Looking for advice on core speed vs. count for pfsense. I have an 1150 board and am looking at these two CPUs:
I'm leaning towards the xeon. I don't think 1.1 GHz would be an issue…? it has the AES instructions as well. i might have just answered my own question. thanks, all!
you can run pfsense on basically anything well (unless you are doing some seriously insane networking lol) so I'd say grab whatever one is cheaper tbh
The pentium doesn't have AES-NI, which PfSense just anounced yesterday will be a requirement in 2.5. 2.4 (the latest release which will run on non-AES-NI CPU's) will be unsupported in about 2 years. We discussed this a bit in this other thread.
that's actually very good to know. timely too.
I fully agree. While I don't understand why exactly, I am happy they announce it way in advance. The pfSense team have basically said that they have this and a lot more up their sleeve, but won't explain why at this moment. However, I guess since all the heat from the community, the guy I linked to, the husband of the CEO, had to step up and explain in more detail.
So, update: got the E3-1220L v3. it's quite happy in its new home:
I'm using a Dell Opteron 3010 case and PSU, which is just a nice form factor (and was my router until recently). Most of the actual components were in my main rig before I upgraded. The board is an AsRock IMB-380-L, which is a neat little board with dual nics. It's kept two sticks of ram for a total of 16GB.
You might have noticed this thing down in the corner:
I don't have anything else with a mini-sata slot, so it could stay here. I plan to do caching on this machine, but I also already have a 500GB HDD set aside for this. It makes a nice boot device, but (being a router) I don't expect this to be booting all that often. I may even boot from a USB stick (there's an internal USB slot on the board, too).
Are there other pfSense applications/plugins that could make use of a nice, fast drive?
Whats the power consumption like at idle and full bore?
dunno as of right now. i have a few hardware things to work out, and I haven't decided if I'm going to install to disk or usb. I've turned it on and messed around a little bit, but nothing's really ready to go yet. I'll get numbers once it is. The CPU has a 13 watt TDP, so it ought to be pretty nice 
I guess "power" would be another good argument for dropping the spinning rust in favor of the ssd.
