I have now gone through two builds; First one was a Netgate 7100 1U that was promised to handle 10G, but then Netgate said no, it can't reach 10G, max 2-ish. (why sell a router with 10G card if it can't even get close), and their spec sheets say it can. Anyways, it can't.

Then I worked with a vendor that meant a Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2410M CPU @ 2.30GHz (2 cores, 4 threads) with 8G ram and a 10G pice (Intel) SPF card should make, it, but from initial testing, and adding the tuneable I can, it peaks at around 2.5-3G through the firewall, so a marginal improvement.

I have now talked to the vendor again and said, no we need more power, but that's the question. How much power do I need to put into this to comfortable gain 10G through the firewall and VLANS, plus say something like Zenarmor? I don't have 10G internet now, but I want the router to be able to handle it. Right now I have a 10G backbone of the network, but I bought two Mellanox ConnectX 4 that can handle around 25G, one for the router and one for my Unraid. With those cards it should not be the cards that max out.

So could I get some suggestions on what CPU to look for? I spoke to Netgear since I got a service agreement and they defaults to Intel "Xeon-DE" D-1537, 1.7 GHz FCBGA 1667 supported SoC on their top routers, so I guess I should use that as a reference. I was thinking something around a 6-8th gen I7 with 16-32GB of ram should be plenty cores and overhead to run this router painless. any thoughts?