Protectli Vault FW6E - 6 Port, Firewall/Mini PC - Intel Quad Core i7, AES-NI, Barebone

Got this for a pfsense box. Installation of the software was a piece of cake on this hardware. Software configuration was a bit more challenging but I attribute that to the software not hardware. It has now performed like a champ for a while. Blows my old Xfinity all in one box out of the water, everything in the house is faster and I can truly inspect the traffic for malicious content.

Don't expect anything from the wifi. Solid router. no issues, strong performance.

I'm an IT professional of over 30 years. As well as my regular job, I also do IT contracting with small businesses and private individuals. Because of this, I have a home lab that many IT pros would be envious of. I have a 1Gbps fiber internet feed, which may sound like overkill for just me and my wife, but it isn't, given that I run my contracting side business from home, and my wife frequently also works from home.I feel like I need more security than the typical home internet user. Because of this, I got the Protectli Vault 6, configured with 8GB of RAM and a 120GB SSD. I've installed pfSense on it, which installed without a hitch. I have the internet feed on the WAN port (of course) and my home network on the LAN port. With pfSense properly configured (which I have), I get the full gigabit of throughput.I've set up a second LAN, isolated from my home one, on the OPT1 port to work on client devices with when I have to bring something back to my workbench. This protects my own network from anything my clients may be infected with. Lastly, I've set up a DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) where I am playing with an internet-facing server. A DMZ is really just another LAN specifically set up for servers to isolate them as much as possible from everything else, only allowing traffic specific to the server in question.Even with all these different "zones" defined on the firewall, this little unit performs like a champ, every bit as well as the far more expensive firewalls I use at work and at some of my clients' locations. It has a nice small footprint, perfect for small offices, and it runs cool without any fans at all. It has a 90W power supply included, but I've measured closer to 45W being drawn by mine. If you bump the RAM and SSD up to the highest configuration, then add another internal drive (which it comes with the wires to support) and use all 6 network ports, I could see it getting closer to 90W power use.

I’m pretty happy with this unit. I put 32GB of ram in it, along with a 240GB SSD and run the commercial Check Point GAiA OS on it with the latest R81 firewall. Works well due to the Intel chips. CPU is powerful enough to run all of the Check Point software blades (the various software feature add-ons).

Having played with custom building mini-PC's as routers for awhile, and eyeballing the PFSense "Products" wondering, do I want a toaster? (appliance) or not.. I googled on Protectli. I swapped out the UDM Pro (utter trash device, buggy underpowered junk). I'm running the 6 Port i7 with Untangle - which is mad overkill for 1:1 Gig internet, this little box is silent and doesn't break a sweat when saturating the link with all the bells and whistles turned on, I've yet to see it pip 10%. You can buy it bare bones and drop in ram and whatever HD you like that fits the case. Only gripe is no SFP ports. Great little bit of kit, if you are on the fence, highly recommended.

This comes with an i7 8550U CPU, which appears to perform nearly identically to the i5 8250U in the cheaper i5 model. So you're paying about $100 more for perhaps a 5% performance boost. And most of that boost is due to a slightly higher clock, so it's just sucking a little more power from essentially the same hardware (also slightly bigger cache, but otherwise ... identical).Maybe I'm missing something here?

I really like the quality of this thing. I have it running Proxmox w/ a firewall, SDN controller, Pihole, and several other containers. Stays cool and supports 1G of throughput with every firewall feature known to man running on 1 core. Stays nice and cool. SILENT. Many months now without any issues.