Hey folks,
I started a planning a small home project where I wanted to build an energy efficient 25G capable router… Not sure if this is a contradiction but I thought, let’s try. I need your advice though.
Here’s one potential setup:
- Fujitsu D3642-B
- Intel Core i5-9600T
- Mellanox ConnectX®-5 (10/25G dual ports)
- Quad 2.5G ethernet NIC (to be decided which one)
- 32 GB RAM (to be decided which one)
- 1 TB SSD (to be decided which one)
The network would roughly look as follows:
- 25G WAN link
- 10G backbone to another switch (routed to the office where my main workstation is located)
- 2.5G Ethernet will be routed to APs capable of WiFi 6
And the setup should then enable to:
- Saturate the 25G link during peak times
- Be as power efficient as possible
- Run a hypervisor (preferably Proxmox), where OPNsense would be virtualised
I haven’t built a PC in over 20 years and I’m not able to find all the info I need. Would you guys be able to help me please? For instance:
- How can I find out if the PCI-E slots of the mainboard are directly connected to the CPU to avoid bottlenecks, especially when I want to saturate the 25G connection (linking to then other 10G slot as well as the quad 2.5G cards)
- Do you guys have a recommendation for a good and affordable 2.5G card?
- Is the processor powerful enough or maybe even too powerful?
- Do you think the setup would actually be power efficient? I’m looking at something around 20W on average but I have no clue if this is feasible at all.
I’d really appreciate any help or pointers!