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I recently migrated to a Minisforum MS-01 and it is performing well.  However, the Thermal Sensor widget shows 50-60 deg C  most of the time for all 8 CPU Threads (color is still green).  However, it frequently ticks up to 70-75 degrees C for two of the CPU threads, and the color of the bars on the widget turn yellow for those CPU cores. 

And when I pick p my MS-01 box its hard to tell if the fan is running.

I know I can look in the BIOS for fan settings.  I plan to do that this weekend, but it is a process to set up a table in front of my closet, then connect a monitor, keyboard and mouse in order to access my BIOS.  I will also run it with the case off to try to observe whether the fan is running.

In the meantime, I am trying to find out if there is a way to monitor or control the CPU fan from inside of OPNSense. 

Thanks in advance for any help provided.

I got OPNSense up and running on the Minisforum (MS-01 i5-12600H with 32 GB RAM).  I have ZenArmor running as well. 

I tried turning on IPS/IDS (e.g., Suricata) and locked myself out of the GUI and even the console didn't respond.  I ended up doing a new clean install and then restore from back-up.  Will have to try again with Suricata.  After choosing some rulesets there were tens of thousands of rules that appeared.  Have no idea how to choose which rules to choose / turn on.

Otherwise, the MS-01 seems to be doing fine.  Getting near 1 Gbps up and down on wired speed tests and 350 Mbps up/down on wifi speed tests (using Unifi switches and LR6 hotspots).

I was only getting around 100 Mbps until I disabled all the ecores in the BIOS.  Now it is guaranteed to be using a p core.  I also disabled the 10 GBPS ports, the PCI port, the Wifi module, and then disabled ASPM on the NICs via the BIOS. 

Yes, I went with the 12600H.

Thanks meyergru for the input.

I went ahead and ordered a barebones MS-01 from Amazon.

I'm pairing it with the following (also ordered from Amazon today)
- 32 GB of Crucial DDR5 5600 MHz ram (two sticks of 16 GB) (i know I'll only get 5200 with the MS-01)
- two WD_BLACK 1TB SN770 NVMe Internal Gaming SSD Solid State Drives (I want to set up OPNSense with XFS - mirror).  Could have gone with 250 or 500 GB drives... but why not get 1 TB's for around $30 more total.

Total cost $650 including sales tax.

The build from scratch option was going to cost around $1,170 including tax, although I already own the new power supply I was going to use.  System performance of the MS-01 should be comparable, might actually be lower power consumption. 

Thanks for your input. 

That Minisforum MS-01 looks tempting.  I almost bought one. However, after reading the comments/reviews one person said that in the Bios it does not have "auto power on after power is restored".

Auto-power-on after a power outage is a must for me.  Before I figured that out in the bios of my old Dell, I would have to get out a step ladder (to reach the top shelf of the closet) and manually turn the Dell back on after a power outage.  My wife did not like having to mess with this if I wasn't home. 

I am fairly new to OPNSense.  I migrated from Arista Untangle over the last couple of weekends.  So far so good.

I'm running on a 10 year old Dell XPS 8700, 16 GB RAM, intel i7-4770 processor.
I have symmetric 1 GbE up/down fiber-fed internet, but 2 GbE is now available.  I have all Unifi switches and AP's downstream of my OPNSense box.

This old machine is chugging along.  It even passed the ZenArmor HW check.  I'm using about 55% of my RAM. My only concern is that... it's 10 years old...  and if/when it fails, other than a new power supply, it will be hard to troubleshoot/repair it and home internet would be down until I can address it.

I found this GMK TEC NUC out there with dual 2.5 GbE ports.  See link below.  $559 isn't a horrible price as an insurance policy.  Would plan to migrate to the NUC and keep the old Dell in reserve. 

Just wondering if anyone has tried running OPNSense on a NUC like this one with and Intel Ultra 5 processor and the Arc graphics. 

https://www.gmktec.com/products/intel-ultra-5-125h-mini-pc-nucbox-k9?spm=..product_9969cb68-cccf-484c-b41e-f986a55099da.header_1.1&spm_prev=..product_abb67de7-5ca3-4fd3-bb37-35f346d6bb58.header_1.1&variant=2c517a3e-15dd-4cfc-a862-41dc0a7da684


Alternatively, I've considered building my own computer using:

ASRock IMB-X1314 motherboard (has 3 Intel 2.5 GbE ports, and can use ECC RAM)
12th Gen Intel i5-12500 (last one with only P cores / no e-cores... might be urban legend that e-cores are an issue... not really sure)
Plus
32 GB DDR4 3200 GHz ECC Ram,
Dual WD red SATA SSD (so I can do ZFS mirror-ed disks),
power supply and
case with Noctua case fans.

Thoughts on either the GMK TEC NUC or my proposed build would be appreciated.