My current opnsense box has an i3-9100, I was looking through my parts pile an noticed I have a i5-8500. They are nearly identical for the most part. Some of the perks of the i5 are thread count and memory bandwidth. But it's all so minimal and I know Zenarmor isn't multi-threaded yet and I'm not sure if there are other parts of opnsense that would benefit.
I own both so other than the time to swap them it's no loss to me either way. Was just a thought, I couldn't make a conclusion I was happy with so figured I'd crowd source it lol.
Thoughts? TIA!
depends on the application.
are you building a traffic filter? or just a router/firewall?
I would go for the T models for low consumption
I'm writing this on an i5-8500, it's a reliable Desktop CPU (working in a Dell OptiPlex 3060).
It has higher supported memory speed (DDR4-2666 vs. DDR4-2400). It also supports Intel vPro, that may be an advantage when using Proxmox.
I saw on Intel Ark that its status is still "Launched" unlike the i3-9100 whose status is "Discontinued".