As others have said or implied, it depends on your use case.
Is this a mission critical network or your personal at home plaything?
A few users or many dozens of users?
Traffic from a few internal users or services for many external users?
The devil is always in the details.
With that said, I have been using a Topton N5105 with 4 2.5Gbe Intel nics for about 2 years. I needed to clean, smooth and re-paste the heat sink on it, and still have a slow USB fan to keep it cool. (May be overkill, as they will run hot without issues, but I prefer it cool.) Network is my home and lab playground, move a lot of data around, a number of services running, several VLAN in network, cameras and home automation stuff, etc. OPNsense runs on it bare metal, and I haven't had any issues and the system never seems to be overworked by what I ask of it.
If a needed to support it for someone else, I probably would use it in a home or few person office. But for a larger or more mission critical application, I would step up to something better.
Is this a mission critical network or your personal at home plaything?
A few users or many dozens of users?
Traffic from a few internal users or services for many external users?
The devil is always in the details.
With that said, I have been using a Topton N5105 with 4 2.5Gbe Intel nics for about 2 years. I needed to clean, smooth and re-paste the heat sink on it, and still have a slow USB fan to keep it cool. (May be overkill, as they will run hot without issues, but I prefer it cool.) Network is my home and lab playground, move a lot of data around, a number of services running, several VLAN in network, cameras and home automation stuff, etc. OPNsense runs on it bare metal, and I haven't had any issues and the system never seems to be overworked by what I ask of it.
If a needed to support it for someone else, I probably would use it in a home or few person office. But for a larger or more mission critical application, I would step up to something better.