Yeah. I was about to suggest AM1 since it’s pretty low power, cheap, and supports AES-NI.
BUT: The semprons don’t. So, watch out.
Yeah. I think anything built on Bulldozer or newer supports it.
That’s what I mean, if you want to use pfsense then you shouldn’t get too hung up on power consumption.
Also, have any of you had any luck finding drivers for Intel network cards that work under Windows 10? Specifically a Pro 1000 MT Quad port?
Even my APU.1D4 with it’s ginormous 1GHz dualcore was spiking around 15% CPU usage… You totally can use low power x86 hardware to save electricity.
Not running windows anymore. Sorry.
what about the Kabinis?, the AM1 5350 its like 25W TDP and on the power consumption its like 10w Idle and 35w full load, you should check it out also it has support for AES Instructions.
-Fallen
i have a 1000/Pro 2 NIC Card and its working fine on the Drivers for 7/8 on 2016, have u tried with those?, when i connected the Card and booted the machine, windows just picked up the default driver.
-Fallen
Windows can’t find the right one, and if I go to Intel’s site the drivers they have are compatible with Windows Server 2008, and those drivers won’t install.
I did consider that chip but right now the cheapest I could find that chip was about $80 and I want to keep costs down if possible. According to a few people I’ve talked to the power of the CPU isn’t nearly as important as the type of PCI-E network card. Apparently a lot of manufactures such as Realtek use complex drivers which offload a lot of processing to the CPU, while Intel NICs do not. I think I’ll probably end up buying a used Intel NIC from ebay.