25 Year old computer as a firewall: 60Mbps throughput!

If you have spend some time around a computer interested individual you may at one time or another have come across the suggestion that a good use for an old computer is as a firewall and router around your home. The argument is however based in how, for many years, your leftover computers would vastly outperform any consumer level router by far in any measurable metric, but is this still true, and how old? What is necessary to be able to stream 4K HDR video content locally?

I decided to re-awaken my families first ever x86 PC, a Pentium II 300mhz from 1996. This computer had served a similar task around 15years ago but since then been boxed up due to a lot of moving around. We’ll, now starting a family of my own suddenly there is a lot of devices that can make good use of a wired connection. So with a number of leftover parts we have a 6port PFsense very capable little firewall, all be it using an old build of the software to fit it within the capacities of this ancient hardware.

• Pentium II 300mhz
• 384mb ram
• 512mb SDcard to IDE ‘hard drive’
• 4 Intel gigabit NIC’s
• 2 Realtec NIC’s
• mATX power supply

Not enough of a challenge though, I decided to cut down the case to a 4th of its original size, cut apart and reassemble the front, and turn the motherboard sideways to fit on the bottom. Really nice to shrink computers, makes room for more of them… Keeping this cool and quiet are two Scythe fans, a slim 10mm thick, cut down in their speed by a manually adjusted voltage regulator.

Happily, the old thing still manages a throughput of over 60Mbps double what I’d require to have it serve content to a 4k HDR TV, the most taxing thing it ever have to do. However, it still sits downstream from the real Firewall and UTM taking care of the rest of the network, it’ll have to live out what’s rest of its life taking care of some less essential services. Still not bad for a computer that otherwise most probably would have been thrown away over a decade ago.