>So having enough beef to push 1 gigabit NICs is good but planning for the future and adding 2.5 gb or higher is better. I'm using I5-2500K's for firewalls. 1

>So having enough beef to push 1 gigabit NICs is good but planning for the future and adding 2.5 gb or higher is better. I'm using I5-2500K's for firewalls. 1 gigabit hardly moves the CPU usage. I have all NIC offload turned off. Btw. I would really consider OPNsense instead if you are building custom firewalls. Pfsense is an atrocious company. Trying to kill off OPNsense by buying domains that tell lies and AFAIK no one outside Netgate can actually build from source. They are not open source even though they claim so. They are also moving to using DRM. https://github.com/rapi3/pfsense-is-closed-source https://github.com/rapi3/pfsense-is-closed-source