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Ideal energy efficient build for home use.

Hello,

I am interested in building a Sophos/Astaro UTM for home use. I have 5 main requirements that I am looking for and I have them ranked in order:

1. Energy efficient
2. Snort IDS maxed rules for PC, Macs, & iOS
3. Full Sophos and Antivir (since they still run both) proxy scanning enabled
4. Throughput of at least 10 megabits down and 10 megabits up without lag (only need the 10 megabits down, country DSL in the US, in all honestly, 5 megabits down is about the best my parents will probably get in the next 15 years)
5. VPN - probably will be rarely and infrequently used

I have looked at the new atom C2750 & C2550 processors and they look awesome for the task, especially with AES support and turbo boost; however, I am on a budget and at the same time not looking to waste money on excess power, especially when I would like to make the UTM as energy lean as possible....

Any suggestions guys?

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0 BarryG over 10 years ago

Hi,

Do you really need a TINY system (like NUC)?

If not, get a Mini-ITX board with 1 or 2 Intel NICs, and a Mini-ITX case with room for a half-height PCIe NIC and big fans (at least 120mm if you want very quiet).

Boards:
GigaByte has at least 2 Haswell Mini-ITX boards with 1 Intel NIC; both start with GA-Z87 iirc. (Newegg)

JetWay and ASrock have Haswell boards with dual Intel NICs; Newegg and LogicSupply carry them.

Cases: Look on Anandtech for reviews.
I have the Fractal Design Node 304. Very quite. Not very small.
CoolerMaster has a couple quiet Mini-ITX cases.

You'll also need a power supply; I recommend getting an SFX PSU with ATX adapter such as the SILVERSTONE SFX ST30SF 300W.

Other options include the GigaByte BRIX systems which are slightly bigger than the NUCs, but iirc they do not have good NICs.

If you really want fanless, there are other options but all the ones I've seen are quite expensive.
Look on LogicSupply.com for some examples.

Barry
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0 ftballpack over 10 years ago in reply to BarryG

Thanks for the suggestions Barry & many others.

I plan on going back to school in the fall and will probably be on the other end of the US. Well, I honestly do not want to deal with security issues for my parents and their random assorted devices we have them on, ie, Kindle, Chromebook, and probably a new dual booting Mac Mini whenever the next release happens.

My parents are also a little electric OCD. I will probably have to buy a kill-a-watt detector just to prove to them they will not go broke running a UTM.

I appreciate your advice guys, I will start looking at things based on your suggestions and try to come up with a super quite & efficient solution.
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0 ftballpack over 10 years ago in reply to BarryG

Thanks for the suggestions Barry & many others.

I plan on going back to school in the fall and will probably be on the other end of the US. Well, I honestly do not want to deal with security issues for my parents and their random assorted devices we have them on, ie, Kindle, Chromebook, and probably a new dual booting Mac Mini whenever the next release happens.

My parents are also a little electric OCD. I will probably have to buy a kill-a-watt detector just to prove to them they will not go broke running a UTM.

I appreciate your advice guys, I will start looking at things based on your suggestions and try to come up with a super quite & efficient solution.
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0 BarryG over 10 years ago in reply to ftballpack

My parents are also a little electric OCD. I will probably have to buy a kill-a-watt detector just to prove to them they will not go broke running a UTM.

Both Haswell i5-4670/4670k systems I have built idle around 27-29W; that's about $30/YEAR.

Barry
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