Fanless Firewall Mini PC 4 x Intel 2.5GbE i225/i226 LAN Ports, Firewall Appliance Soft Router Intel N3700 Quad Core, Network Gateway Soft Router PC, Support AES NI/WiFi (4G 64G)

I have a decent amount of IT gear in the home (Synology NAS, VM host server, etc), along with an abundance of mobile devices, PCs, Macs, and a bunch of connected devices (TVs, AppleTV, Fire Stick, Ring, MyQ, Insteon, and more). Gigabit service from Xfinity was serving the home through an ASUS RT-AC86U with another RT-AC86U in AP mode with a wired back haul to ensure our entire home is blanketed in fast interwebz. Lately the RT-AC86U that was serving as the router would become unresponsive and require a reboot. Internet would be slow to unavailable entirely. If I could get the router to respond it looked like both CPU cores were maxed. I never looked into what the culprit was…I decided I’d just go a different route entirely. I had experience with pfSense when I managed IT operations for a bit and got to thinking this was a good excuse to go that route. Tried it out on a 15 year old gaming PC I built first to get things dialed in and prove out it would work. After some tinkering I got things working great…our power consumption was INSANE. Enter this awesome alternative. Priced attractively. 4 gigabit Intel based Ethernet connections. AES-NI compatible CPU. 128GB HDD and 8GB of RAM. Perfect/overkill for hosting pfSense in a home setup. I spent a few minutes tinkering with the BIOS to get things the way I wanted, installed pfSense, restored my pfSense config, and put it into service. Within 30 minutes I was done. It’s been running without issue since. Power consumption is almost non existent…it’s super efficient. pfSense doesn’t put a strain on the system resources at all, and it runs cool, as well as completely silent. Absolutely nothing not to like. I expect this to serve my needs for many years to come, and will do so much more reliably than any consumer router. Aside from all this, I have a MUCH more powerful device to improve my home network if I wish to, and I have a much better security posture in my home, running Snort and pfBlocker, etc. I can’t speak for using it as a pc, but if you want to use it as a firewall, I have zero issues recommending this unit.

I've had one of these in place running FreeBSD and IPFilter for over a year, running streaming TV and security cameras. No problems, very satisfied.

I went comparing, almost bought a NetGate box, but decided to go this route and stick to open source.I didn't trust the pre-installed Windows, but it worked well enough to do a quick burn in test to make sure everything was functional before I blew it away to install what I intended to run, pfSense.Docking a star since it came with OEM bios rather than CoreBoot, and while CoreBoot supposedly is available from some vendors of vnopn with that, it isn't here and doesn't seem to be available as a firmware flash. The second thing that pushes a missing star is the mSATA drive. It is great value to get this size at this price, but it doesn't appear to support trim functions. This causes issues with CAM timeouts on pfSense, OpenSense, and others, but you can get around this by going into your /boot/loader.conf and adding this line to fix it: vfs.zfs.trim.enabled="0"If you expect to do disk intensive actions with this system, you should either replace the included drive or use the internal sata port, as trim becomes increasingly important the more the disk is used or filled.I would've also preferred a more solid power plug than a barrel connector, or a locking barrel, but space is limited, so not docking a star for this as the barrel seems to be of reasonable quality.The unit runs warm, but is fanless, not too hot to touch, and rather powerful. 4 individual network ports and included wireless that works with pfsense is great. It isn't the latest wireless technology, but the latest doesn't work with things like pfsense anyway, and I disabled the wireless for security. If you want more/better wireless, use an external access point (and treat it as unsecure, like all wifi is). The SVGA port lets it work with ancient displays, and the HDMI port lets it work with anything current. AES-NI is a key feature that is included here on this processor, and enables speed ups for various encrypted network actions, which other slightly cheaper boxes didn't have when I compared them.In short, this makes quite the nice all in one tiny package bang for the buck router box.