I'm interested in making a PFSense router. My co-worker was experimenting himself and said the only way he could make it work after trying MANY motherboard and MANY nics, was using an intel-branded motherboard. Is this true? I would have expected pfsense to run on any hardware.....being BSD and all.
I'm not entirely sure but pfSense worked a treat for me on a variety of OEM boards and aftermarket ones aswell, all with different integreated NICs (some Broadcom, others Realtek).
What you have to careful about though is what expansion cards you buy, only specific chipsets are supported by FreeBSD. They have a compatibility list here: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.1R/hardware.html