Do you mean for a gigabit internet connection? Because you may need something decent (ie not cheap) for that. You should have a look at the hardware guide on the pfsense site, it's based on older hardware but it will give you an idea of what you need. I haven't tried but I'm fairly confident that something like an atom will not be able to do gigabit.
Gigabit internet with wifi on the cheap. Sorry, that makes no sense.
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I started looking into new router about a month ago and was dead set on making myself a pfSense box until I saw Unifi. I got the Security Gateway (Router) and their cheapest AP and it outperforms my ASUS RT-N66U. I was even able to order them on Amazon Prime now which was pretty neat haha.
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Yeah, and that's why it's expensive.
If I buy the correct WiFi card, there shouldn't be any headaches. My plan is to simply send it back in case the chipset is not the same as shown on the pictures.
I mean seriously, if the drivers are fully compatible how hard could it be?
I never asked for advice on what AP I should get.
I think 100-200 megabits should be enough for the internet connection for now.
The WiFi speed itself doesn't matter too much. I definitely don't need Gigabit WiFi.
Personally I don't like the "it will do everything" mentality anymore. Every time I tried it, something went wrong. One thing per job is much easier to handle and gives you way more options.
Honestly, I wish you luck with what you want to accomplish.
I'm sure it would be interesting to read about it here.
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Does anybody have any experience or Is there any in depth information available for the increase in cost/power that comes with running (more or less) a desktop computer as your router? The practical features of pfSense are pretty balla but im not sure if it's justified if you're going to be spending a significantly larger amount of money on power for the privilege.
You should start a new thread for that.
https://www.pfsense.org/hardware/
CPU Selection
The numbers stated in the following sections can be increased slightly for quality NICs, and decreased (possibly substantially) with low quality NICs. All of the following numbers also assume no packages are installed.
10-20 Mbps We recommend a modern (less than 4 year old) Intel or AMD CPU clocked at at least 500MHz.
21-100 Mbps We recommend a modern 1.0 GHz Intel or AMD CPU.
101-500 Mbps No less than a modern Intel or AMD CPU clocked at 2.0 GHz. Server class hardware with PCI-e network adapters, or newer desktop hardware with PCI-e network adapters.
501+ Mbps Multiple cores at > 2.0GHz are required. Server class hardware with PCI-e network adapters.pfSense is incredibly light on resources. Whatever a system draws at idle is about what you can expect pfSense to draw.
@Dexter_Kane That's good news. I mean that J1900 CPU was quadcore 2GHz I think, so I'd get 500Mbps easy. That's more than enough.
Power draw mostly depends on what hardware you are using. Mine is running on an AMD Athlon 5350 which draws around 25W on idle but some of the SoCs mentioned in this thread will have significantly lower power draw.
The J1900 is a low power part, a Pentium G620 even beats it in multi-core performance and absolutely stomps it in single-threaded performance. I doubt a J1900 would be enough.
How much would such a J1900 get me?
I also just found an interesting motherboard with a Celeron CPU, is that better?
It's only 1.8GHz x2 though.
Performance is almost identical, the J1900 just beats the Celeron 1037U in multi-threaded but the Celeron beats the J1900 in single-threaded by a bigger lead but I'd say the Celeron is better because the difference in multi-threaded is very minimal.
@MichaelLindman Thanks.
I'm still unsure if I should go for it though. I mean if I'd only get 10mbits in the end that would be very frustrating.
I'm saturating my internet connection of 100mbps with an Athlon 5350 so you should be fine, I can even transfer files between the wireless and wired subnets at around 200-300mbps.
@MichaelLindman So you're running WiFi from the pfSense box directly, right?
200-300mbps through WiFi is quite impressive I'd say.
I'm using the Unifi AP AC Lite like most other people in this thread which is wireless 802.11/ac and has a max transfer speed of around 400mbps in real-world performance.
Just remember that when they talk about network throughput and CPU power they don't mean sending large files between two interfaces, they're talking about firewalling a large number of packets per second. Pretty much anything will do gigabit for a file transfer but internet traffic, especially if there's a lot of packets, is very different.
That makes more sense, given my current setup I could probably do over 200mbps internet on the Athlon as the CPU isn't taxed very much during heavy usage, not 100% sure on my NICs though.
If you get something like an Up-Board² (I know, I know, Realtek NICs, but just for the sake of argument), that will run at less than 10W at full load - and PFSense won't likely load the CPU on that all that much. I run a Core 2 Xeon for my PFSense box, and I can make up the difference by turning off a couple of lights.
If the power bill increase still worries you - these things initialize in like, 30 seconds to a minute. Turning the router off when you're not using it (out of the house, asleep, etc) will take at least 2/3 of the usage off. At 45W running constantly for 31 days, that comes down to $5.50 in electricity at $.164/kWh.
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