It's about time you ditched your ISP-provided router. I'm not here to suggest it's bad per se, but you're severely limited in what you can do unless your provider ships decent hardware. Even if the ISP router is fairly reliable, it still limits what you can do, and you're open to snooping from the company, and may not see software updates beyond a specific point in time. That's where a custom firewall can take your networking game to the next level. This mini PC would make for the perfect OPNsense firewall ahead of self-hosting and creating a home lab, and it's on sale for $180 this Prime Day.

Why is this a great deal for OPNsense?

The primary highlight of this mini PC is the dual 2.5 GbE Ethernet and dual 10 GbE SFP+ I/O configuration. That's some serious speed support, allowing you to take full advantage of fibre to your home with the ability to enjoy speeds surpassing 200 MB/s both in and out of the firewall. Once you're ready to go to the extreme and build out a super-fast internal network, the firewall will support two 10 GbE SFP+ connections. Pair up two network switches with equal ports, and you'll have incredible amounts of bandwidth across the LAN. $180 for a mini PC with this level of performance is a great deal.

One thing to note is that there's no SSD or RAM. This system can be configured with RAM and SSD to be included, but I suggest shopping around for the parts separately to ensure you save the most. Better yet, if you have an older mini PC or laptop lying around collecting dust with the same specifications, you can quickly swap out the SO-DIMM DDR5 RAM and SSD (M.2 NVMe and 2.5-inch SATA supported). Once up and running, OPNsense can be installed in under a minute, even if it's the first time you're installing your own firewall firmware. After that, you're good to go!

To help keep temperatures in check, a small fan is located on the top-mounted fin stack, though it's not required since my own firewall with the same chip is completely passive (with a smaller heatsink) and barely hits 60 °C under decent network loads. You shouldn't encounter any trouble with this mini PC for creating the ultimate firewall without hopping to enterprise or enthusiast-grade hardware. If only I had held off for another year and picked one of these up, since my Sharevdi system only has a 2.5 GbE port array.