Low power consumption parts for a pfsense router?

Supermicro and ASRock Rack sell motherboards with embedded CPUs, not cheap.

Are you limited on space/size as well, why not go with low end desktop board and parts?

7W from the wall socket? That would be impressive, but I doubt you could get that low for the whole system considering two fans alone draw 10W… Could be wrong though. :slight_smile:

(and yes, I was talking about 50W from the wall socket e.g. total power draw)

Pretty much prebuilt arm will be low power

IDK why you are splitting hairs over 300 bucks for 5 years. That seems stupidly affordable

Lol not enough

If you want low power go arm but you trade performance it’s that simple.

That netgate should have the performance you need. A firewall only needs two ports. It serves as a gateway not a router :wink: . I think it draws a grand total of 7 watts from the wall under maximum full load… with 3 to 5 watts being idle

If you don’t care about performance and only want to pull 1 to 3 watts and seriously don’t care about VPN and want something Uber cheap then

https://www.netgate.com/solutions/pfsense/sg-1100.html

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PCEngines APU2 systems https://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm (the metal case is the heatsink, so don’t buy just the bare board unless you are prepared to deal with that) would fit the bill if all you need is gigabit routing. It has AES-NI support so it can run VPNs as well. Can be found around ebay and such for 200-300 euro at least in Europe.

Repurposing the old hardware you have will give you a system that performs worse than a modern low-power system and still is around 60w on idle (or worse), the issue isn’t just the CPU but the motherboard as well, even modern boards can use up to 25w on idle for no reason.

Laptop processor, it’s soldered to the board like all laptop processors in the last 5 years.

In the device pictured, it’s on the other side of the board, and is probably in contact with the case/heatsink.

You can only buy barebones mini-PCs with that, like Intel NUCs and industrial PCs, and I think some mini-itx motherboards from Supermicro that cost like a whole mini PC.

Yes, it was 7W from the wall. Variable speed fan ran very slowly easily keeping it cool, and since the PSU intake was right over the CPU heatsink, I only needed one, running almost completely silent.

2 of the 3 PSUs I tested with drew about twice as much power, so I was really tied to that one (still cheap) PSU. These were the days before 80plus. Ancient history. You can do the same these days easier with laptop parts, or mini-PCs like the one I linked to. There are Celeron versions that should have twice as fash per-core performance with half as many cores, at the expense of a couple more watts (per userbenchmarks), but I can only vouch for the Atom one I linked.

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That’s nice, however, that should perform similar to the SG-3100 ($350), but that only draws 5W.

I’d recommend OP not to build one and just but one instead.

Edit: just saw @PhaseLockedLoop reply. I agree with him.

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