My next Firewall project

[NeoGen]

I think I overlooked the AM1 platform because I was specifically looking for motherboards with 2 LAN ports, so in my searches they got filtered out, but thank you for showing it to me Dirk because it just popped up an idea in my mind

Even though the AM1 motherboards don't have more than 1 LAN ports, I can see using a 4-port network card instead of 2-port. On the other hand I think what threw me off the 4-port cards was the price, it's 2 or 3 times more expensive.

Passmark has benchmarks with the Athlon 5350 and it seems to beat the other 2, especially the one I was thinking, the GX-420CA. The newer one, GX-424CC appears to have higher clock frequency (which gives a higher score on single thread test) but still falls slightly below the Athlon 5350 in overall. The good thing is they are both under 25W TDP.

Good thing I left the motherboard, CPU and network card for last on my shopping list, this way I still have some time to do more research.


On a side note, my current firewall is running on an R-Series R-464L, which pushes the thermal envelope up to 35W but gives a nice boost in performance. For a simple home firewall this is way too much power, especially graphics wise. Once I have the new firewall in place I want to turn this R-464L into a media center/receiver and hook up the living room TV to it.
The 2nd Generation R-Series appears to have launched already, although only a handful of boards appear to exist yet. It will still run on the 35W TDP, but the thing that attracts me the most to it is the support for HSA.