need recommendation for some hardware

[lageotakes]

I am looking for hardware recommendations that I can buy in the US for a small office.  I was going thru other topics on this board and saw IBOX-501 N13.  This looks nice but cant find it in the us.  I really wanted to spend around $200 not including the ssd or memory.  Would prefer to purchase from somewhere like amazon, newegg, etc.  Thanks.  I like to connect remotely and use vpn a lot.  Thanks in advance. 

[jenmonk]

I am using 2017 New firewall computer with J1900 Quad core  Support SATA HDD Q190G4U-S02 (Celeron) barebone pc about $150 including shipping(received within 1 week). support is good.  Added 8gb ram and 120gb msata. all together 250$. I am very happy with the performance.  I would suggest you get
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/QOTOM-4-LAN-Mini-PC-with-Core-i3-4005U-i5-5250U-processor-and-4-Gigabit-NIC/32812678037.html with no ram and Q330G4 i3.  Add 8gb ram and 120gb ssd or msata.

[Ciprian]

I am looking for hardware recommendations that I can buy in the US for a small office.  I like to connect remotely and use vpn a lot.  Thanks in advance. 

Since I assume there are chances you might get a PPPoE type of WAN connection for that small office (PPPoe is single threaded - so only the performance of only a single core of a CPU matters + CPU cache(s) size), and since you stated you would use (Open)VPN a lot (which is also single threaded - so only the performance of only a single core of a CPU matters + CPU cache(s) size), I would rather choose:

https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Industrial-PC-Gateway-Firewall-Router-for-pfSense-Core-I7-5500U-AES-NI-4-Gigabit-NICs-QOTOM/108231_32855356778.html

Of course, the fact that the NICs are Intel chipset NICs is very important, and a real gain in throughput, but anyway, I would chose the best single core benchmarked CPU available today, so that it would serve well even for the future features & plugins.

Good luck!