Best NIC and WiFi cards for PfSense?

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dcole13

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#150220 15-Jul-2014 16:20

Hi,

I'm thinking about setting up a PfSense router on a old pc, and was wondering which NIC and WiFi cards would be best for this?

Thanks

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chevrolux

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#1089540 15-Jul-2014 20:43

The cheapest ones!

bonkas

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#1089846 16-Jul-2014 11:45

If you are running pfsense on a low powered processor like an Atom, Celeron or another embedded chip you will get higher throughput with Intel NICs with an onboard processor.

Otherwise any cheap NIC will do for most standard fibre/VDSL connections.

dcole13

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#1090164 16-Jul-2014 17:39

bonkas: If you are running pfsense on a low powered processor like an Atom, Celeron or another embedded chip you will get higher throughput with Intel NICs with an onboard processor.

Otherwise any cheap NIC will do for most standard fibre/VDSL connections.

I'm going to run it on a pentium, and I was asking because it needs drivers

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richms

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#1090186 16-Jul-2014 18:21

IME its the PCI that becomes the problem. Moving one nic to a PCIe one made it work properly on a machine that was on a 20ish meg connection, whereas both on old PCI on a 4 port 100 base T card, it was struggling to keep up.

Only saying that because a pentium might be an old P4 machine or some other thing that should be put in the skip with PCI only.

Richard rich.ms

insane

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#1090197 16-Jul-2014 18:54

Intel or 3com NICs have always worked best with pfsense, ipcop, smoothwall etc. I know I've had issues running two realtek NICs at once on one of the old ipcop builds.

Inphinity

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#1090253 16-Jul-2014 20:39

pfSense 2.1 is based on FreeBSD 8.3, so anything with a suitable driver is fine. Here's an HCL.