyś,

I have read and searched a lot specially in this forum, thankfully there is a lot of answers of similar questions like mine. I’m happy to say that I found what I was looking for(I think) but I need to make sure that I’m not making a huge misstate with my finding. I hope its ok to ask if this hardware is a good choice or not. What I want is a future proof system as far as that is possible.

what I will be using for this build is:
Pfsense, snort, vpn(OpenVPN) AES-NI. Is this system capable of this and is 1GB throughput in the near future possible with this system?

I’m thinking one of this two systems:
Supermicro A1SRi-2558F € 284
Kingston ValueRAM KVR16LSE11/8HB € 61
Samsung 850 EVO mSATA 250GB € 101
Akasa Euler incl. 120W Power Adapter(Not sure if this case fits) € 105
Total: € 551

Or this i3 barebone system and add memory and SSD:
Shuttle D S57U3 € 411
Kingston ValueRAM KVR16LSE11/8HB € 61
Samsung 850 EVO mSATA 250GB € 101
€ 573

Thank you

laped

Think its hard to get 1GB/s on VPN with that system if that's what you want. In the following post he gets around 300 MB/s on VPN.

https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=87408.0

But maybe some optimizations will come in the future by looking at this blog https://blog.pfsense.org/?p=1866

heper

openvpn doesnt support aes-ni (yet, see https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/ticket/301)

you wont be able to get anywhere near that speed with either of the descibed hw configurations.

Sandman

Ok.I got it about the speed. what about the rest of the hardware? is it good combination? should I better choose different hardware? does the chassis fit with the chosen supermicro? any one got this chassis with any of the supermicro. Please let me know if I have to consider different hardware or not.

Guest

Pfsense, snort, vpn(OpenVPN) AES-NI.

AES-NI must be supported by the CPU, then it can be used for speeding up such things as crypto
workload. Not bad to have it for future things in pfSense, but please read also the link @heper was posting.

Is this system capable of this and is 1GB throughput in the near future possible with this system?

In the LAN for sure it is now able to perform 1 GBit/s throughput
On the WAN it is also able to work with more then one CPU core, but not if the PPPoE will be used
to connect to the Internet! The PPPoE part is single CPU core threaded at this time and so something
around ~500 MBit/s will be the maximum at this time.

Supermicro A1SRi-2558F € 284

Might be a good choice, really powerful and power saving on the other side.

Kingston ValueRAM KVR16LSE11/8HB € 61

I would go more for 2 x 4 GB ECC RAM

Samsung 850 EVO mSATA 250GB € 101

Nice try but no way, there is no mSATA Slot on this board!
Please go for a Samsung840 Pro or a Samsung 850 Pro 2,5" SSD with 128 GB for ~120 €

Akasa Euler incl. 120W Power Adapter(Not sure if this case fits) € 105

You can try it out and report it then here ;-) I would more tend to use;

M350 mini ITX case for ~43 €
PicoPSU-160-XT 160W/200W peak 12V for ~40 €
AC Netzadapter (12V, 16A, 192W) mit PicoPSU-Adapterkabel Mini-Fit-JR ~65 €
Silent, matches to the board and fits into the case!

Or this i3 barebone system and add memory and SSD:
Shuttle D S57U3 € 411
Kingston ValueRAM KVR16LSE11/8HB € 61
Samsung 850 EVO mSATA 250GB € 101
€ 573

If you go with non silent and fan less system, you could do the right and go with the following;
Big:

Intel Xeon E3-1220v3 @3,1GHz
2 x 4 GB DDR3L-1600MHz KingstonValue ECC RAM
mini ITX Board with Socket LGA1150 (Gigabyte GA-6LISL)
1 GBit/s and full UTM device

Medium:

Supermicro X10SLV-Q
Intel Core i5 (4 Cores @3,0GHz, AES-NI)
RAM & SSD & Case

Small:

Supermicro X10SLV
Intel Core i3 (4 Cores @3,0GHz, AES-NI)
RAM & SSD & Case

Budget:

Supermicro SuperServer 1018L-MP
Celeron G3260T @3,2GHz
RAM & SSD
1 GBit/s and Snort

Only 1 GBit/s at WAN and not 1 GBit/s OpenVPN throughput! I personally would tend between
a C2758 and an Intel Xeon E3 but this is also mostly budget oriented.

Sandman

Thank you so much for your replays. Very helpful. I will report back when I decide what to buy.

Aluminum

Do you have a real need to be dust resistant? And even so, most fanless still has airflow due to convection etc, only a handful of cases are truly sealed which limits TDP a lot. I have seen true rugged fanless systems meant for this, but typically $1k+ and come with miserable weak cpus.

Give up the fanless, take it from someone who has gone that route. The euler is a nice case (I have one) but it only works with thin-itx boards exactly and the fastest cpus it can handle are 45W TDP and only with a good ambient air environment. Finding 2 good NIC chipsets on those boards is a royal pain too. It can handle a ~2.5ghz quad but that is really pushing it, haven't looking hard at the clocks on mine (E3 1265Lv2) but I bet it turbos less than it otherwise would. OpenVPN currently still only cares about raw single threaded high clock grunt, extra cores won't help.

If what you actually want is quiet/near-silent, powerful and on a budget, I'm going to parrot my usual TS140/T20 mini-server deal hunting mantra. Hopefully you aren't also obsessed with making your router as small as absolutely possible too, its like a disease…