Updated Low Power PFSENSE Build for Gigabit Fiber

Updated Low Power PFSENSE Build for Gigabit Fiber

Since moving into a house I now pay for power, so I wanted to upgrade my PFSENSE box while at the same time saving power

I also got gigabit fiber, so it needed to be able to handle that. This is the updated 2020 build of my pfSense Firewall.

I started out with the same chassis and PSU and SSD from my old build which can be found here: https://blog.networkprofile.org/my-overkill-1u-pfsense-build/

I swapped the old board for a Supermicro X11SCL-LN4F which cost $230 shipped, it has Quad intel gigabit LAN which I need 3 of for my AT&T Fiber setup to bypass the crappy gateway

For the CPU I went for the Intel Pentium Gold G5500, this CPU uses almost no power but has plenty of power

I added 2 x 4GB sticks of DDR4 Unbuffered ECC RAM. I chose the cheapest RAM I could find in a 2 stick configuration so I could retain dual channel

Here are some pictures of the completed build. The IO Shield could not be changed, so I just hacked it out with a dremel. Ill clean it up better in the future, but it works...

And best of all, it handles my gigabit connection with no problem

I am super happy with this setup