Its a bad idea from a power consumption POV, your old PC will be very inefficient, and running it 24/7 as a router will rapidly add up.
Security wise, you'll be running a fairly up to date Linux or BSD based OS, so its perfectly safe.
You’re getting bad advice.
If you don’t expect to actually be shuffling packets back and forth or doing any kind of quality of service or vpn or really anything then the pi will be the better choice just barely because of its super low power consumption at idle. In that situation you would be at idle enough to actually justify using the pi. It would suck in the same way that using a pi for stuff usually sucks but you could justify it maybe.
If you plan to have a bunch of hosted stuff, a seedbox, qos, manage vpn connections and especially upgrade your lan to 1gb + later on down the line, the mini pc will actually be more efficient per cycle. In that circumstance you’d be at idle less, and the mini pcs more powerful processor, wider bus and expandability would make it less of a bottleneck presently and down the road.
Risc CPUs like the arm in the raspberry pi are really good at not doing anything, or doing a really small subset of things (it’s in the name!), but x86 is great at doing some stuff and being able to do a wide variety of stuff with its big instruction set. If you raise an eyebrow at my claim, consider that before gpus were the main way to do math in a data center it was x86. If the people who literally count every fraction of a watt of power consumption as billable time think it’s most efficient it probably is!
With ~08+ CPUs ability to turn cores and functions off at the clock tree and communicate back and forth with the os to orchestrate and coordinate it, there’s not as much daylight between the power usage of a pi and a mini pcs as some of these comments might make you think.
The long and the short of it is that you’ll most likely have a better time using the mini pc than the pi and claims that it’ll bankrupt you with power bills are greatly exaggerated.
In terms of privacy, I’d go for the mini pc. All your packages are most likely going to be open source, but the x86 stuff gets more scrutiny and isn’t as “magic blobby” as the arm world is.
Source: I have used over twenty different pi variants including knockoffs, wrote for microcontrollers before they were called sbcs, host a bunch of services on x86 which are monitored for their power usage using a power distribution controller by my lovely wife who keeps an eagle eye on the bills and I literally registered an account because people were telling you the wrong thing on the internet.
If you wanna verify that for yourself, get a cheap plug em in power meter and try both units running the package you choose under some artificial load like managing qos between a device streaming 4k and one torrenting 50 different Linux isos.
What you're saying is mostly right, and in a practical sense is right, as well, but not as much from a technical sense. This is the specific block that is problematic.
Risc CPUs like the arm in the raspberry pi are really good at not doing anything, or doing a really small subset of things (it’s in the name!), but x86 is great at doing some stuff and being able to do a wide variety of stuff with its big instruction set. If you raise an eyebrow at my claim, consider that before gpus were the main way to do math in a data center it was x86. If the people who literally count every fraction of a watt of power consumption as billable time think it’s most efficient it probably is!
This is generally correct, per cycle. Overall, it really depends. The problem is, the x86 architecture does okay as long as it's kept busy and the work to be performed is predictable (for the purposes of look-ahead and parallelization). This is why it's great for those mathematical calculations you referred to, and why GPUs took over - they're massively better performers on tasks that can be parallelized such as math calculations and graphics rendering. Beyond that, the ARM use case has been tuned to low power environments, which means the computing does poorly in environments that need a lot of calculations because, in general, more computing requires more power (or the same power with more efficient hardware, and now we're talking about generational chip design differences). Now, couple that with the massive amount of money spent to make x86 what it is, and the relatively lower amounts that RISC and ARM received, and the gap gets wider.
Now, as I started with, even a basic x86 computer running at mostly idle is going to have pretty low power consumption, dollar-wise. Compare that to the power draw on a new router, or even a newer low-power mini PC, and your ROI is not going to indicate the need for that purchase if you have the hardware just sitting around idle. And it will still perform better than a raspberry pi configured to act as a router if your bandwidth is above about 250 mbps, if I remember correctly (and something like 120 mbps for the v4 and earlier generations).
100%!
One of the operation types that benefitted from much of that money and software development time is cryptography, where entire chunks of silicon are dedicated to quickly performing the (for better or worse) pipelined calculations that allow us to conduct secure transmissions along to their destinations.
There’s a lot of technical differences I just wanted to go a step above saying “arm is just a lil guy and x86 is a muscly dude who can’t function without his protein”, which seems appropriate to me.
I don't think you have to worry about security with old(er) computers that have been reassigned to be a server. You're going to most likely be running an up-to-date Linux OS, and as long as you keep everything updated, you shouldn't have any issues. Couple that with security deployments, and I think you will be good.
The problem is that very old computers are not as efficient when it comes to electricity to run them. Will it run your power bill up an extra $100+/month. Probably not. I would stay clear of old enterprise equipment because they definitely are power hogs. It really depends on how expensive electricity is in your local. For me, it's relatively cheap. I think I saw an increase of about $25 which is probably a nominal amount that most people would spend on a hobby.
Wouldn't that efficiency thing largely depend on what silicon you're using though? Like, for example, if you have an old AM1 board sitting around, those are 25W APUs and shouldn't use anywhere near that if used as the base for a router.
Meanwhile if you're using, say, an AM3+ board and an FX-4300 for your router, the FX-4300 is a 95W part and more likely to cost more to run by contrast to, say, the Athlon 5350's 25W on AM1.
Wouldn’t that efficiency thing largely depend on what silicon you’re using though?
I would think so, but anecdotally, I didn't see a horrific rise in electrical costs. Most of my equipment is 5 to 10 years old. Some people spend way more on their hobbies so I figured my costs were in-bounds. If you are in a locale where electricity is at a premium, yeah, I'd probably want equipment more modern that has less power consumption. If OP did a little diffing around on ebay, they could probably pick up a dual nic, small form factor, fanless for pretty cheap.
You should be fine. Linux and BSD systems have te ability to load microcode updates at boot even if you don't update your BIOS.
I'd be more concerned about the noise and power consumption.
Also the number and the max speed of your NIC is a factor if you have a fast internet connection If you run OPNSense make sure your NIC is well supported (I had problems with realtek and paravirtualized cards). Otherwise you can always add more NICs with pcie cards.
Unless I'm mistaken, this mostly depends on software/os you install.
A RPI with OpenWRT will be secured in exactly the same way as a router with OpenWRT and a laptop with OpenWRT. (At least I think so, I vaguely remember hearing about some Intel CPU vulnerabilities, but I don't think there's anything remote).
Power draw will be the main problem, along with more limited range because of the strength of the WiFi card.
Protectli sells opnsense routers with openboot, or you can roll your own on similar embedded like systems.
I second this. I run opnsense on a protectli
I been running a virtualized pfsense on a PC using Proxmox. It's been serving me well for the last 2-3 years.
The benefits of running it on proxmox gives me the option to virtualize a few more servers on the same hardware.
And as a few people have pointed out in the comments, it's not the hardware that's providing the security per say, it's the software you are running.
A PC running OpenWRT vs a modem running OpenWRT are more or less the same.
I got a friendly elec nanopi r3 that I use as a router. It routes all my Ethernet connected devices, and my consumer mesh network does all WiFi connections.
It's basically a raspberry pi, but they do use their own flavor of os, so I just run it using a fresh image on an SD card. Works no problem and power consumption is minimal.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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