How to cheaply build a small PFsense router?

I'm quite liking the J1900 but I can pick up a dell optiplex with an i5, ram and disk for less than the J1900 without ram or disk.

For my needs I don't actually require hardware aes but if I can have it for free I will take it. I'm not convinced the dollar or two a month savings in electricity is worth the $100 difference.

Never Mind missed germany part

I found the cheapest SFF PC I could find on Craigslist and dropped in a PCI-E NIC I scrounged from work. $45 for an AMD E-450 dual core with RAM and HDD is not too shabby in my book.

I'm thinking about building a dirt cheap PFsense box to replace the dell Optiplex 380 im using now. It would be overkill for what I need but for less than 100 bucks i can build a....
HP proliant DL380 G7 server w/ 4 Broadcom NICs
Dual Xeon L5520
32 gigs of ram
2 X 146 gig SAS hard disks
2 X 460 watt redundant power supplies.

Any thoughts why I should or shouldn't? It would be the router/firewall for two houses and a small buisness with a FreePBX phone system.

I'll definitely work but its more than overkill for your use case, in some cases its more equipped than the Netgate products. Only issues I can see with is that the power consumption would be quite high and I'm not sure how well Broadcom NICs will work in pfSesne as most people recommend Intel NICs for the best compatibility.

Not really concerned with the power consumption. I can get the servers cheaper than a good motherboard and they are built like a tank. I have memory and processors laying around from other builds and upgrades. New 146 gig hp hard drives are going for 15 bucks with sled on ebay. I could put intel NICs instead of using the embedded Broadcom NICs but it raises the fan speed (all SIX fans) after a pcie card is added. The thought of a 50-60 pound router is kind of amusing though.

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If you don't care for power consumption then go for it i guess, the utilisation on my Athlon 5530 is almost none existent so running a dual-xeon on pfSense would be quite amusing, not sure if its a practical use of the hardware but why the hell not.

I've had some issues that I think may be in the Optiplex I'm using. It becomes unstable after a few days. i can reboot and its fine for a few days. It's actually been more reliable on the nightly builds than on the stable track. I'm not that farmiliar with BSD to go poking around...... I'm still learning linux.

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Never had any problems on my Athlon and its been running for 134 days straight, also the instability could be caused by the NICs as I know they can have weird issues but that depends on what the instability is.

Forbidden 503 and 504 when logging in. One of my internet connections disconnects and will not reconnect without reboot. Could be the service provider though. Seems like when I loose one of the Wan connections it tries to reconnect until it just becomes unresponsive. Haven't really had a lot of time lately to troubleshoot it. Just reboot it and go on.

I am from Germany too...so I know the parts market. I just put together my very own pfsense-box. Something a wanted to do for at least Wendells old scrapyard-PFsense video. Now I had some parts lying around (2 y old Raijintech Metis ITX Case, old ATX powersupply, a single 8GB DDR4 Stick) and only had to buy board, CPU, a small SSD and a good networking card.
I took the cheapest motherboard I could find: MSI B250I Pro (85€), a Intel Pentium G4560 with all the latest features +stock cooler (57€ + even has ECC support if I want to do something other with it later) a 35€ SSD (60GB) and a new chinese Intel I350-T4 networking card (40€) from ebay. So total cost was ~215€ (would be 130€ more if no parts avail.) Install was first-try everything working. The Metis case was nice, because I could fit a full ATX-Powersupply in it. 8 gig RAM is overpower, but i had the stick...so what. And having 2 core/4 threads with 3,5 GHz is enough horsepower for everything and then some. Full VPN trafic routing on the router level and processer isn't starting to sweat (<15%).
My VPN-setup @home added ~15-20ms to my 10ms ping and shaved 5% of my max down speeds on a 100/40 connection. I will add a 200/20 over cable at a later stage when the prices a down to about 25€/m for a second WAN with failover and loadbalancing.
I will try to undervolt/clock the processor when all my final installed apps are decided.
Noise is great as all fans running on lowest setting possible - its not silent...but the ambient noise (street/window) is louder at my place. I will post total power consumption @load when I find my wattmeter again (went missing 2 y ago).
As an AP I am thinking: Openmesh or Ubiquiti AP - but that has to be decided.

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I have been looking to build something similar in the Future. It does not quite fit your requirements but you might sill get some useful information out of it, since I used an austrian website to put everything together.

https://geizhals.eu/?cat=WL-728915

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