After my previous fun with assembling a server from scratch, you’d think I wouldn’t be too excited to do it again. But I did it anyway…
With only one non-Xeon D item remaining in my home network, it was time to replace my firewall and router that was running pfSense.
My trusty SYS-E200-9B that ran pfSense wasn’t really cutting it for my new Gigabit Internet connection. Especially since I had multiple VPNs running, offsite backup for some production services, and a few other things running on the firewall.
With that said, it was off to Amazon for a X10SDV-2C-TP4F-O, a Pentium D-1508 board with onboard 10 GbE via SFP+.
After buying a number of 32GB sticks of ECC DDR4 for the other Xeon D servers, I only needed 8GB for this build. This purchase left my pocketbook only slightly bruised, instead of assaulted and hospitalized like my prior RAM purchases.
I picked up this board for a handful of reasons. I liked the idea of dual 10GbE for future expansion. The D-1508 was sufficiently overkill for a firewall. And most importantly, the board came in a Flex-ATX form factor.
That last item was important for a one simple and important reason. I had the the CSE-E300 case leftover from my Frankenbox build.
For once, the build was simple and went exactly as expected. I actually had an extra 4 GB DDR4 stick laying around, so my build ended up at 12 GB of RAM, which is total overkill.
Board went in:
and I got it installed and hooked up:
Finally, a speed test:
I am 100% satisfied with this board. After a few weeks, I have yet to be able to even slightly stress it.
