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15W idle is not bad. The 20€ eBay-Cards will eat this alone. You can get better numbers with Intel cards, but those are 70€ and up. Also, Ryzen embedded is quit

15W idle is not bad. The 20€ eBay-Cards will eat this alone. You can get better numbers with Intel cards, but those are 70€ and up. Also, Ryzen embedded is quite a bit more efficient. Now, depending on where you live, this might not matter, but a Wattyear costs me ~3.4€. So if the thing uses 35W instead of 15W, I pay 68€ extra per year just for power. Additionally, you need to find a small formfactor passive case that supports a PCIe card and a small enough mainboard to fit it. This alone will set you back quite some money. If space or power efficiency don't matter to you, that's totally fine, then you can easily & cheaply match those specs. If you need something small and efficient, the markup isn't that large.

glowingly 4y ago
The cost can still favor DIY, even using new parts. I did this twice about a year ago, when the USD prices were far worse for DIY. Nowadays, one can get a cheap Alder Lake Pentium + ITX/mATX with a cheap case, okay PSU, RAM, and SSD. That's no more than $350. Now new Intel dual SFP+ NICs are hard to find cheap, with Nvidia cards being easier to find cheap. So a dual port CX4 or CX5 from fs.com will run from $260 to $340. This still comes out ahead of the official HW. It all gets cheaper with older Intel HW.[1] IMO, buying the official HW is officially supporting the OPNSense developers. As you noted, the DEC700 series is also quite small in terms of footprint. Those are definitely strong factors in favor of the DEC700. [1] I mostly went with Intel HW, moving away from using a R5 3600 in that role. It seems that AMD's Zen2 is a bit less efficient vs contemporary and current Intel desktop platforms in idle to low-mid loads. Current setup with an older used Pentium and an used dual port X520 takes ~<20W on average. Though I doubt the DEC740 takes 15W at idle, probably less. W.r.t. older Intel HW, I am thinking of 10th/11th gen parts, which can be had on good deals new.

glowingly 4y ago

The cost can still favor DIY, even using new parts. I did this twice about a year ago, when the USD prices were far worse for DIY. Nowadays, one can get a cheap Alder Lake Pentium + ITX/mATX with a cheap case, okay PSU, RAM, and SSD. That's no more than $350. Now new Intel dual SFP+ NICs are hard to find cheap, with Nvidia cards being easier to find cheap. So a dual port CX4 or CX5 from fs.com will run from $260 to $340. This still comes out ahead of the official HW. It all gets cheaper with older Intel HW.[1] IMO, buying the official HW is officially supporting the OPNSense developers. As you noted, the DEC700 series is also quite small in terms of footprint. Those are definitely strong factors in favor of the DEC700. [1] I mostly went with Intel HW, moving away from using a R5 3600 in that role. It seems that AMD's Zen2 is a bit less efficient vs contemporary and current Intel desktop platforms in idle to low-mid loads. Current setup with an older used Pentium and an used dual port X520 takes ~<20W on average. Though I doubt the DEC740 takes 15W at idle, probably less. W.r.t. older Intel HW, I am thinking of 10th/11th gen parts, which can be had on good deals new.