Intel N100 Appliance Throughput & Power Calculator
Estimate 2.5GbE line-rate routing throughput, IDS/IPS packet inspection overhead, WireGuard crypto speed, and passive thermal dissipation for N100/N200 micro appliances.
Hardware and workload
Active Security Modules
Fanless appliance breakdown Estimates, not measurements
Notes for this configuration
- Prefer Intel i226-V over i225-V, and over any Realtek 2.5GbE controller.
- Ensure passive aluminum fins are oriented vertically for optimal convection airflow.
How these numbers are produced
Every value on this page is arithmetic applied to the inputs on the left. It is a planning estimate, not a measurement, and nothing here was benchmarked on physical hardware. The starting points are the published 2.5 Gbps per-port rate of the Intel controllers, the documented behaviour of the FreeBSD igc driver, and vendor sizing guidance from the OPNsense and pfSense projects. Inspection and virtualisation penalties are coarse rules of thumb; real throughput depends heavily on average packet size, ruleset size and traffic mix. The temperature figure is a linear function of ambient plus estimated load, not a junction-temperature model, and the WireGuard figure assumes a single tunnel carrying large packets.
Use it to sanity-check whether a configuration is in the right order of magnitude before buying, then read the guides for the reasoning behind each figure.