Just thought I’d leave a note for future users. I’ve been using ProtectLi’s FW10408 at home for about 7 months now. It’s a modest (Intel Quad Core, 4GB RAM, 8GB mSATA SSD), easy-to-use small appliance that works well for me. I have more than 30 wired and wireless clients connected including a torrent and Plex server. I use many of IPFire’s built-in and addon features and never had it overload. Idle CPU averages above 90% and free memory averages around 40%. The update accelerator filled up the disk once, but adjusting the cache size fixed that problem. Would recommend for an average or avid home user.
you must be kidding 
Do you have a real criticism, or are you just trying to be cool?
I’m not trying, but I’am. Chinese cheap Mini-PCs have been here a great topic quite often. No EFI/BIOS update support and unknown firmwares. A great idea to use hw like this for firewall applications 
.
I have read some of the historical comments, and even though not everyone agrees with you, I can see that this is a subject about which you feel strongly. Rather than debate it again, I will just let people search for themselves and make their own decisions. Thanks for the feedback.
P.S. ProtectLi does support UEFI and allows for BIOS updates. Last updates were posted in Fall 2019. Spectre and Meltdown fixes were posted in 2018. Last textual update to their BIOS page was Feb 18, 2020.
I can’t find any download resources on their website. Also the CPU is old and slow, there is no AES-NI and it can’t handle large bandwidths with many connections and services. DDR3 is also old and mSATA outdated.
From what I read, you don’t mind old and slow as long as it works. For a home deployment, it’s just fine. Thanks again for the feedback.
P.S. For anyone truly interested in looking for them, here’s the link to ProtectLi’s BIOS updates.
@eggman
Your hardware is actually later than hardware, we run at company to serve a 1Gb backbone with some 30 users with local DNS and gateway to our 100Mbps DSL. There is still a T type ivybridge CPU running - and idling some 90% for most of time…
For a home ipfire I recenty setup one of these unspeakable chinese mini PCs with an Atom Z8350 CPU, which is basically comparable with you hardware, except that CPU supports 1 memory channel only, and so half the maximum RAM, but already has 4 cores - and AES instruction extension. And for now it is still in low power mode nearly all the time, with at least two of its four cores clocked down to minimum. Percents of CPU usage are rarly above 10, and RAM (2GB) usage is still below 25 percents, even if I’m running a larger single source single file download and a multisouce (torrent) downlaod at the same time. My ipfire boot and log media btw is a real slow USB stick.
So I’m fine with this solution for now, and I don’t beleive, that my future enpansions - publishing the WiFi and establishing a VPN access to a still to setup orange nerwork accessible via VPN only - will drive my “Z83V” or “Z83ii” or what it ever is named, to the extremes. Of course, there still may be some hardware out there better, later, or what else. And for other people the difference between DDR3 and DDR4 RAM may be relevant. But for LAN bandwidths below, say 4Gbps, and WAN bandwidths upto 1Gbps, for a home ipfire, I don’t think so.
For a bigger commercial appliation with, say 100+ users, a 10Gbps local backbone and 1Gbps from and to internet, things are quite different…
Best regards
Same here. The device is running “hard” if it’s using two cores. I’ve deployed almost all the services that would consume cpu time and memory (OpenVPN, Guardian, IPS, squid, clamav, update accelerator, cachemgr, QoS, Tor, etc., etc.). Even with a some active torrent and media servers connected to the Internet 24-7, I don’t see it needing an upgrade until, like you said, I get a lot more bandwidth to the house.