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Just in case the question I am asking is unclear or hard to understand, I am basically asking whether or not the type of hardware in a machine (such as a router or server) matters when using a gigabit connection.

It is already known that you will need a NIC that is compatible (correct me if I am wrong) with gigabit speeds. My question more focuses on whether or not I need a specific type of CPU, motherboard, RAM, etc...

I understand that some of the parts may be unrelated to how fast the network goes but that is the nature of the question. What type of hardware is required for a Gigabit connection?

I am mostly asking this because I am interested in building my own pfsense router and I want to be sure that I am not slowing down my network because of my ignorance of the type of parts I need.

joeqwerty
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joeldesante
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    Most recent hardware supports gigabit connection. unless you chose something super old 5-10 years old. – Danila Ladner Nov 28 '17 at 19:07
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    Embedded processors (ARM, MIPS etc.) might have trouble keeping up with gigabit line speeds without specialized hardware. But an ordinary PC , even several years old, will have no trouble. – Michael Hampton Nov 28 '17 at 22:06
  • How many packets/second and which OS? – Martin Schröder Nov 28 '17 at 23:35
  • @DanilaLadner, I think you'll have to go back more than a decade: I've done gigabit speeds on an Atom 230, which is reportedly comparable to a 1GHz Pentium III (so, early 2000). – Mark Nov 29 '17 at 02:38

2 Answers2

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You should be fine with just about any hardware put out in the last decade. You're more likely to run into issues with, as you said, the NIC, the cables, or the switches. Just make sure you're using a Gigabit 10/100/1000 NIC and switch, and Cat5e or higher cables

Steve Stoveld
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    It's worth noting that as of 2.5, pfSense requires a CPU that supports the AES-NI instruction set, which IIRC is any processors from Westmere on. – Tristan Nov 29 '17 at 06:14
  • @TristanSeifert Good point. I will add that to my answer – Tonny Nov 29 '17 at 07:08
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From personal experience (I have build about 30 of these...).
For pfsense a Pentium 4 or newer is fine. If you are running more than 2 gigabit nics in there (or 2 under nearly continuous heavy load) go for at least a Core2Duo. I do recommend 2gb of RAM as that gives some room for complicated firewall, dhcp, NAT, proxy and whatever other service you want to run on the router.
I like to repurpose old business desktops for this as they often come with an onboard Intel NIC. Intel NICs are nearly always vlan capable so you don’t need a 2nd NIC for a router-on-a-stick configuration.

A hard drive is really nice. You can run pfSence from an USB stick, but booting will be slow and logging to disk will be really slow. Besides, if you need a lot of logging (or run a caching proxy) the stick will fill up quickly and may die prematurely due to excessive writing to it. (Most USB sticks aren’t really designed for that kind of abuse.)

As Tristan pointed out in a comment the upcoming 2.5 release of pfSense will require a CPU with AES-NI support. This means Broadwell Core-I (not Celeron/Pentium). Anything after Broadwell is ok. For pre-Broadwell you will need to check on a CPU by CPU basis (some Xeon, i5 and i7 models support it)

Tonny
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