Oh My! This thread quickly went off-topic and turned into a discussion on ECC vs non-ECC and flaring tempers. Like @svt3391 mentioned earlier in this thread, I have been looking for a low cost & power consumption unit for pfSense appliance that has enough additional capacity to run other services such as OpenVPN, snort etc. I'll probaly go down the pfsense VM path once I am done tinkering with my ESXi home lab setup.