Yeah the APU2 handles gigabit no problem and the CPU is plenty fast. They have really nice intel NICs, see https://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm. As you say, ships with coreboot.

I've been using APU2's for years (and before that APU and ALIX). The ALIX couldn't really saturate gigabit, but iirc even the APU could. Highly recommended.

I only have 100Mb FiOS and it handles that just fine. I'm not sure if it can handle gigabit. It ran OPNsense and acted as a basic router and dyndns, nothing fancy. My only real advice is to use an mSATA disk and not SD. My first install ran from a 32GB Sandisk SD card which died after a year.

If and when I buy a new APU I plan on running OpenBSD and learn to setup PF proper and roll my own router (A friend runs such a setup and loves it). At this point I just want a standard OS.

I don't run SDs for anything important. I've had a dozen RPis in my home rack alongside the "serious" hardware so I've killed my fair share if microSDs.

I'm not very familiar with OpenBSD, have run FreeBSD for a while, would certainly be fun to play around with a router based on a standard OS and not have to worry about proprietary updates like with the EdgeRouter any more.

That was my first and last important thing running off SD. And I too have had a few uSDs die in RPis. Though at work I have a Beckhoff PLC in a machine with a uSD running in a control cabinet. Still running fine after 2.5 years and I've not heard of issues with them. I'll have to find out which brand it is.

I run both FreeBSD and OpenBSD. FreeBSD for recently built home server as it has first class zfs support, bhyve works well, and excellent docs. OpenBSD as I know a few hard core users, and I've been using it on old hardware for years (have an imac G3 running it :). VPS for webcrap. OpenBSD is clean and they have good documentation as well. At the bottom of the following link is the pf router how-to I want to give a go, https://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/

Thanks for the link, it's amazing that this is so thoroughly documented, I think I'm going to have to give it a go myself!

I have an APU2 as the primary OPNSense router at home and picked up an HP T6xx thin client as a backup. There are a lot of small, low powered x86 boxes that will run OPNSense well but it is pretty common knowledge so prices have risen.

The current goto is commercial display PCs with multiple NICs otherwise there are some great micro PCs e.g. Qotom.

I currently have OPNSense running on a small x86 box, it's sitting inside my network though and providing a secondary network for access to some buddies for "SaaS" I run from home for our projects.

I really want a PCEngines APU specifically for my edge router though, mainly for coreboot and potentially failover to cellular, and it fits nicely in 1u too.