> I'm not saying I'd use it for my desktop, but the Atom 330/board combo > is decently faster, a better choice then most microatx/cheap celeron > combos, and I have nothing bad to say about it. You can find those > boards for like $80 945G+Atom330 onboard. One of the best bangs/buck > out there, period. I'm going to use another one, slap a USB > Mediareader in it, boot to USB for a ClarkConnect Firewall. >
I used to be a fairly big ClarkConnect fan until I tried pfSense. It doesn't have the glitz of CC, or the all-in-one multi-purpose functionality, but it is infinitely more robust at what it does do. I would seriously consider it in places where something like a Cisco ASA (or older PIX) might be a more traditional solution. Commercial support is available, and it even can be configured in a stateful HA pair. Something like an Atom board with a cheap CF card or USB thumbdrive would make an excellent DIY pfSense platform that would probably be good for at least 300-500mbit/s of throughput. I did a test of one deployment with an older Netburst-based single core 3.33GHz Celeron and got full wirespeed gigabit of routing/firewall throughput. Greg
