My router at the moment is a 1U Poweredge R230. Got it for 70€ off of ebay about 3,5 years ago. It's using a Pentium G4600, one stick of 16G DDR4 ECC RAM, and a small cheap 2,5'' SSD. There's an extra PCIe card with 2x 1G Intel RJ45 ports as well, giving me 4x 1G plus IPMI (or whatever Dell calls it).

Fans are throttled to 8% and I'm having Icinga2 watch system temperatures, which are usually between 35 - 45°C. It's barely audible, and currently sitting 1,5m away from my ears. I think idle power consumption is something between 20 - 30W.

It's based on Debian 11, and I'm only using tools available from Debian's repo: dnsmasq, nftables, wireguard, ipsec, haproxy, some policy based routing. Provisioning via ansible.

Rock solid platform. I've recently had to reboot for the 1st time in about 600 days due to physically moving some things around - I know, uptime is not supposed to be a flex.

Might replace the Intel PCIe card with a 1x SFP+ for a DAC connection to my core switch soon-ish since we finally seem to be getting our apartment complex connected to residential fiber.

I guess what I'm saying is - I congratulate the tenacity and expertise that went into OPs blog post, as far as homelab routers go, I'm very happy with my (very easy to set up) HW/SW.