Hello,
I would like to build a router for home use with the following hardware:
2X DELL Intel PRO 1000 VT
DELL OptiPlex 3050 SFF
I would like to know if it’s a good pair or what should I get instead. Also, I want 8-9 ports.
As for software, I was thinking about pfSense with some firewall software.
Thank you,
Nicolaegis
I checked the specs of your the Optiplex.
It has one PCIe 3.0 x16 and one PCIe 3.0 x1. One of the Intel PRO 1000 VT will surely work out fine, but the other one x1 slot has a maximum bandwidth of 984MB/s or so which would likely choke out the 4 ports of the Intel Gigabit LAN if all ports decide to pull a lot of network data. You can probably get away with it if the devices connecting to it dont consume a lot of network bandwidth. Still, dont expect the connections to be reliable though.
Maybe you could physically split the PCIe x16 port?
EDIT: Not sure if it would be practical to split the PCIe port if the splitter cost significantly more.
EDIT2: Maybe get a better Optiplex model that can support better PCIe slots?
1 Like
Since the network card has four lanes and the port only has one you will limit the card to a maximum throughput of about 250MB/s, since it will only connect one of it’s four PCIe3.0 lanes to the physical port (if it even fits physically).
I also want to mention that, while it is an mid-tier quad-core processor, the performance will not be as high as on a dedicated switch, since the CPU will have to do all the routing and switching between the interfaces manually, as opposed to a FPGA or other kind of dedicated chip which does the same work on dedicated switches. I can not tell you, how high the switching capacity of this CPU will be, but you might look into it before you get disappointed by it’s performance!
1 Like
Do you have 8-9 different subnets? Or just 1 network and have 8-9 devices connect over the network to the internet?
Typically on “real” routers and router OSes each port is meant to be its own network/subnet. If you want multiple devices on a single network you would have 1 of those ports be that network within the router and then it would connect to a network switch, and all devices would plug in to the switch instead.
You can set up bridging in the router OS so that all physical ports act like a single network and the network applies to the bridge itself, but this typically has less performance than just using a switch does because the bridge and its traffic is all done on the CPU of the router.
Also, I would go with OPNsense instead of PFsense.