Follow Up: Is The Netgate pfsense SG-1100 Still A Good Home Router? What About Gaming?

in February of 2019 I reviewed the neck gate SG 1100 firewall I really like this box I want to do a follow-up a few months later and talk about the pros and cons pros it has all the wonderful features of PF sense and I have a plethora of videos that talk about how to use any of those van features like you know whole home VPN or selective policy routing and every Bell and whistle including if you wanted to do an H a with these you could actually do it with these tiny little boxes so you would have full feature complete pfSense the downside if you have a connection over 500 Meg's and that's why I like to put this being a video if you're someone who's going I have an 800 bag or a full gig connection fiber at my home this is not the box for you stop watching right now that's that's is a limitation I will throw it out there I would say anything over 500 you might want to look at something a little bit bigger still running pfsense pfSense can certainly route that fast but the hardware within this little box just doesn't do it now the box currently is still priced at 159 with a notice that there's going to be a price increase to two tariffs of the September 2019 it's 17 or 15 2019 it's gonna go to 179 so they haven't had a dramatic price increase but what I specifically want to talk about is I bought one of course for myself and for my staff and we put a lot of these out there for you know a few different people who helped them configure them and things like that in the solid performance solid updates the updates have had no problems really been a couple versions updates since then not not too many and they've been a really trouble-free box but I want to talk about home routing with them are they a good buy for that yes so you can set up in your home all once again full features of pfsense you get a Smart Switch managed switch and you would be able to then create VLANs cuz it only has a couple ports on here but you could use the two ports that it has for LAN or you know when failover like I said very flexible in terms of options or you can follow under my more advanced videos on how to build out all the VLANs and create a very segmented out network with a lot of security with a lot of different rules on each network interface that you create that's absolutely possible at these but what about games that is what you know I wanted my staff who plays more games to me but of course having at home my kids play games my kids play a lot of overwatch minecraft and probably plenty of games I can't remember the names of through Steam and things like that but this is where sometimes you run into a problem the switch has plenty of issues and we'll start there not because of pfSense but because of the way they designed it and a lot of these games are expecting and the default option of pfSense is off to have UPnP turned on that it does include the switch now the switch has a couple other things you google Nintendo switch and pfSense you'll find some solutions for for static routing and it's because they didn't design in my opinion the way Nintendo implemented the network stack in the switch it's there's a problem a lot of firewalls there's a lot of little things you have to do to get it working properly and pfSense doesn't automatically or magically fix that either but as far as all the other standard games like I'd mentioned overwatch minecraft or any multiplayer games provided you're willing to do the port mapping it works or you can check the box to turn on UPnP or you can create a separate network for your gaming computers so you don't have to have the risk of UPnP turned on most of your consumer firewalls turn this on by default and what that does is UPnP allows devices to automatically decide what ports get open in your network from a security standpoint this is terrible from a home user who goes I just want to play my games and are not worried about security well turning it on by default makes more sense so you'll have to log in there I like the PF sense gives you the option of doing it and your ability to create separate networks means you could put all your gaming systems on a separate network where you don't have to worry about any of the potential security threats that come through the UPnP but as far as performance goes for myself I have a 350 mi connection at home I've been using this ever since February when I reviewed it I had watched you before that I already had it at my house I was doing testing with it but my kids even multiple of my children playing at the same time both playing overwatch including competitive play which they seem to play a lot of it's had no issues at all is worked really solid it's been an excellent performer and not any problems and I still recommend buying these I think when you start adding it up I mean if you have a bunch of hardware laying around awesome you can build yourself one I encourage people to get out there and experiment and put things together but when you're looking for something that's you know turnkey budget-friendly and you don't about updates or any real process to loading it not that I'm stopping those you who want to tinker I'm certainly not a deterrent for those if you want to tinker and build your own awesome but if you're looking for a turnkey solution and just jumping into the software and programming side where you just want to learn some of the network engineering and play around with a firewall that has even at this tiny little size here an amazing amount of features from proxies to selective routing policy routing VPNs this is still hard to beat even with the price increased after September 15th of 2019 up to 179 you get a lot of power in a small box now for those you asking what I do I have a full 1 gig connection well I do have over here on the SG 3100 I think this is a good one here or of course you can go to the self built route if you go even a basic system running pfSense that does not have to be anything very powerful will route at gigabit so if you were to build a system find a older use computer and I do see older you can find a computer that's a few years old and so runs it but do look for a chip that has AES and I in it that is not a prerequisite to run Pio sense but if you do any type of VPN the AES ni is the offloading of the crypto that is built into a lot of modern processors well I think it's been around for like 8 years so it's not hard to find an older computer that has it in there and it enhances the VPN performance so it's not a prerequisite if you don't use VPNs it's not going to matter to you at all but still a good choice well actually 3100 if you're faster than one faster than 500 mega if you only have a 500 connection this still fits the bill works really well now the VPN speed is not going to be if you do to a whole home VPN or you select a VPN where you have certain computers over it and I've done videos on this you know you're not going to get the full performance at some point there are some limitations I believe the VPN in this limits you to roughly 7080 Meg's one in in real world I think I can peek it out we're doing simulated tests at like closer to 100 but real world I think you get about 7080 Meg's when you wrap everything in a VPN via this and then that wrap the computers behind it within there so maybe that's the problem for you maybe it's not I prefer to actually run the VPN directly on my computer because it's fast enough to handle it at even higher rate of speed but you do have that option to do this on here maybe we put your servers behind it if that's something you want to do so I still think it's a good purchase my follow-up of you know having used it and of course that my staff having used it and one of the solutions they actually because I the VPN support is in here is they built VPNs between their homes and that's actually plenty of speed to play a video game so building VPNs and building your own personal network so you can play peer-to-peer games without sharing it across the public Internet that section in our cool feature and it did work fine a few my staff for doing that and playing some of the games but other than you know having to turn UPnP on um if you want to take that risk to get some of the games working fully other than that it's been a solid product it's a great performer and my review still stands as it did in February I'm still really like this product it still what I'm using at home and I just want to show that cuz a lot of people always ask me what's a good home router to get I still think this is a really good purchase even you know six months later and unless you're lucky enough to have fiber net whole gig connection then you're gonna have to step it up a little bit if you want to get the take advantage of that speed all right thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and 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Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 53,861

Keywords: SG-1100, sg-1100 setup, sg-1100 vpn, sg-1100 throughput, sg-1100 speed test, sg-1100 vs usg, pfsense, firewall, pfsense router, router, Home Router, home router review, best router, best gaming router, pfsense gaming, pfsense gaming configuration, pfsense gaming setup, pfsense gaming ports, pfsense gaming latency, pfsense gaming qos, sg 1100, sg 1100 review

Id: 6VqeB5eXjq0

Length: 8min 25sec (505 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 13 2019