Here are some results if anyone comes across this thread in the future.

The baseline result I need to achieve is a speedtest result of 7.5 Gbit that the ISP’s rental router gives me.

I ended up picking up:

• Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny M720q, Core i3 8100T, 8 GB RAM ($70)
• Huawei SP310 (Intel X520-DA2/82599) dual 10 Gbit NIC ($20)
• 16x PCIe riser + Network Card Bracket ($20)

Initially I installed pfSense. I ran iperf3 to just get an initial sanity check that the PCIe card/wiring was working right but was getting results between 3-7 Gbit with the CPU pegging at 50%. Some quick googling returned results like “you can’t run iperf on pfSense!” and “pfSense isn’t a router, why do people keep using it as a router, it’s a firewall!”, so I decided to switch to OpenWRT since the Linux side of things always seems to make more sense.

On OpenWRT, iperf easily hit 9 Gbit with like the CPU at 95% idle.

It took like 2 hours to configure the weird IPIP6 tunnel my ISP uses for IPv4, but once it was set up, the machine has no trouble routing the same 7.5 Gbit speedtest the ISP router managed, with the CPU usage at 78% idle (the remainder in “sirq”)

Power consumption:

• ISP router draws a solid 16W both when it’s idle and when there is 7.5 Gbit of traffic
• The M720q draws 16W when idle and up to 29W when there is 7.5Gbit of traffic. This is with two copper SFP+
• This is without tweaking any power saving options in BIOS etc

I can only look at Mikrotik gear in jealousy since they don’t have a reseller here, so all that’s available are overpriced, un-warrantied gray imports…

Thanks for the Intel x520 recommendation, those are looking like a much better deal right now than the Mellanox cards I was looking at.

Glad to hear it about the BSD networking!

I’m still trying to avoid the Xeons for power consumption reasons, hehe, although it would be a lot more fun for sure!

Yeah I’m not ordering anything until I have the connection up and running, which is why I opted to rent the ISP router to begin with, but looking at results online that others on the same ISP have posted, I can probably expect up to around 7 Gbit real-world so I’ve been thinking that I will at least want something better than the standard 1 Gbit or even 2.5 Gbit stuff out there, hence why I’m trying to research what the hardware requirements actually are!

These ThinkCenter M720q machines I’m looking at all seem to have a single PCIe 3.0 8x card slot, regardless of the CPU, and that seems to be all that the Mellanox ConnectX cards need according to their spec sheets, so hopefully that is good.

We also need to consider the practical aspects. Who mucks after the horses? Who feeds them? Do we need a stall? Does it need to be air conditioned in the summer/winter?

The problem is that it all looks really $$$, even on the used market

For anyone who’s not in the Synology ecosystem, this is what the release notes are:

Starting from this version, the processing of media files using HEVC (H.265), AVC (H.264), and VC-1 codecs will be transitioned from the server to end devices to reduce unnecessary resource usage on the system and enhance system efficiency. These codecs are widespread on end devices such as smartphones, tablets, computers, and smart TVs. If the end device does not support the required codecs, the use of media files may be limited.

This mostly affects things like streaming to a TV, streaming box or tablet with limited codec support.

When watching videos on Linux, the support on the NAS itself doesn’t matter, just the support only your PC. When opening videos over SMB in dolphin, the codec support on the NAS does not come into play. The thumbnails are generated by your PC.

Just install VLC on your PC and it will play whatever you throw at it, regardless of OS codecs. I would not re-encode anything.

edit: It looks like the biggest impact is using Synology Photos - it can’t generate thumbnails for HEIF photos/HEIC videos anymore