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Comment by teleforce | Hacker News Reader

This Celeron based system has been reported to be able to support up to 64GB RAM [1]. It's an excellent low cost multi-port 2.5GbE switch, router and firewall platform for small networks [2].

[1]Two Fanless Intel Celeron N5105 4x 2.5GbE Options Reviewed:

https://www.servethehome.com/two-fanless-intel-celeron-n5105...

[2]Cybersecurity for Small Networks:

https://nostarch.com/cybersecurity-small-networks

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Running opnsense on one of these that I got for ~$150. Really happy with it.

Interesting, a few questions:

1. Are you running opnsense in a VM or bare metal? 2.Do you know how much throughput it can handle? 3. Is it fanless? How hot does it get?

1. Baremetal. 2. It can handle 1gbps over the wan port (that's as fast as my internet goes, unable to test faster). 3. yes - not sure how hot, hasn't been a problem yet though.

I have the Kingnovy 2.5gbe one (4 i226 ports and n6005 cpu), on baremetal (128gb nvme and 16gb ram) and not using vm yet but I think you could without problems (~<25% cpu usage during speedtests -- and hardware offloading is disabled by default on opnsense), it does ~2.3gbe download/upload on a 2.5gbe plan (maybe overhead?) and 10ms bufferbloat on download/upload which is pretty good and gets an 'A' rating on waveform buffer bloat test.

It is fanless heatsink design but has fan pin for an addable fan. Hot to touch, we'll see if there's any issues.

The power difference is huge, but it's also different classes of devices i.e. router vs switch. This N5105 seems to be rather power hungry.

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