The good: I learned the correct NIC’s to buy. Also why my pfsense VMs never worked right. The bad: I had already bought 2 PRO/1000 PT’s for pfsense builds. I can confirm they are temperamental, they are in a Dell sandy bridge era optiplex 990 for double the gremlins. The hopeful: If I win I will have a good quad NIC and a lower power pfsense box. Mine has a 65w i7 2600 non k CPU which is super overkill.
preference: package 1. But honestly it would be fun to catch the audiophile disease too.
edit:quoting post correctly is apparently hard for me