Ok I feel like this has been asked many times so my apologies. I'm building a router from a Dell precision t1700 sff PC. What I have gathered right now for it is a xeon e3-1246v3 CPU (3.5-3.9ghz quad core) 16gb ecc memory, 500gb sata SSD, Intel x540-t2 nic. Bought all those components separately as I buy those t1700s as barebones. I plan on having 10gbe lan through the house in the next year just not happening today. But for right now I'd like to make sure I can get full throughput 1gbps up and down through my isp. Now all I've found is that the x540-t2 has issues with pfsense, can't find anything to tell me for opnsense. I'm also planning on using a VPN provider such as nord or expressvpn for alot of traffic. I know that I'll be at the mercy of whatever speed they can provide but I'd like there to be no bottleneck on my end. Right now my internet usage is close to 2Tb a month. After this is all setup I'm going to have a "server" moved over to my house and I expect that number to double. So if someone can tell me anything on nics, ram, hardware acceleration, wireguard, OpenVPN, VPN providers , ect. It would be greatly appreciated.
I bought one of these (https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256804435153453.html) and just got it installed. It's running ESXi with 32 gigs of ram and a 1TB NVMe for less than $300. I have gig internet and my cable modem has a 2.5G nic and it's connecting to this device at 2.5G and it's blazing fast. Even when I saturate the link, the CPU doesn't even realize anything is going on and I only gave OPNSense 4 gigs of RAM, 2 CPU cores and 100 Gigs of storage. I already have another VM going too doing light duty Windows and all is working quite well.