New pfsense device

[T_Minus]

What's minimum Intel Xeon E3 v3/4 CPU (or pentium for that mater) that has AES-NI that I should be looking for to handle 100Mbit/100Mbit WAN + VPN and in the future security/thread monitoring too.

I'm under the impression even the E3-1220 v3 is over kill.

What about a non-E3 pentium or celeron type CPU? Do they have AES-NI?

I'd like to keep power as low as possible, but feeling the burn buying the last appliance 8mo ago and needing to replace it 100% sucks so I'm somewhat leaning toward one of the cheaper SuperMicro motherboards I got, thus the e3/4 generation.

What about the new ITX SOCs from intel? When are they coming out?

 

[BlueFox]

Why not one of the Rangeley boards? 20W TDP max and they have AES-NI. If you can live without Intel QAT, you can get one of the Avoton boards too. Should be plenty.

 

[T_Minus]

Rather go with a 'new' generation (C3000 based) if going that route, just no clue when they're coming out?

See: Intel Atom C3000 Denverton - First benchmarks and what we can expect when it is finally "launched"

"Significantly improved IPC compared to the Avonton/ Rangeley cores. We expect a 70% or so raw performance improvement per core"

 

[BlueFox]

Could wait if you want since it shouldn't be much longer. The older generation will do what you want though and you can pick them up for a fairly reasonable price on eBay at the moment. If I were going to wait, I'd get one of these: Supermicro | IoT | E100-9AP

Edit: this should be available shortly too: A2SDi-2C-HLN4F | Motherboards | Products - Super Micro Computer, Inc.

 

[nitrobass24]

You can do that on an Atom 2550.

 

[Evan]

Pfsense support the SOC NIC of the c3000 ?
But even the 2 core should do fine for 100M

 

[mackle]

I just ordered a J3355, because I couldn't wait for Denverton, but wanted this gen and didn't mind going consumer.

 

[Evan]

I just ordered a J3355, because I couldn't wait for Denverton, but wanted this gen and didn't mind going consumer.

As it's a router then ECC is rather insignificant and unless you need IPMI remote management then consumer is more than fine, the n4200 supermicro fabless server is bare just over $400 !! That's pretty pricy for what it is I think but then again it sits somewhere between consumer and server.

 

[mackle]

Yeah, the Asrock board I got was $55. It needs a case, nic, psu and memory - which Apollo Lake is a little specific on (4gb chips only, so not all 2GB modules will work). The pci-e is apparently only 2x, so that probably rules out 10GbE, but then I hardly see having more than 1GbE on my WAN any time soon. I figure worst case it can always be re-purposed as a perfectly fine media-PC.

 

[T_Minus]

As an update to this thread I trade parts with another member and ended up with the SuperMicro ITX 4C/4T Rangley motherboard, and for now single stick of 8GB to be upgraded to 16GB. I have this tiny lil NAS case with power supply, and 4x 3.5" hot swap I'm going to shove it in, right now debating about 2xSSD 2x3.5 for logging/archives/caching or start with 2xSSD and add 2x more when I get deals on them... Looking into pfSense Packages - What do you use? to see what kind of SSD would work best, hope to do some useful caching, well see

 

[Nnyan]

Which case are you sticking in there?