Partaker C4 New NUC Mini PC Celeron J3160 J3060 Quad Core 4 Intel i210AT Nic

The appliance was very easy to get up and running with pfsense. Took me less than 10 minutes to install and setup a basic configuration. It was running fine for a couple of days and then pfsense started logging kernel cores. The system would restart itself and work without issue for a day or 2. That is until it continually started coring when attempting to load the wan interface.

Luckily I have spare parts laying around and was able to replace the sodimm which resolved the issue along with the random cores. Moral of the story for me? Buy this appliance as a "bare bones" product and add a higher quality ssd and sodimm. The sodimm I replaced the failing one with was not only of a better quality, but it is also faster (noticeably so).

The other thing I would strongly recommend, especially if you are going to be using vpn, is a usb fan to help keep the appliance cool. I purchased the following and it keeps the device running in the 30C range where is was in the upper 40Cs without the fan: AC Infinity MULTIFAN S1, Quiet 80mm USB Fan for Receiver DVR Playstation Xbox Computer Cabinet Cooling.

Last but not least backup, backup, backup your pfsense settings. I had a considerable amount of rules and packages installed, not to mention a long static IP table that I would have lost if I needed to reinstall.

Apr 23,2020

The appliance was very easy to get up and running with pfsense. Took me less than 10 minutes to install and setup a basic configuration. It was running fine for a couple of days and then pfsense started logging kernel cores. The system would restart itself and work without issue for a day or 2. That is until it continually started coring when attempting to load the wan interface.

Luckily I have spare parts laying around and was able to replace the sodimm which resolved the issue along with the random cores. Moral of the story for me? Buy this appliance as a "bare bones" product and add a higher quality ssd and sodimm. The sodimm I replaced the failing one with was not only of a better quality, but it is also faster (noticeably so).

The other thing I would strongly recommend, especially if you are going to be using vpn, is a usb fan to help keep the appliance cool. I purchased the following and it keeps the device running in the 30C range where is was in the upper 40Cs without the fan: AC Infinity MULTIFAN S1, Quiet 80mm USB Fan for Receiver DVR Playstation Xbox Computer Cabinet Cooling.

Last but not least backup, backup, backup your pfsense settings. I had a considerable amount of rules and packages installed, not to mention a long static IP table that I would have lost if I needed to reinstall.

Apr 23,2020

I replaced an older SFF with an Atom processor, 4GB of RAM and a HDD with this unit after upgrading my Internet connection from cable to 1 Gbps fibre. I was hitting a CPU and NIC choke-point, and only getting ~400Mbps at any point on my network.

Install was super easy, booting to a USB key with the ISO image loaded was seamless and presented no issues. Untangle recognized all 4 NICs and numbered them correctly (eth0-eth3) with WAN and LAN as eth0 and eth1, as expected.

Using the Intel i210 NICs is huge for Untangle performance, which is why I bought this specific model. My previous firewall was using RealTek NICs based on the 8168 chipset, and while I generally didn't have problems with streaming and overall performance, the NICs were a definite bottleneck during the day when I'm also constantly VPN'd in to work and I'm certain after research were capping my max throughput.

After I got everything configured, my CPU and RAM usage are both way lower (CPU went from 4% avg to < 1%, RAM from 65% to 23% utilized), and more importantly my throughput has jumped to ~825Mbps in some parts of the wired network, and ~700Mbps on wireless. Huge improvement and I'm able to realize the value of my improved ISP connection.

Apr 23,2020

Easy to install and operate with pfsense community edition. Just downloaded an image file and I was up and running. pfsense comes with a version of Free BSD as an operating system as this system is bare bones. You need to understand what you are doing. That being said, I was up and running in less than an hour with really packet packet moving This replaced my problematic Netgate 3100, also with pfsense. The Celeron, 8 gigs of RAM and 120 gigs of space makes it a really fast mover for streaming. I use for two separate networks in my house and that was a breeze to set up. There is room for one more completely segmented network. I use IPv6 routing and it works like a champ. Highly recommended for a bare bones system for pfsense fir walling.

Apr 23,2020

Reasonably fast operation with hardware for the money, too slow in my tests to run squid proxy with filtering if speed/heavy usage required but I don’t really need that. It is very reasonably warm in operation but I added an external usb quiet free standing fan to move low speed air across it and case stays cool to touch. Very satisfied, and recommended. Been running a month now, absolutely no issues.

Apr 23,2020