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Comment by briHass | Hacker News Reader

I had trouble getting a hold of one of those C1037U boxes from China. The seller would 'run out of stock' frequently if I found one for a decent price.

I ended up going with the APU2B4 board (an upgrade from the APU1D mentioned in the article.) I put pfSense on it, and it's been running perfect for a few weeks now.

Even that board is probably massive overkill for most people. I have 50/50 internet, and with full bandwidth used by torrents, a VPN and ssh session open to the router, and the web interface open, I'm still only getting about 10-15% CPU.

http://pcengines.ch/apu2b4.htm

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Looks like the one listed in the article is both out of stock and going for ~$1400 (I'm guessing auto pricing?).

The APU boards are nice too; I thought about going for one when I was shopping for a better router and slapping OpenBSD on it. Ultimately I went with an Ubiquiti ERL, mostly because I didn't really want to buy an RS-232 cable, but the PC Engines boards are probably one of the best fully-DIY options you can get.

Interesting. I have been using such PCs in my Chinese office for about a year. They are made in a factory about 30 minutes from me. I was considering designing a better looking case and bundling a more reliable power supply to export these but I got busy with bigger business.

These Shenzhen factories are somehow getting these Intel CPUs for next to nothing. Factory price for the i5 model was about $100.

At least in the past, I've heard of people getting lots of low binned / questionable QC'd intel chips for dollars per chip. They basically go for auction to the highest bidder. If you're willing to deal with a high defect rate (Either extensive QC yourself or just don't give a shit), it is a pretty good deal.

Could you please recommend accompanying parts if someone wanted to use that board with pfsense to end up with a home/office wireless router? I was looking for a packaged solution but the official pfsense two port appliance with the wireless option seemed fairly expensive.

Sure. I ordered:

APU2C4 http://pcengines.ch/apu2c4.htm

case1d2blku http://pcengines.ch/case1d2blku.htm (black cases run cooler)

http://pcengines.ch/ac12vus2.htm (power plug)

db9cab1 http://pcengines.ch/db9cab1.htm (serial null modem)

I already had a USB->Serial adapter. For storage I used a 32GB Class 10 microSD card in a SD adapter, which I found acceptably fast (and faster than my usb sticks.) Note, if you want to run Snort or Squid, you might want a small SSD, but for a router-only it is overkill.

I assembled the board+case, wrote the 4gb nano-bsd image of pfSense to the SD card, and booted right up.

Total cost was < $200 USD.

edit: I noticed you mentioned wireless...I've heard the wireless support in pfSense using PC Engines boards is better than it was, but I prefer to use (multiple) separate APs for wifi. One of the APs I'm using is: http://www.amazon.com/TP-LINK-TL-WA801ND-Wireless-300Mbps-Re..., which I've had no issues with. I prefer the ability to upgrade/replace my APs without messing with the router, and my router is in the basement, while the APs are on other floors.

I'll probably move to 5GHz wireless later this year, and this separation allows that.

Awesome, thank you!

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