It is decision time to build a system. I have available to me an HP Microserver Gen10 with an AMD Opteron X3216 2 core processor, two on-board Gb Broadcom NICs and 32GB RAM, or a no-name mini-itx system with an Intel i3-4130T 2c4t processor, two on-board Gb NICs and 8GB or 16GB RAM. Which should I use?
Additional info:
The Microserver can also take 4x3.5" drives if I want to use it as a NAS and idles at 18w. The i3-4130t cannot really take spare drives and idles at 24w.
My internet connection is currently 800/80 but I do need to run some sort of QoS to I can de-prioritise the Sia network to one of my servers.
So flexibility and a little less power consumption or better processing speed?
Check the network cards/chips for reliability and performance.
8GB Ram is more than enough for IPFire, but ddr3 is better than ddr2 and ddr4 or ddr5 of course a lot better.
I do not think you will be able to use a dedicated IPFire computer as NAS, nor would it be recommended. Fast storage, NVME or SSD is preferred any you only need 2 drives, if possible in RAID1 as I have, or one as backup.
AMD is more power efficient, more recent, with better ram, on a far more known computer builder than the one of Intel CPU. But it’s almost wasted silicon.
Unfortunately Bulldozer and derived architectures are low IPC and low multicore performances, also this CPU is still two core (and as for IPFire, the same is for Intel) however…
Requesting more power, with worse ram, Intel IMVHO will prevail.
More cache (mostly due to L3), more frequency (however Opteron can turbo).
IMVHO if the itx board is well equiped for firewall use, the opteron machine can be easily repurposed as a NAS with specific distro.