Lenovo M920q NIC and RAM recommendation

[no_Legend]

Hi together,

i want to move my opnsense hardware from an Alix board to an Lenovo M920q i5-8500T.

For the M920q I'm searching for a Nic with 4 ports.
Is there any suggestion which chip is best to use?
Intel i350 or something else?
Is there any special brand which is common to use?

Also I'm struggle with the RAM size.
At the moment the system got 8gb.
Will it be also recommend to add an other 16gb RAM?

Thanks for you help.

Cheers Robert

[abulafia]

Intel i350. Beware fake Intel cards on eBay though.

RAM - 8GB are plenty for Opnsense. More could be required only if you need a lot of additional services.  Have a look at your current RAM usage to check.

Incidentally, I'll be moving to an m720q 8500T or 9400T soon, too ;-)

[no_Legend]

@abulafi

Thanks for your advice.
But how do I see if it is an fake nic on eBay.

I was searching for the 9th gen cpu.
But the price of was double the 8th gen.
Also there was according to cpu passmark there isn’t a big different between 8th and 9th gen.

So I decided to use the 8th gen. Compared with my alix apu it is 8x faster.

For the nic I found an HPE NC365T 4-port, which got an 82571EB chipset.

[abulafia]

Re: fake i350:

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/comparison-intel-i350-t4-genuine-vs-fake.6917/

https://www.hardwareluxx.de/index.php/news/hardware/netzwerk/58048-gefaelschte-netzwerkkarten-von-intel-bei-namhaften-deutschen-shops.html