Looking to build a system to run pfsense/opnsense and wanted something a bit more "modern" than the M720Q/920Q/P330, especially the P340/350 seemed interesting as it already has the riser installed (planning to add a quad 2.5Gbit/s NIC), however noticed that PCI-e instead of directly to CPU the NIC would now go through PCH sharing bandwidth with other internals, which in my case will only be the NVMe drive. Should I not go the P340/P350 route or is this totally not an issue and the latency impact is not an issue at all and going for a newer system makes sense? Basically the price diff between older is relatively close, so rather buy something that has a longer life and could support higher load or a different function down the line. Thanks!
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I don't think PCH bandwidth or latency will be noticeable issue for 4x2.5Gb networking, even with other stuff, including storage. Even old AMD and Intel PCHs like B550 has 32Gb/s, and even older X570 has 64Gb/s. It may not be ideal on paper, and slightly triggering for OCD, but it should be fine. Especially in homelab setting.
Kinda what I was thinking and yes it totally triggered my OCD, really not an issue till we load it up with 4x10Gbit/s 
Anything with a pcie3.0 x8 or better slot is more than enough. My OCD simply won’t allow me to run a firewall off the PCH.
Plenty of cheap systems out there that match this criteria. I’m still running an old ass 1155 motherboard with an Intel x710 quad 10g card in it, and I’ve yet to see the CPU go over ~15% usage. That’s with 2.5g symmetric fiber WAN and a bunch of internal interfaces.
Plenty of cheap systems out there that match this criteria. I’m still running an old ass 1155 motherboard with an Intel x710 quad 10g card in it, and I’ve yet to see the CPU go over ~15% usage. That’s with 2.5g symmetric fiber WAN and a bunch of internal interfaces.
Yup my OCD has taking over as well...so I "verified" my dilemma with chatgpt and it seems to think the PCI-e riser is direct CPU not PCH on the P340, so did some googling and yes I was totally wrong and the config is like this:
Riser PCIe x16 (CPU, x8),
M-key M.2 (PCH, x4)