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Comment by great-potential | Hacker News Reader

I think if the OP uses this only as a router it is indeed a waste of power.

What I would probably do is also use it as nas/workstation by using virtualization, SR-IOV is now pretty standard on these cards.

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I’m using the machine also as a server, so it replaces 2 existing devices. In terms of power consumption, it’s likely only a small increase, if at all.

Also, the user can use his freedom to build and do whatever wished for. This tone of you shouldn't do this because some COTS is available sounds very commercially driven. People have the power to create another Google, we are not powerless.

My only rub with that is - shouldn't the router be only a router from a security perspective? Definitely combining servers for home use does make sense though.

Ideally yes. But with the resources needed for 25 Gbps, not using one machine for multiple purposes seems wasteful. The server only stores publically available data, though, so not a big deal from a security perspective.

What do you mean by resources required? expansion ports on the mb?

Yeah running your nas-bittorrent/firewall-router on the same OS is clearly not something I would do, especially that now you can use somrthing like proxmox for example and virtualize your pfsense/opnsense instance.

I am using a home server with the same CPU and I am using it for SQL, storage server and virtualization. In order to do that I changed RAM to 32GB DIMMs, 64GB in total was not enough and the CPU works just fine with 32GB DIMMS. The platform is quite limited by the number of available PCIe lanes, but without moving up to Threadripper (a lot more expensive) there is no better option, Intel is in the same place or worse. The good thing with Intel is that you can use a CPU with integrated graphics and save the PCIe lanes for the graphics card.

My previous build (Ryzen 2700, 65W) had a great feature until it was gone with a BIOS update: after installing everything it worked with the graphics card removed. As I always connected only remotely, it was not a problem but a benefit. You can try and see what happens.

Yeah, I have an overpowered router PC (mostly in the capabilites sense --its a low power passively-coolable Xeon), but it also acts as a flash NAS, and hosts a few other containerized services that I prefer are always-on, it's a wireguard endpoint, etc. I've got a separate sometimes-on box for other VMs and containers. That one hosts a windows VM with a VFIO-attached GPU which my living room tv plugs into. Altogether it's lots of computing power for home use but draws relatively little at the wall. I'm pretty happy where I landed in terms of overall utility versus TCO, using this sort of consolidated-hardware approach.

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