Sophos SG 310 Rev. 1 vs Intel(R) N5105 @ 2.00GHz (4 cores)## NAT Performance

[vinet]

hello community,
iam looking actually for a firewal gateway for a Event with around 300-500 Clients on a around 300Mbit/s WAN Connection.

did you think the Intel N5105 from China could handle this easy or should i go better with some Sophos Hardware and install on it OpnSense?

best wishes,
Valentin

[Greg_E]

For peace of mind, I'd probably go with something more powerful and at least 16GB of RAM. An N300 would probably be good (if buying new), if buying used, look for something with an Intel i3 or i5 9th generation or newer processor, or comparable AMD processor or comparable Xeon processor, something with 8 threads (or more). Supermicro x10 or x11 series main board would be a good choice the Xeon E3-1230v5 that I have in my x11 based system would probably handle this, and maybe even do it with Zenarmor running (maybe).

Part of the question will be if you are going to run IDS/IPS, Zenarmor, Crowdsec, etc. Zenarmor specifically wants the fastest processor clock you can get for high throughput, a recent thread says an Intel i3-14100 will handle 2.5gbps with Zenarmor running.

Other people will probably tell you that at only 300mbps connection, an n100 or n5105 would be fine. But it sounds like there could be money at stake here (an event of 300-500 people), I would error on the side of too much performance to give a little safety net.

Only other advice I'd give is make sure you use an Intel NIC for the wired connections, an i350 would be fine for this use case. The Realtek might be OK, but in the end when I bet my paycheck, I go with Intel because it is almost definitely supported (i350 is definitely supported).