I was looking to dive into the pfSense world and I was looking at the zotac zbox c. I also rummaged through my bin of electronics not used anymore and found an old 4600x2.
My question is it worth it to try to find hardware for that older titan of a processor, or just get the zbox c and enjoy dipping my toes into pfSense
For the price, the Zotac looks pretty killer for a simple PfSense install. If you have all the parts lying around for the Athlon X2 system, I would try it out before you spend. If you don't, honestly that Zotac looks like a pretty killer deal and I don't think it would be a bad choice at all. You'd want to throw a single 4GB Sodimm of ram in there, and you could either install to a USB flash drive or a really cheap 2.5 inch drive if you want to keep the box without a USB sticking out of it.
To be clear. Im not forking over the cash for the i3 or i5 version. I just saw those and holy crap thats awesome but ill stick to the baseline model lol.
We just got one of those zotac boxes for an ips type system for work. They're pretty neat. Thu k ours in the i5 with like 16 gigs of ram.
im replacing an old home router so i think i am going to stick with the base model. the i5 is tempting but i dont think ill for that kind of cash over for running connections at my home only lol
I've got a CI323 Nano that I've used for pfSense and Sophos UTM9 and used them in a Hyper-V VM on top of Win10 and it worked fine in all setups. For a busy network you would want to run it directly on the hardware but I liked the idea of a low power (~17W) Win10 client for casual browsing that was also acting as my network router. Never got the wireless to work in either pfSense or UTM9 just Windows so I am running an Asus wireless router for my phones etc.
I'm just thinking of putting pfSense back on it myself to hide my main network as I have a PIA VPN subscription to try it with.
They can get hot being passively cooled so be aware of that in a hot environment.