Ryzen cpu and pfsense

Networking & Firewalls
1

I have an itx setup with an AMD Ryzen 5 4600g CPU and I was wondering how well this would work with pfsense? Any stability issues using an AMD CPU or is Intel the way to go like with the network cards?

Thank you in advance for your comments!

2

A Ryzen 4600g should be a great CPU, and you shouldn’t have problems running PFsense on this unit.

As far as the NIC’s go Intel just has the best overall support for things like routers and virtualization (Proxmox and the like). Other brands like realtek occasionally run into issues with Proxmox based on my experience.

Anyway, yes a 4600g should have more than enough juice to run a PFsense appliance, and if you’re savvy with virtualization you can easily use it to run Proxmox, with PFsense installed as a virtual appliance, along with other VM’s for example, Truenas scale depending on your environment and use-case.

3

pfsense requirements are really low for even a moderately used system, ryzen systems make awesome proxmox hosts, my goto is …

  1. install proxmox server first

  2. buy a two or more port intel (recommended chipset) based pcie nic, even cheap and cheerful used 82576 ones work well)

  3. setup pfsense as a vm after passing through the two nics on the intel card (use the onboard usually realtek nic for managment only)

  4. backup the pfsense vm nightly using proxmox’s built in backup scheduler to a network share (in suspend not snapshot mode)

I support a few SMB systems ive setup in this scenario (with a second identical pc running as an unused proxmox server also connected to the same network share for quick restoration on hardware failure of the first)

Keeping it simple and uncomplicated, very easy to support :slight_smile:

4

Like others have said, the Ryzen would work very well maybe a bit overkill though.

pfSense doesn’t require much to run. I would say it needs more disk space and maybe RAM.

I have an HP Elite Mini with an i9-12900T, 64GB of RAM, and thought that was overkill to run just pfSense.

I installed Proxmox bare metal and have pfsense, UniFi console and trueNAS in VMs and I STILL have a lot of resources to spare!

5

Thanks for all the replies. Is a quad port intel 2.5Gbe card worth getting for future proofing?

6

I upgraded all of my NICs to 2.5GbE to future proof as well. Right now I am getting 1.2Gbps from my ISP, and with this setup I can squeeze 1.8-1.9Gbps. Don’t know how but that is the speed test from fast.com