recomendations two system build advice/suggestions?

[High_Voltage]

okay, so, I have a plethora of custom built systems to my name thus far, between tweaks of existing systems, existing custom builds and the likes clear down to actual custom builds, and I'm at a total loss here for how to build these two systems, and would like some advice....

 

the problem I have here, is most of the systems I have built are built to be the best at what they are intended to do for a good budget and to be able to get out of the ballpark performance at no whim given to the energy efficiency that they will be, IE they are made to be the best performance I can get from them with not a care in the world as to the cost and consumption of electricity that they use because I didn't really care how power hungry they were given my situation, well, thats the exact polar opposite for these two systems in question and I do not even know how or where to begin on energy efficient performance parts, so, help please??

 

 

tl;dr I need two systems for two specific purposes in mind and I would like the best performance at the lowest cost of electricity given these two systems will be online 24/7 when the rest of my systems are running only adding to the energy consumed by everything all inclusive so the best performance at the lowest power consumption would be optimally desired for these two systems...

 

system #1:  a quad core AT LEAST system to be used as a pass-through firewall/av scanning system that ALL of my internet will be routed THROUGH before hitting either the outside world or the inside of my local network

budget?? anything that is cost effective given I have like 0 budget to use for these two systems, so the lower the cost and the higher the electric efficiency per performance the better, I can save up long term to build this thing, but the budget is as low as can be for the highest performance per watt that I can afford, preferably anything less than 100$ is highly desired here, it will be running opnsense for an open source linux firewall os, and I can provide the hard drives and storage, but everything else I'll need, and quiet here is also HUGELY key for me.  am I willing to go above 100$ if need be?? absolutely especially if the performance gains will be highly worth it, so that 100$ pricetag is a ballpark desired amount on my end, but if you can explain to me WHY it would be good to go above that, i AM NOT against going above that, but I will have to save up for doing so longer term and I would like these two systems up as soon as I can get them up, anything past quad cores is a huge plus given that this is a pass through firewall that any computational issues WILL be a HUGE speed and throughput bottleneck, IE if you all think I should do a dual socket server system for this AND its either energy efficient on the needed use or the performance gains outweigh the electrical efficiency vs the performance of a more energy efficient system then so be it and go the performance route given that my actual througput is over 8MBPs download and almost 900KBPs upload throughput

 

system #2: I need a system that can be EASILY more low powered than system 1 given all this system will be doing is operating as a vpn intermediary router, so to speak, meaning that it will be running as a pass-through vpn connection router to route all of my local internet traffic through to my prefered vpn of choice so as to route everything through a single system and operate as if it were only a single device connecting to my vpn of choice (paranoid, and have huge hacker problems so thus the desire to build both of these systems and try and get some of the spying and hacker bullcrap off my back even to a minute degree, because hey, every little bit helps in this day in age, plus isp snooping and all that bullcrap I dont want to realy openly discuss here phaha...so yea, those two systems I need help on)

 

so yea, any help with suggested builds for these, the vpn system also would be a prefered budget of about 100$ unless once again significant enough validation as to why to go above that is warranted in which case once again I'm not against going over that proposed budget.

 

thanks everyone ^^

[Blackhole890]

maybe rasperri pi? because with your actual budget you can't have the best for less...

[High_Voltage]

I was more thinking used parts ala ebay type deal for buying the parts and what not, thus why I figured I could go for a lower end budget for these type setups, as for the vpn system I think I figured out I have some spare systems/parts I can use for that system, so the budget proposed for the antivirus/firewall system is basically both the proposed budgets of 100$ making the budget for that firewall/av scanning system about 200 or so if needing to be higher it can also do that given it would be worthwhile for that end of things, so I'm still curious what kinds of parts setups would be advisable for that system if anyone can lend their thoughts on that side of things?

[N3v3r3nding_N3wb]

2 hours ago, High_Voltage said:

I was more thinking used parts ala ebay type deal for buying the parts and what not, thus why I figured I could go for a lower end budget for these type setups, as for the vpn system I think I figured out I have some spare systems/parts I can use for that system, so the budget proposed for the antivirus/firewall system is basically both the proposed budgets of 100$ making the budget for that firewall/av scanning system about 200 or so if needing to be higher it can also do that given it would be worthwhile for that end of things, so I'm still curious what kinds of parts setups would be advisable for that system if anyone can lend their thoughts on that side of things?

Well, I'm going to submit the obligatory "wait for Ryzen" post.  R3 could be really, really good for that system.