Son of the Forbidden Router in Mid-2023: 12th vs 13th Gen CPU and Motherboard Choice

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Hello,

I find myself needing to build a cheap-as-possible-but-still-effective 10GbE firewall/router (OPNSense).

I really like the Son of the Forbidden Router video. SON OF THE FORBIDDEN ROUTER! How to Build a Blazing Fast Router on a Budget - YouTube

I am curious about a couple of points, as it’s been about 6 months and the 13th gen processors dropped about the same time the video was published:

Is there any benefit at this point to choosing the i3-13100 (4 P cores) over the i5-12400? That is, is there something about the 13th gen chips that makes the 4 core entry level 13th gen i3 a better choice then the 12th gen i5 with 6 cores?

Since the goal is to virtualize something like OPNSense and support multigig/10GbE networking, I’d assume an i5 with 6 cores would be preferable to an i3 with 4 cores, but I’ve been almost entirely AMD up to this point and I’m not really used to comparing Intel CPUs this way. I’d really appreciate any advice.

I’m also curious if there are any more readily available motherboards at this point that would be a good replacement for the Gigabyte board recommended in the video. I can only find that one at one retailer, and it’s nearly 600 USD. I do not want to spend that. :wink:

I’ve also got a Pi KVM v4 on order, so I could use that and not need on-board IPMI…

I’m not planning to run a NAS on this box, so I don’t feel like I need ECC RAM (though it would be nice to have). I’ll be building in a tower and am more concerned about being able to seat a 10 GbE SFP+ NIC and a 10 GbE RJ-45 NIC (so I can get from the RJ-45 on my fiber gateway to the SFP+ uplink on my core switch).

Is there a more mainstream motherboard I could look at for this?

Thanks!

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Interested in the response here as I’m going through the same decision to run opnsense on top of proxmox with 10gb NICs.

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Th gigabyte board has not truly been widely available since launch. “Gigabyte motherboard powered systems are just three months away.” That said every w680 board costs $350 and up. The cheapest being the asus w680 & asrock industrial offerings. If you don’t need the Ecc ram and ipmi there are plenty of consumer boards that don’t cost an arm and a leg.

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13600 and lower are likely to be using Alder Lake arch.

I bought the 12500 over newer Raptor Lake CPUs since I want homogeneous cores on my hypervisor.

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It’s also ~e-waste which can be seen in the thread, you can argue about the ethics regarding not editing the description in the video about it.

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