Is this a good option for a low power pFsense machine?

Have been looking at getting a pFsense machine that its great and does not take up too much space(Small apartment). After doing some research i found this on amazon;
Amazon link - Qotom-Q190G4N-S07

It seems like it checks all the boxes for what you would want in a pFsense machine, but thought i would ask all of you smart people here on the level1tech forum :smiley:

My connection; 250/250 mbps

Looking at the specifications it should be fine, the J1900 is more than capable for the task and it has four Intel NICs as well which is good, only downside of the product I can see is that the J1900 doesn't have AES-NI extensions which could be an issue if you have a lot of VPN traffic.

4 Likes

Hmm, if you dont mind, could you elaborate on what you mean? Not 100% what "AES-NI extensions" are :stuck_out_tongue:

AES-NI is basically a piece of hardware in the processor itself, dedicated to en/de-crypting, which will decrease the load on the processing cores significantly when doing said tasks. 250/250 is a relatively high throughput, and you want to be able to push both these bandwidths at the same time. So your processor should be able to de- or encrypt 500mbps continuously while still keeping the rest of the tasks of routing and such running. For reference, i have a dual core c70 amd processor without aes-ni which can push about ~340mbps across both cores. However, some say OpenVPN is single core, which would half the throughput.

3 Likes

If i were considering to do whole network pFsense, as described in a level1tech video(This). How big of a problem would it be, that it does not have AES-NI?

Look at my edits. You mean put all your internet traffic through a VPN?

2 Likes

It depends on how heavily AES is used but I haven't done any testing in pfSense myself with none AES-NI vs AES-NI, might have to look into it though.

However, here is a comparison of the J1900 vs the Athlon 5350 which is what I use in my pfSense router and has AES-NI, the difference between the two is really quite significant given these results.

Source: http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Celeron-J1900-vs-AMD-Athlon-5350

1 Like

Just read through the edit, thanks for the great explanation :smiley: And yes, was thinking of doing my computer VPN on a router level because it seems easier then doing it on multiple computers. Might have to reconsider it or find a box that supports AES-NI :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks for the comparison! Seems like it might be worth to reconsider finding another small box or just outright building a small pc to run pFsense. Don't know if i am okay throtteling my connection that much :stuck_out_tongue:

I am a little confused with the use of commas here. I think the correct score is 56.9MB/s and 1010MB/s.

That would be my guess. Otherwise it seems insane that it can process 56 TB a second :stuck_out_tongue:

2 Likes

However. 56MB/s IS actually just enough for your bandwidth requirements. And if it is quad core, there'll be more than enough peocessing power left for all the other tasks your router will be doing.

2 Likes

If you plan on using a VPN for most of the traffic then it might be better to look for a CPU with AES-NI but I'll see if I can do some testing on my pfSense box with AES-NI disabled/enabled and see if I can get any meaningful results, I expect that I won't see a difference in performance as my connection is only 115/6 but I should see a CPU spike in the graphs.

yes, that would seem to be the case, I must have missed that when I checked the results.

2 Likes

If you have the energy and time, you can set up a VPN server LAN-side to be able to push gigabit speeds.

2 Likes

So ? Let me condense this.. Amd is better ?

In this example, if you wan to do whole network vpn then the amd processor is better, but on a whole its difficult to say.

The box i linked(If i haven't miss understood anything) is great for pFsense and will work just fine. The feature it is missing is "AES-NI" which if you want to do whole network VPN can limit your speed as seen geekbench graph linked earlier :smiley: As it is now i think the small box is still a great option, but will have to do a little bit more research before i can say more.

Hmm, might look into this as a solution, any links to where i can learn more about this?

This was a reply to @MichaelLindman, but if you have the j1900 already go ahead :stuck_out_tongue:

Regarding the choice of processor, I'd say power draw is also a thing to consider, and here the j1900 will win over the proposed AMD chip.

In this case possibly, the Athlon 5350 beats the J1900 in all multi and single-threaded tasks and offers better performance per dollar and also has AES-NI which the J1900 doesn't, That isn't to say the J1900 is bad, the Athlon only has slightly better performance but uses significantly more power as its a 24W TDP chip vs the 10W TDP of the J1900 but in this case the only meaningful difference is the lack of AES-NI support, if the J1900 had it the choice would be clear and the J1900 would win hands down.

3 Likes

There is a Qotom with AES and 4 intel NICs out there if you look around 3150(?). Costs a bit more.

I had a good hard look at it but it was cheaper to use a Dell Optiplex 990. This gave me an i5, 8gb of ram and a 128gb SSD to play with. It had a single intel onboard nic and I purchased 2 - 4 port Intel Pro/1000 NICs so I now have a total of 9 ethernet ports on the Pfsense box. I have 2 ethernet cables going to my 24 port switch as a load balanced lagg. I have 2 ethernet cables going to my cable modem to receive my 2 dynamic IPs. When I break down and get a 10GBe switch I will LAGG 2 more from the router to bridge between my 1GBe switch and my WAN.

I have a couple of 10GBe cards with optical cables here to play with so far that will link my NAS and my workstation/lab/dungeon in the intermediate term. My test machines are mostly various flavours of 1GB and wifi so they can continue to reside on the 1GB VLANs.

2 Likes

I tried searching around but the only thing i could find is This, but i am not sure if this was what you meant. Seems like its not really "out" for people to buy, or rather not though any store that i have acces to :stuck_out_tongue:

Dosen't that just eat waaaay to much power? My hope with the small j1900 based box was to get a small formfactor but powerfull pFsense router, that would not cost alot in electricity. Just out of curiosity, do you happend to know how much watt your computer uses?

Did you have some time to test this last night?