I had been looking for an unnecessarily fast router that could handle 5Gb or even 10Gb WAN with a ton of pfblocker and suricata rules enabled... and I think I've finally found it. This was delivered from China in less than 2 weeks.
Truly, we live in a crazy time - this is so much more powerful as an edge device than Xeon systems just a couple years old.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805527094073.html
I installed a 250gb WD Blue NVMe drive, and 16GB of Crucial DDR5-4800.
I installed Ubuntu 22.04 minimal, and after updates ran Geekbench.

This appears to be significantly faster than the previous version of this system that STH had reviewed (borrowing your picture)

But even more importantly - the system has excellent copper cooling, which has configurable controls in the BIOS, allowing the device to be very quiet, unlike R86-S, certainly inaudible other than at full load next to a Synology with 8xHDDs with PWM 40% (that scales up with temp) and temps in the 40C range.
Using a Kill-a-watt the power consumption is 14W idle, 40W load, 70W full load.
Would love you guys to review this system - I think I finally found something that will make upgrading my 1Gb Google fiber worth it! Not sure how Pfsense handles heterogeneous cores, but I'm thinking with this kind of single-thread performance I could just disable the efficiency cores and still come out way ahead of my current N6005 box.
Truly, we live in a crazy time - this is so much more powerful as an edge device than Xeon systems just a couple years old.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805527094073.html
I installed a 250gb WD Blue NVMe drive, and 16GB of Crucial DDR5-4800.
I installed Ubuntu 22.04 minimal, and after updates ran Geekbench.

This appears to be significantly faster than the previous version of this system that STH had reviewed (borrowing your picture)

But even more importantly - the system has excellent copper cooling, which has configurable controls in the BIOS, allowing the device to be very quiet, unlike R86-S, certainly inaudible other than at full load next to a Synology with 8xHDDs with PWM 40% (that scales up with temp) and temps in the 40C range.
Using a Kill-a-watt the power consumption is 14W idle, 40W load, 70W full load.
Would love you guys to review this system - I think I finally found something that will make upgrading my 1Gb Google fiber worth it! Not sure how Pfsense handles heterogeneous cores, but I'm thinking with this kind of single-thread performance I could just disable the efficiency cores and still come out way ahead of my current N6005 box.
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