PfSense "Box" Suggestions

[Mind_001]

I need a new PfSense "box". I looked around, and everyone has good ideas and all, but nothing is "recent" It's all the way back from 2014... Surely "something better" is on the horizon now?

 

I'm looking for a low-powered system. No need for more than 2 Ethernet ports, as I have my 16-port switch. No use for wireless, as I have an AP in my living room. included RAM, SSD, etc. would be awesome. Must have AES-NI support.

 

Price gotta be around $100-200. And I want to pay with PayPal...

 

I looked on Newegg, eBay, Amazon, hardly anything is reviewed.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Speed of broadband connection?  Do you need to connect to VPNs?  QoS?

I'd be quite tempted to go for their own base unit https://www.netgate.com/solutions/pfsense/sg-1100.html

[Mind_001]

6 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Speed of broadband connection?  Do you need to connect to VPNs?  QoS?

I get 200/11. No need for VPN/QoS

[Alex Atkin UK]

2 minutes ago, Mind_001 said:

I get 200/11. No need for VPN/QoS

I wouldn't be so sure as a big point of a good router is to use QoS to mitigate bufferbloat when your connection is under load.

 

Any particular reason you are going for pfSense over a mid-range consumer router that can run OpenWRT?  At the moment I believe those are actually slightly better for bufferbloat mitigation, pfSense is more about scaling to very complicated setups.

[Mind_001]

1 minute ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

I wouldn't be so sure as a big point of a good router is to use QoS to mitigate bufferbloat when your connection is under load.

 

Any particular reason you are going for pfSense over a mid-range consumer router that can run OpenWRT?  At the moment I believe those are actually slightly better for bufferbloat mitigation, pfSense is more about scaling to very complicated setups.

Consumer routers are a pos... I have been running pfsense off a spare computer for 6 months now. I never had a problem. So....

 

The reason I need a pfsense box is because the PC is taking up way too much power. I need something smaller and less power drainage.

[Eniqmatic]

Get a PCEngines APU4, should do the trick!

[Alex Atkin UK]

29 minutes ago, Eniqmatic said:

Get a PCEngines APU4, should do the trick!

But it has crappy Realtek NICs.  I wouldn't touch anything without Intel personally, its pretty much universally recommended for pfSense.

[Eniqmatic]

2 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

But it has crappy Realtek NICs.  I wouldn't touch anything without Intel personally, its pretty much universally recommended for pfSense.

No it doesn't, has Intel i211 nics??

[Eniqmatic]

Direct from the PCEngines site:

 

[Alex Atkin UK]

Ah I see, I was accidentally looking at the main APU page.  They really should make it more clear than just that little title at the top, changing the colour of the menu link is pretty standard for a well-designed site.

Also, curse you Google for linking to the main page when I specifically asked for APU2.