Evergreen gPC2 TC2512 Reviewed - 5 out of 5

My firewall / router recently started having hardware issues causing it to lock up about every day or two and would take around 30 or 45 minutes to get it to boot properly; because of this, I decided it was finally time to replace it. I didn't want to spend a lot of money, and wanted something faster than my current firewall - this wasn't hard to achieve since at 800 MHz, even the cheapest computer on the market is going to be faster.

I ended up purchasing the gPC2 TC2512 from Evergreen on NewEgg. At $189.99, this was the cheapest computer they were selling. In fact, after pricing out parts, I determined that I could not build a computer of similar specs for that price. As it is running a VIA C7-D processor, it uses very little power and generates extremely low amounts of heat. This fact enables everything to stay cool without any case fans, and an minuscule processor fan; due to the lack of fans, I cannot even hear the computer running.

At 80 GB, there is ample hard drive space to install a caching proxy as well. This is something that I have been interested in for a while as I often hit the same (mostly static) pages for reference on various topics. It only comes equipped with 512 MB of RAM, however, this is still twice as much RAM as my previous router. Also, at $10 for 512 MB 533 DDR2, I doubled the amount of memory and still kept the computer at under $200 before shipping.

I promptly repartitioned the hard drive - wiping out gOS Linux - and installed Fedora 9. The process went smoothly and all hardware was detected immediately.

The only problems that I have found are very minor. Since the motherboard is so small, there are only two available card slots (both PCI). This was not an issue for me as I only needed to install a wired NIC and a wireless NIC; the motherboard already has one ethernet port on it. However, if you have more than one wired and one wireless internal network, you will either need to purchase a multi-port wired ethernet card, use a USB wireless card, or go buy a different computer.

If more hard drives were added, this system would also make a decent media server, file server, or backup server and, because of its lack of heat generation, can be stored pretty much anywhere.