Ryzen 5 1600 router?

Networking Networking Hardware
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Hey guys,

I have a ryzen 5 1600 just kind of siting around and am looking into building my own router for pfsense. Would buying a 4 port intel NIC and slamming it in there installing pfsense be a good idea or not? At the moment I am using it as a node in a Proxmox cluster, but it hardly ever runs anything. Would this be a good PC to try the forbidden router idea? This maybe that when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail situations. I haven’t ever built a router and wanted to know if this is a viable solution. I know any old PC will work (for the most part), but not sure about power consumption, compatibility and gotchas.

Any information or pointing me in the right direction would be appreciated, Thanks.

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I run pfSense on a VM on Proxmox on a Ryzen 1700 and it works like a charm. A 1600 has a lot of horsepower for a router. You can get away with a 2-port Intel NIC, one for WAN and one for LAN.

The downside is probably idle power usage since you will essentially be using 1-2 cores.

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Or a 1/2 port sfp+ 10gig nic and a managed switch (router on a stick).

If you’re already using it, marginal extra power consumption of the Proxmox host is probably negligible.

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A pair of these would set you up nicely for a home router with firewall:

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I have a one port on hand and the motherboards NIC is supported by pfsense would I need a 2 port NIC of those 2 would be sufficient?

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You can use bridges and give Pfsense virtual nics connected to Proxmox bridges

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Yeah didn’t really think about that.

So I have one i got for like $30 from a local bin store a netgear GS316EPP witch is kind of inspiring this idea of using pfsense

I may try this first since I the on board and the one port nic I have laying around should work

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That will probably work fine :slight_smile:

I experienced weird issues with pfSense and Realtek NICs (~2008 vintage) on a very old AMD jaguar board. I’ve since upgraded to an Intel i350 which is fairly cheap and very robust. It manages to saturate my 1 gbit connection without any issues.

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I use opnsense on a 2200g with zenarmour and see about 50% usage.
I used to use pfsense but jumped ship during the wireguard fiasco.
I typically use Intel nics and have had issues with 2 different realtek based nics over the years.

Having heaps of control has been great and glad I moved from the ISP modem/router garbage

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Yeah I need to look into opnsense. Dont know a ton about either one just know that I want to move on from my current soho router to something better.

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I recently repurpose my old i5 9600k gaming system to run proxmox and pfsense and I was surprised by the relatively low power consumption (around 50W compared to 30W that my old celeron SoC system used, and that’s with 6 hard drives in the system).

For normal use (internet, VPN, suricata) the CPU sits at 800mhz and about 20% usage and only speeds up if I’m doing something heavy like routing between VLANs at 10gbps.

I recently updated pfsense to the new version of pfsense+ (the community edition will get updated soon) and that dropped my CPU usage by a third.

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Definitely jump in and have a play you will be amazed at what you can do and how much more reliable your home network can be

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Not a good idea for home use IMO. Unless you live off grid or near a hydro power plant…

A Ryzen 1600 system idles around 50W. Operating 24/7, it’s around 438kWh a year. By the average US electricity price, the annual operating cost is over $70. I’m pretty sure over 90% of that electricity and dollars are wasted…instead of used.

To put things into perspective:

Ryzen 1600 currently sells around $50 on ebay. You’re throwing away a Ryzen 1600 every year you operate the system 24/7.

A little but very capable router such Edgerouter X, idles at 2.7W, max at 3.1W.

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I did not know about that i may look into buying one of those it would be cheaper than getting a good nic thanks

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Just so you know the Edgerouter X is hamstrung by the 1Gbps half duplex pipe to the CPU, which may be a deal breaker for you.

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Interesting…you brought this up.

I was the original author/discoverer who documented this issue about six years ago. So basically every article/post after that I’ve seen was a repeat of my finding. lol

It’s not exactly half duplex. But aggregated bandwidth is capped at 1Gbps either purposely by Ubiquiti or simply a lack of competence by Ubiquiti. I believe OpenWRT won’t have this issue. If people going to put money on ERX in 2023, most likely should plan to run OpenWRT in the long run btw.

Anyway, this thread is not about ERX or bashing Ubiquiti…

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Wasn’t my intention, it’s just a friendly heads up for him to manage his expectations.

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While I agree with the numbers $70 a year is not a lot for the fun, utility and entertainment of having a Ryzen 1600 servre running a router, NAS and homelab.

Edit:
pfSense and OPNSense are also extremely capable router operating systems that make most other software look like the networking equivalent of Lego DUPLO.

If you some day want to go 10Gbit you just put a new network card in the box, that’s gotta count for something.

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What OPNSense (also pfSense) nice about is the GUI which is important to some users but not all users.

For home use, most power users don’t need router for 10Gbps to internet but a 10Gps switch for the LAN.

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I don’t think it is either, but I am a bit worried about having my NAS and router in the same device. No specific reason it just seems like a bad idea to have my data on the same device as my firewall. I maybe and probably am wrong, but it feels off. I still want to, but I know I am going to have to do quite a bit to get it segmented properly.

I really do want to play with pfSense and OPNSense. That is the primary reason for wanting to switch from my current router. It does all that I need for the most part.

The other router I was looking at is the TP-link omada, but I really just want to learn pfSense and OPNSense so like the Edgerouter X it kind of defeats the propose for me.