I've been testing OPNsense on an old desktop that's too large for my network closet, and want to buy some dedicated hardware.
This will be in support of a fairly large home network with Comcast 350mb internet, with no likelihood of anything approaching, much less over a gig WAN for years. I have plenty of L2 switching capacity for most intra-vlan traffic but want this for WAN mostly, and some limits on inter-vlan (e.g. video, iot, etc). Inter-Vlan will not have high bandwidth.
I have no idea what kind of IPS and filtering I may want to run, still too new to having it available (so assume toward the worse case end), except I will not be running any significant VPN (maybe occasional remote connection while travelling, nothing continuous). So any encryption needs are slim.
The two best I can see so far:
ProtectLi FW2B (Celeron)
HP (renewed) 800 G1 SFF I5-4590, 16GB
The HP is old, but the I5 should be substantially faster than the Celeron, and I can add a good 2 port Intel. While it is large, it fits on a shelf in the closet OK. And it's cheap, even if I throw away the included SSD (I have plenty) and HDD (not needed) .
I like the small form factor of the Protectli of course. Price wise after adding the NIC these are about the same cost.
Question: How important is the faster CPU speed going to be for these modest WAN requirements.
In case it is of interest to others, I got the HP 800 G1 SFF, it came from Amazon from a company called SKYTECH USA LLC for $192. It was surprisingly good for that price, clean, ready to go, sadly with windows pre-loaded (so I probably paid something for that). Had current (if old) bios, and all the virus scanning I could do found nothing (was curious even though was wiping disk).
I added a fairly pricey dual NIC (I350-T2 from Intel) for another $98, so about $300 total.
I had a spare Samsung 830 sitting around, it came with what looks like a new Kingfast SSD, which I tested was about the same speed, so I put them in a mirror zfs pair for OPNsense, and pulled out the (used) HDD.
It runs fast and quiet. If I saturate the WAN up (350mbs) the CPU hits all of 9%. With 16gb memory and 250gb of disk, OPNsense should have plenty of room for anything it needs. It's not as small and pretty as the ProtectLI, but it cost a bit less, and I can more easily expand it if needed (e.g. more NIC's, indeed I already have 3).