[simmons]

I'll chime in, since I moved to PC-based fanless router hardware about 5 years ago, and for my needs it's been fantastic.

One of my WAN connections is 100Mbps down (25 up), and I don't have any problem saturating it. I'm only using whatever hardware offloading Linux supports out of the box, which from the parent article I guess is pretty minimal (e.g. stuff like checksum offloading, I suppose). I haven't noticed any bottlenecks when routing between two gigabit LANs (I just ran a quick dd|nc test that measures 940Mbps). However, my needs may be relatively simple and I'm sure there must be more complex scenarios that would benefit from the offloading described in the parent article.

I bought a 4-port Intel NIC because I wanted discrete network interfaces for 2 LANs and 2 WANs. I ended up having to saw off some of the PCI-e edge connector segments to make it fit in my motherboard, so I'm presumably not getting the benefit of all the lanes the NIC could otherwise take advantage of, but nonetheless it seems satisfactory for my needs.