Fortinet FortiGate FG-40F Review Leveling-up Firewall Testing

Fortinet FortiGate FG-40F Internal Hardware Overview

Opening the unit, we can see a neat custom PCB. Note, this is a Gen1 motherboard, and Fortinet releases revisions over time. It is just what we had.

Under the big heatsink is the reason we are taking this apart.

Here you can see the FortiSOC4. Fortinet makes its own silicon. This is a tiny package compared to switch chips or modern CPUs/ GPUs. Still, this is a huge differentiator because Fortinet is spinning custom 28nm silicon to optimize the power and performance for these gateway workloads. There are cores, custom accelerators, and more in here. We could not find real photos of this using a Google search before this article, so hopefully, this helps folks see some cool Fortinet engineering.

There was another heatsink (not dedicated to power components).

Here we have a Marvell Alaska 88E1545, which is a 1GbE Ethernet Transceiver. It is crazy how many devices we open up and see are using the Alaska series.

Sam just took photos of some of the other parts of the board so you can see them.

Since Alaska is only a four-port interface, we need one for the WAN port. This is the Marvell 88E1514.

Here is another quick shot.

If you want to see the board without its big heatsinks, here you go.

Looking at the bottom side of the board, you can see there is a neat feature.

Here is the CRS2032 battery. To be fair, that is a bit of a pain to get to if you ever had to change it.

One other small but nice part is that the chassis lid is not held on just by screws. Instead, there are these retention pegs. This is just a small quality bump over a low-cost chassis that solely relies upon screws to mate sections.

Next, let us get to the software.