Firewall Mini PC STH3

Great little pc. Mines running a customer firewall/router for a 1Ghz internet connection. No problems at all.

Have this running as a OPNSense firewall for the house. More than capable of gigabit throughput even with ad blocking and basic IPS. Would advise running the firewall as a Virtual Machine on Proxmox though rather than bare metal. Originally had it bare metal as was concerned about losing performance but discovered yesterday that there's a hardware/driver bug with the Intel NIC that completely kills PPPoE throuput. Got to spend last night rebuilding it all as a VM to work around the problem 😴. However I can now confirm that there's no noticeable drop in performance when running as a VM and can now easily get 900Mb/s throuput on both of my internet connections. Only recommendation would be to consider upping the RAM to 16Gb instead of 8. Still working fine but it's a little bit tighter than I'd like once Proxmox takes 2GB for itself.

This review relates to my purchase of the fanless STRHIGP firewall mini pc with 4 network ports, 8GB RAM, 120GB SSD and RS232 serial comm/console port. It is worth noting that the four NICs are Intel based which is important for my use case. I purchased this device with the intention of installing and configuring pfsense v22.05 as a backup router/firewall for my Netgate WAN router. The spec of this purchase is somewhat overkill for pfsense, but this was intentional in case I needed to repurpose the device. The install went smoothly. Using the RS232 port & 'PUTTY' app on my laptop, the console monitor worked perfectly. I accessed the pfsense webgui via my laptop browser to complete the detailed configuration of the router. Note that there may be compatibility issues with pfsense and the built-in wireless adapter, but for me I don’t require this function. So far I am very happy with my purchase, especially as the price & spec of the STRHIGP router is favourable compared to other equivalent hardware options. I have been in contact with STRHIGP customer support on a couple of occasions & received prompt responses each time. Finally, customer support confirms the unit has a 3 year warranty although I'm not sure how the return process works. The only negative is the lack of detailed hardware documentation or a dedicated website.

I was somewhat sceptical of the capabilities of this mini PC, I had done a lot of looking around and eventually figured I'd take the decision to see if this would be just what I needed. Happy to say after a few weeks of use that this is been a great mini PC for use as a router, currently have OPNSense installed and able to get gigabit throughput with dns adblock and Zenarmour performing additional filtering and blocking services. Overall I can say I am pleasantly surprised with the performance and if you're looking for a mini PC that is capable of handling a 1 gigabit connection with some apps and filtering this is capable enough for that. A shame there is no 2.5G version for future 1G+ internet connections, but I guess at that point at least link aggregation should provide the means support that.

Just what I needed to replace my Asus router with OPNsense. It's not the quickest device in the world and takes a while to boot but it uses Intel NICs for maximum compatibility and the Celeron J4125 is sufficient to handle gigabit traffic (asymmetric at least) without breaking a sweat. It was the cheapest model I could find with this CPU and NIC combination by around £100.

I bought this to use as a router. I opted for this one over the Sharevdi due to the more modern CPU and DDR4 memory. It's working well so far - I originally intended to run it with OpenWRT (which I was able to successfully boot), however opted for Arch Linux in the end (I've not tried to boot the included Windows 10 install). Network devices all work well, the four ethernet ports present as separate devices allowing maximum flexibility, and wifi card easily configured as a basic Wifi 4 / 802.11n access point.

Works perfectly with Sophos xg 19, performs well 200 ish megs np with ips. The one I got came with a wireless adapter/antenna but I ended up removing those. Quiet operation, and remains a little warm to the touch on the heat sink on the top. Comes with hdmi/Sata and power, power adapter is external. Looks good so far and will be putting this into commission in the next month or so, just configuring and texting before then.