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.