Shopping for low-end mini PC with more than 1 Ethernet port

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

Has anyone looked at this market lately and can suggest a model? What I require:

  • Two or more GbE ports
  • AES-NI support
  • Fanless
  • Cost US $200 or less, ready to run (including case, RAM, and flash if those are sold separately)

Of course any common one-port PC can route "one armed" with a managed switch, but I'd prefer a simple WAN in LAN out plug in.

2

I like the APU2 series for such use cases.
You can buy it on Amazon, eBay, etc...

https://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

I'm running the apu2c4 with pfsense as firewall with 5 vlans and some OpenVPN servers/clients for more than three years.

I can do some aes-ni benchmarks with openssl if you are interested.

3

Don't forget that you can easily add a second GB ethernet with PCI-e or even PCI cards.

Gigabyte, dual GBE:

  • GA-N3150N-D3V
  • GA-J3455N-D3H
  • GA-N3160N-D3V

Asrock:

  • N3150M
  • N3150DC-ITX
4

PCIe, yes - PCI, not really.

Yes, there are 1000BASE-T ethernet cards for PCI, by they don't reach full capacity of 1 GBit/s linespeed (not by far), still better than 100BASE-T, but not worth it when looking for 1 GBit/s support.

5

PCI 2.0 gives you around theoret. max. 133 MB/s so I assume you wouldn't lose much if any bandwidth at all. PCI 2.1 even doubles the rate.

6

The PCI bus is shared among all connected PCI devices (in some cases, admittedly older ones, the southbridge itself is connected via PCI; more modern boards only have a PCIe to PCI bridge chip, which imposes its own throughput limits). In practice there is a significant impact of using PCI connected 1 GBit/s ethernet cards (yes, even for good chipsets).