I’m in Australia and I can’t seem to find HP 290-p0043w’s and T730’s are pretty expensive. Just wondering if anyone knows of similar alternatives to either of these for a pfsense/ipfire box?
There are other 290 variants that I need to look into and I’ve looked at, so far, the Dell WYSE thin clients but none of the ones I’ve looked at so far (that are affordable) will take a PCIe card.
This is not me trying to have others do my homework, I’m just looking for a nudge in the right direction. Also the DQ77KB and alternate motherboards are either unavailable or overpriced considering I’d need to get the remaining parts.
As PFSense is pretty lightweight and doesn’t need QuickSync, any old SFF box would work, e.g., decommissioned desktops from doctor’s offices, etc. The SFF form factor is handy as it’s essentially a small 2U and has room for half-height / low-profile PCIe cards. Pick up a $10 I340-T2, pop in a small SSD, 4GB of RAM (most listings will include this), and your new router is ready.
It’s worth buying from the recommended ebay seller within HP 290 guide. Shipping costs are around $100, which is pretty good. Last time I checked it was going to cost around $400 to bring one into Australia. I wish I hadn’t started the Anniversary 2.0 build and purchased one of these from ebay insted.
I’ve ended up buying an Optiplex 9020 for $205 including postage. I’m thinking about picking up an i3-4160T to swap into it but might wait until I see what the power consumption is first with the stock CPU.
I offered well under what the seller was listing and ended up getting a Optiplex 5040 SFF. I was going to hold out for another HP 290 but oh well I got bored last night and made an offer.
Not sure exactly what I’m doing with it yet…probably will be a glorified Vudu, Plex, Prime, and Netflix player in my living room. I also thought about putting it at my office and replacing the computer there that is taking up too much space.
It’s a Skylake i5-6500, based on Dell’s service tag this thing has a m.2 ssd slot and came from the factory with a 128gb ssd m.2, but it also said it came with 8gb ram and the seller listed it with 4gb so I figure it was gone thru.
Not sure what the QuickSync ability is for something like that…for one I’m sure the 6500 is power hungry compared to the 290’s Celeron. Neverthless there are some Optiplex options all over ebay. If the aforementioned seller hadn’t taken my offer I was going to buy this one…
If hard times have really come I guess you could hack together something using the board. I’m going to follow some of these sellers and see if the prices on these fall
Thanks!