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Based on what you write, my own view would differ a little. You describe a system completely fulfilling its load requirements with a caveat of 95% CPU but without circumstances or timeframe for that. What do the load factors say on your dashboard? They are more interesting for estimating headroom, given you have already said the user experience is fine. Are you planning to add load or to upgrade the 2.5Gb/s link in the next few weeks?

Machines constantly develop in speed and price, so it makes sense to buy when it will make a difference rather than for future needs, to wait until the current system is actually or imminently deficient. A latest router is basically a quick-buy drop-in and the latest will have best performance over price.

While my link is only 1 Gb/s and the chip in my DEC697 might be considered practically antique, my downlink and the 2.5 Gb/s routed backbone (3 nets) run full tilt with load factors way below interesting levels. I would love to buy a DEC850 but have no excuse so I bought a new Mac instead. Unless there is more information that you have written, I suggest keeping options.

You bring up a lot of solid points, and I definitely should have been a bit more precise on what my exact needs are in the parent post. I'll do my best to keep it all concise while giving a bit of clarity:

• As far as load factors, it's experiencing peak usage anytime I'm downloading something or if multiple devices are downloading items across the network. Seems to handle local network transfers like a breeze, however.
• The heavy usage is a combination of that bandwidth saturation and the fact that I've got Wireguard across the network in conjuction with a pretty sizable DNS blocklist. The encrypt/decrypt on wireguard is most of the utilization.
• I have no plans at present to increase my ISP speed beyond 2.5Gb as I find it to be wholly unnecessary
• My biggest concern is I don't believe the J6413 will be able to handle adding IPS/IDS in the future when I start messing around with hosting my email server. I think the overhead will be too much and lead to throttling or just not working

Thank you for making sure I actually provided some details, guess I was just in a rush at the time. I'm of the same mindset where I don't like to buy new things until I absolutely have a use case for them, or my old tech just stops being practical. Even then, I like to reuse (my old PC build is now a NAS).
The only reason I have an itch to get the upgrade now is that I've seen what this device is capable of, but I'm still within the return window on the J6413 box. So I could take the money from that and scoop up the 304 with the difference. Otherwise, I'd just ride this box til it quit.

Hope some of this info helps. I know I'm just chirping out into the internet with my decision making problems essentially, but had some legitimate concerns regarding the Realtek NIC. But it would appear forum member meyergru has the RTL817 working in OPNsense, so that's a relief.

The Core 3 304 does surprisingly well in Passmark. Apparently the unit includes 16GB of RAM. The base UFS storage is fairly large, slow by NVME standards but faster than SATA; I don't know what its endurance is like. It is possible to add an M.2 SSD. According to meyergru the RTL817 works now, and you can dig through BrandyWine's i226 thread if necessary. The MediaTek MT7922 Wi-Fi is unlikely to be usable in the near term, but I could be wrong. I wouldn't load the firmware driver thingie. YMMV.

CNX has a review. His benchmarks are interesting - performance is a bit uneven, likely due to the core arrangement (1P 4LPE) and long-term power limit.

I don't have advice, as I have no experience with similar hardware (or Internet service, thus far).

Thank you very much for the links! I really appreciate it, and it will certainly help a ton as I make this decision. I'll definitely pour over all of it tomorrow after work, so I thank you again.

 Hello, and thank you for your time. I am currently running OPNsense on a small, fanless mini pc with an Intel J6413 and 8GB of RAM. At present, my 2.5Gbps fiber connection is seeing its full bandwidth being utilized effectively, and that makes me happy.

Direct passthrough, I'm getting the full speed, and with WireGuard enabled, it's only dropping by about ~10-15%. However, I'm pretty certain that's mostly due to the servers my VPN of choice uses, because even with no VPN on the network, and using it on my PC (13900K for reference) I get the same speeds.

My biggest thing I want to address with my upgrade is the CPU utilization. Currently sitting at around 95% when under full load. Hence the upgrade.

I've been shopping around for N150 devices, and I stumbled upon something else entirely. See, the N150 devices I see are close to $600 and I'm assuming that's likely a price hike due to those devices having 6 LAN ports. However, I found a mini pc from Beelink with an Intel Wildcat 304 on board and 2 LAN ports. One is a Realtek RTL8127 (10Gbe) and the other is the tried & true Intel I226-V (2.5Gbe).

I know there have been issues in the past with Realtek, but the most recent posts I've seen on the OPNsense forums show that it's apparently working fine now? Just have some worries I need assuaged before I pull the trigger on this device. So I come to you before making this purchase decision. It's sitting at around $469 right now, which feels like a steal, but I need some community input before I make that call.

Thank you very much for your time. Any help would be greatly appreciated.