I bought that tiger lake motherboard with the laptop i7 on an ITX motherboard and the bios sucks. They left a lot of debug settings, there are a lot of options. Like 4 pages of settings that only make sense for the engineers who developed this. It's not stable, sometimes doesn't wake up from sleep, sometimes it hangs.

From now on I will only buy motherboards from reputable OEMs and not unknown ones operating from a 15 square meters room in Shenzhen with no extensive testing or future support

I bought one of those passively cooled router boxes from AliExpress and have been running opnsense for over a year on it now. It’s way overkill for router + ad blocking, but it’s been working great.

Nah, I worked on router firmware, we rarely have time to finish the requirements, but I would worry if it was someone like tenda.

Put your own distro on it and be happy, intel has more root ware on that than anyone.

Why buy a mobo when you could get this for cheaper, in a smaller footprint, and comes with a case and PSU? Do you really need the SATA ports?

https://a.aliexpress.com/_mtmaWfo

Have a look at the Fujitsu Futro S720/920. They are dirty cheap on eBay (from 20/30€) and you can add a PCI Ethernet card (single/dual/quad gigabit, but I'm sure there are even 2.5/10 Gbps) and you'll have your router ready with less than 100€!