I did something similar. I used Proxmox and then installed PfSense as a virtual machine. You might want to look into OPNsense and PfSense. There are addons for both that do the same as AdGuard and are free and open source. I had good experiences with pfBlocker

Geekbench is pretty useless for actual performance comparisons.

I would have done that a long time ago, but most streaming providers limit your bitrate and there’s no dolby vision steaming when on PC.

Not sure how it could help me solder or find faults on PCBs.