Specific hardware recommendation wanted

[Doktor]

I am looking for hardware for my firewall:
- 1 GBit connection WAN
- up to 2.5 GBit LAN
- Up to 70 devices
- Zenarmor should run on it in the $99 version
- 2 to 4 Ethernet ports
A mini PC that doesn't consume so much power would be nice. Maybe even without a fan?

I was thinking of 16 GB RAM.
CPU: N100 or N305. Is an N100 enough?

Do you have any specific hardware suggestions? Gladly from Amazon...or Aliexpress?

Cheers, Doctor

[Doktor]

Another question:
for the network topology as described above:
Is an N100 sufficient, or do I need an N305 (i3)?

[Greg_E]

Considering Zenarmor, then I would throw the fastest clock speed processor possible at it. I would probably lean towards the N305 and 16GB of ram.

The AMD V1756b in my HP T740 had no problems with gigabit transfers Lan to Opt, I don't have any 2.5gbps for testing. I think it might benchmark a bit higher than an N100 and certainly draws more power than the N100. 40 odd simultaneous users were not a problem for the T740 when I had it running during testing, eventually replaced with a Xeon based Supermicro server after freeing it from other duties. The T740 never got hot in use and would give me about 600-700mbps across the Lan with suricata and zenarmor and crowdsec all running. My Xeon machine is a little faster, but it also has a higher clock and faster ECC ram with greater interleave  on the RAM (all 4 slots).

Hopefully that will give you a little data you can use to compare with benchmarks for your processor. All that said, I'd look at a faster AMD, or the N305 if it were me and needing the 2.5gbps

[Doktor]

The WAN is only connected with 1 Gbit. Then an N100 should be enough... the 2.5 Gbit traffic in the LAN doesn't usually go via the Opensense, does it?

[Patrick M. Hausen]

The WAN is only connected with 1 Gbit. Then an N100 should be enough... the 2.5 Gbit traffic in the LAN doesn't usually go via the Opensense, does it?

Correct, it goes through your switch only.

[Greg_E]

It does if you have multiple LAN and use OPNsense as the router, otherwise as mentioned, no.