I accidentally cooked my current Opnsense router last night trying to shoehorn an M.2 2.5g nic into it. So I'm looking for recommendations for something new.
The now dead machine is an i5 Lenovo M920q with a Connect-x3 10g card and a USB3 2.5g nic.
I have 2 gig fiber service that's handed off on an RJ45 2.5g port. So I feel like that really limits my options.
It doesn’t really take all that much to run 2Gb speeds if you’re not doing much with the traffic - any modernish processor in a small fanless box would work with 4-8GB ram. If you’re wanting to run Suricata, VPN, etc then you need more.
If you didn’t need 2.5 Gbps on the network, ace magician has a ryzen 5 mini that has a 2.5 Gbps and a 1 Gbps NIC for around 300 USD. Otherwise I guess you are looking for a new pc to put in fast cards.