I’m thinking about building a box for pfsense. Looking at hardware options and I see a pretty significant difference in price when comparing hardware with and without AES-NI. I don’t necessarily think I’ll need AES. The way I understand it, AES is for using VPN that is somehow running on the router??? I mean, my wife and I both use VPNs on our work computers so we can reach our work networks, but that isn’t using any encryption features on my router, is it?? Or am I not understanding?
I’m not sure what you’re shopping for with AES-NI but I can strongly recommend the HP T730 and T740 thin clients if you’re trying to build a budget home firewall machine. Both support AES-NI (but obviously not Xeon QAT) and the t730 is cheap on eBay. Drop whatever NIC and an SSD in and you’re off to the races with OPNSense. The T740 is performant enough to run OPNSense on Proxmox if that’s your thing, you’ll have plenty of spare processing time to do something else on the machine beyond routing/firewalling a 1-2Gb home connection.
