Hi, just signed up and am prepping a system. I had a dell precision 5810 sitting around so after reading the initial steps and directions and driver availability docs, put together a xeon e5-2690 v4, 32 GB DDR4 RAM and a 256GB NVME M.2 and currently have two 2.5gbe rtl8125 cards. My question is about cores and threads and GHZ speeds. Do I want multicore capability or do i want a processor designed for faster single core processing and more GHZ. I have not installed IPFire yet. TIA, Ed.
Welcome to the pack.
Multi core helps a lot with encrypted traffic especially AES-NI .
Same would go for NIC’s, multi queue support is preferable.
Very interesting setup, maybe a little over the top and power hungry but still better than 99% of us running Atoms and Jaguar CPU’s.
You could also see some interesting stats in “Processor features”
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I would say both are important, but multi-core is more important. Some testing was done several months back with QoS enabled on fast internet connections. It was noted that >150Mbps downlink, QoS was not able to keep up with line speeds on cpus with low single core performance, even if the cpu had multiple cores. I’ll see if I can find the post where this was tested.
edit: here is the post
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Hi @apiarist , another late suggestion.
As said by other persons, it’s really a question of balance, context, goal, use.
Some processes/services/modules are driven mostly by a single thread, so higher IPC and frequency could boost significantly the performances. Others instead are multi-threaded ready, so any physical core count increase could be important for reduce bottlenecks. IpFire, as safety measure, disable SMT in kernel options.
No sense to beat around the bush: your Precision 5810 is anyway a really interesting powerhorse, with lots of options and capable of deliver solid perfomances if the configuration of IpFire is tweaked enough.
But a 6 years younger middle-range desktop CPU can deliver roughly 85% of computational power, with 50% of power consumption and only 42% of cores and 20% higher a single core performance than your fine Xeon.
I know, the reliability classes of these two products are not in the same league, but without specific needs IMVHO Ryzen 5 4500 could be really “good enough” with a fraction of energy waste compared to your workstation.
You already have the metal, so really makes no sense to not say you “take a ride”; Ipfire delivers some statistics to understand if you’re using correctly your hardware and if it’s showing strain; however while working nice, RTK network adapters are far more CPU-dependant than others chip manifacturers like Marvell, Intel, Broadcom, Mellanox/nVidia. Not suggesting to trash your adapters, but a “stronger” NIC could deliver interesting developments in optimizing resources.
Please, after deploying your system consider to come back to this topic and… tell us your experience for better optimizing hardware setup and lessons learned 
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