OPNsense and AES/AES-NI

[sidekick]

Hello everybody

I picked up two old jetway ITX motherboards with built-in cpu's, for next to nothing at a charity fund raiser. The pair would make ideal HA OPNsense firewalls, since they each have four Gigabit NICS. Unfortunately, they have two flaws that may make or break my dream of building a HA "cluster" of OPNsense firewalls
Firstly, they have old Intel Atom D525 64bit cpu's - dual core and no AES/AES-NI.
Secondly, the motherboard only supports a maximum of 4GB ram.

I am running a home lab with a few single board computers using docker swarm, a database, file server (NAS), etc. for development and also seven live, low use websites. My current HA OPNsense firewall is made up of two identical desktop motherboards (the only "big" boards in my home lab), each with an i5 gen 8 cpu, 8gb ddr4 ram and one onboard Gigabit NIC (two dual NIC cards added in PCIE slots, giving me 5 NICs each).

Which brings me to my obvious question: Will my new motherboards be good enough for OPNsense for at least the next three years?

Thanx in advance.

Edwin

[meyergru]

That heavily depends on what you try to do with it and your internet speed. If you want IDS, then most probably no.

Also, the D525 is a slow beast, compared to even the slowest 8th gen i5:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/611vs3097/Intel-Atom-D525-vs-Intel-i5-8400

[sidekick]

Hello meyergru
Thank you for the brief but helpful response - and the link! Much appreciated. Well, I'll just have to find another use for my boards, whenever and whatever that may be.
Thanx again
Edwin