I’m thinking about building a box for pfsense. Looking at hardware options and I see a pretty significant difference in price when comparing hardware with and without AES-NI. I don’t necessarily think I’ll need AES. The way I understand it, AES is for using VPN that is somehow running on the router??? I mean, my wife and I both use VPNs on our work computers so we can reach our work networks, but that isn’t using any encryption features on my router, is it?? Or am I not understanding?
It’s for encryption and decryption so only valid for VPN tunnels initiated by pfsense. Not a needed feature by any means if you don’t selfhost stuff and want to setup VPN tunnels and run a lot of traffic through (like say media through Jellyfin)