I have a pfsense whitebox with a Xeon E3-1240 v5 and a mellanox connect-x4 (also have used x520 and x550 in the past) and my WAN speed is 5gig up/down. Aside from the power consumption being higher, am I at any major disadvantage from a performance perspective by using my current box vs a modern Xeon-D? Is there something I’m missing out on by the NICs being onboard?
What matters is the chip being used, not if the NIC card is built in or not.
PFSense does need a powerful processor , just look at the systems specs of Netgate devices
It really depends on number of users, what services being used and etc. Netgate have a sizing tool on their website.
Also, bare in mind pfsense maxes out at 10 gig due to FreeBSD limitation. Which is why they came out with TNSR+.
Hey everyone,
Isn’t that funny how “things” work. LTS forums dropped me an email with some posts I might be interested in reading. 
I’m almost in the same boat. I have two decom servers I’ve been messing with. 
Trying to figure out which would be the quietest and least power/heat.
-
HP Proliant DL20 G9 w/ Xeon E3-1270 v5
-super quiet and can monitor the power directly with iLO
-can be mounted on my vertical rack mount next two unRAID server
-separate or shared port for iLO (html5) -
Datto S3-P4000 w/ Xeon D 1541
-typical 1U fans that are loud AF, so I gutted it, IPMI still uses java for console
-case needed, tower or rack
I couldn’t decide between the two. For now, I repurposed a Dell 7060 micro. It has an i5-8500T, 16GB RAM, a SATA port, and two M.2 slots. I put a small NVMe as the boot drive and got an M.2 a+e key that’s 2.5Gb to replace the wifi card. I went the aliexpress route to get a card with an Intel chip. Everything on Amazon was Realtek chips and wasn’t being recognized.
Just this morning I swapped out the Unifi USG 3P for the pfsense box. It’s running on Fios 1Gb right off the ONT, no POS VZ router 
Going to run with this for a day. Then I’ll rewatch Tom’s bufferbloat video and apply the settings.
Ⓡich