I am looking at replacing our aging Cisco 7206VXR border routers with servers running RouterOS. CPU-wise I am considering Xeon X3460s, 2.8Ghz quad-cores with hyper-threading support. Network cards will be Intel E1G44ETs. I will be running BGP and OSPF. Does anyone have a similar setup? I'm wondering (at least roughly) what kind of throughput I might be able to expect.

Thanks for any input.

How much traffic will passthrough?

What I'd like to try to find out is what I could realistically ramp up to. We have Gbe connections to two different carriers. There would be two routers, each would terminate one carrier. Currently, we run about 200Mbps per carrier at peak time.

Depends on how many routes you have, how much firewall filtering you're doing, if you're doing any QoS etc. - the software configuration is as important a piece in this as the hardware is.

I will have full routes to the Internet and probably a few hundred internal routes. There will be no QoS, firewall, etc . . . these are just transit routers.

Currently ROS is using one core for routing so it's better to have fast dual core (like i7) than quad-core.

i7 is quad core/HT . . . and 2.8Ghz is about the upper limit as far as server-class hardware, unless you want to pay massive premiums for small increases in speed.

i7 with turbo boost will run single or dual core with ROS at much higher speed than Xeon can.

Turbo-boost is good for a few hundred Mhz, AFAIK, which is likely going to be far from providing a large performance increase (my guess would be maybe 10% at most). Other than that, i7/X34xx have essentially the same architecture, save for the X34xx ability to use ECC RAM. Regardless, i7 is not an option for me. My question is what type of throughput I could expect with the hardware I proposed.