J1900 vs C2558...PfSense & Plex

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JimPhreak

Active Member
Oct 10, 2013
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I have the following 2 SuperMicro boards with the CPUs listed in the title and I have the following 2 use cases:

SuperMicro X10SBA-L
SuperMicro A1SRI-2558F


1. PfSense home router/firewall for my parents house. Only need 2 NICs (WAN & LAN) and the only requirement is the ability to handle an 85Mbps OpenVPN (256-bit SHA2) site-to-site connection.

2. Backup Storage/Plex server. This server will run unRAID and backup my main unRAID Storage/Media server. 95% of the time it will just be doing simple SMB file share copies (I use SyncBack for this). However I plan to install Plex on this server as well so that if for whatever reason my main server goes down or needs maintenance, I can have Plex running on this server for a short period of time. I currently serve up my Plex remotely and have anywhere from 2-8 people streaming at once. I know neither of these CPUs will support that many transcoded streams but I wouldn't' expect them to. If they could support 1-2 transcoded streams at a time for a short period of time I'd be happy since this is not going to be the main server. Only for emergencies.

I plan to run unRAID inside a VM on ESXi 5.5. The case I have for my backup server is the following so it will have limited airflow to the CPU/motherboard area.


So my question is, if you had these 2 use cases and these two boards, which would you assign to each use case? I'd prefer not to buy any additional hardware at this time.
 

pyro_

Active Member
Oct 4, 2013
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The X10SBA for the PFsense server, board as is will do the job, no need for add in cards

The 2558F for the Storage/Plex server, more expandable so more options in the future if needed for SAS cards, network or PCIE SSD

The cores for the Bay Trail and Avoton are both based on Silvermont cores so performance will be similar and more down to what speed they are clocked at than anything else.
 

JimPhreak

Active Member
Oct 10, 2013
553
55
28
The X10SBA for the PFsense server, board as is will do the job, no need for add in cards

The 2558F for the Storage/Plex server, more expandable so more options in the future if needed for SAS cards, network or PCIE SSD

This is my first thought. Do you think I'll have any issues with temps with regard to the C2558 in that case? I was running that board in this case previously and the temps were up in the 60's before I added two 40x40x10mm exhaust fans to the case.