I don't like the noncompliant 12V-only USB-C power supply. It's all too easy to get it mixed up with other USB-C chargers and fry a phone/tablet/laptop. I'd rather have a barrel jack if they're not willing to put the proper USB-C power delivery circuitry on their board.
if I'd acutally would consider buying it (not enough RAM for my taste) I'd go ahead and fabrecobble a permanent barrel jack into the case and snip the 12V USB-C plug from the powersupply.
I'd really like to see open source firmware on a device like this. Fake USB-C PD input is a bad idea, and ignoring standards is a sign of poor quality. A barrel jack is superior anyway. To their credit, GOWIN takes feedback seriously and iterates quickly.
@@gowinfanlesswould you consider making a model with a 10gbE rj 45 instead of the 4 2.5gb port? (or even 1 sfp+ and one rj45 if it's possible) I'm asking because where I live 10gb fiber is arriving but you have to use the isp modem in between the fiber connection and your router so you can only use rj45 or a converter but those generate a lot of heat so I would like to avoid them if possible
Small fans = noise, and they don't look like the standard ones you can easily find replacements down the road... Small ones do fail faster... I prefer a bigger fanless case or a bigger case with a 120mm fan for an almost silent system, for my home use. Everything else sounds awesome.
A small note, While an Intel network card is a good thing, their WiFi cards are decidedly not - The cards are locked down and do not support running in AP mode, meaning that nodes like this can't be used for a complete Router/AP solution, or even as a mesh node. And while WiFi 6 is not supported in pfSense/OPNSense (thanks to a lack of support in FreeBSD), it is in OpenWRT, though 6e AP support is only with some specific and hard to get Marvell cards I believe.
Well that's what it is, two physical 25gbe ports on a mellanox x4-lx ocp nic. It just can't seem to push raw packets effectively. I'd be curious to see how it does running in dpdk with cisco trex...
Absolutely true, but I'd really like to see more devices released with that connection to drop the pricing, and maybe normalize it in the process (similar to gig-e connections, or even ethernet connections on motherboards at all).. I'd love for them to release a different version that maybe gives up a nvme slot so that it can push the bandwidth.. That would be killer
Definitely like to see more ram available on these systems. It will really opens them up for virtualization tasks. The increased bandwidth ethernet is great especially for using network storage for VMs. I don't know what form factor these mfr's are going for, it seems like 1L sized wouldn't make these any less desirable and offer the benefit of decent cooling.
Yep, many of these ultra small systems are sacrificing too much to get the size down. Here is my wish list: 1L size or smaller N100/N305 (or for more performance and I/O, a laptop cpu like a i5-1235U) DDR5 Memory slot Two 2.5Gbe NICs At least One SPF+ port, preferably two Two M.2 slots, one for NVMe, and one for either Wifi or NVMe (may need an adapter) Two USB 3.2 Gen2 Two USB 2.0 Standard 12v barrel power jack Standard sized fan (horizontal mount) with adjustable speed Excellent thermal design that also provides airflow to memory and M.2 slots Easily accessible memory, fan, M.2 slots. BIOS with plenty of configurability With the limited number of PCIe lanes, there may be trade offs between the NVMe and SPF+. Seems there would be demand for this from home labbers, and it shouldn't be unreasonably expensive.
@@Zeric1 Something like that to work as a router for a 5Gbps connection I could get at home would be sweet. Potentially trading the WiFi adapter for a SATA controller, all together in something like Jonsbo N3.
The fans can be a pain, because they are custom. The Beelink SER6 Pro already starts to have a slight rattle 😞 slightly larger with a standard fan or some fan you will be able to buy would be nice
Nice, but since I once saw a Ryzen 7 5800U in a small form factor on Aliexpress, I needed to have one for my home lab. For almost no money I got a 64GB RAM; 1TB SSD; 8 cores (16 threads) , 15W TPD, 4.4GHz Turbo (3.4GHz all core turbo) monster of a home server. It destroys the N305 in almost all benchmarks and is almost the same price as a N305 with the same features.
Hi Patrick! That is very cool :-) I do have a concern though. Is that power supply an actual 12v DC through a usb-c plug, or is it PD and it is 15v PD? If it is actually a 12v power brick that just happens to have a usb-c plug on the end I don't want to let that into my house. I don't trust future-me to not fry some other delicate gadget with it.
This looks awesome...I could wish for 64 GB of RAM, but if the pricing's right I could just cluster more nodes and have fewer VMs per node. 10 GB to NFS for shared storage would make me happy.
About 4 years ago an isp customer of mine had problems with a customer that needed to test a 10gbe connection, so I built a couple of small shuttle boxes to pop a couple intel x710 nics into to travel and iperf test them at each end to help troubleshoot the matter, I really wish these were around then. You ought to run Cisco trex on it for nic testing, it's built to use mellanox x5 nics in dpdk at 100gbe in place of expensive sprient/ixia boxes.
At 100G rates yes, and I can vouch for that having gotten an x5 to test with myself, but should have enough bus to loop 25gbe through the ports too removing ip stack the overhead with dpdk.
Love those universal systems - but absolutely agree on bigger chassis size and better/less noisy cooling. Quadruple the size and make space for more RAM, NVMEs, etc..
I’ve one with 10gbit and n305 since some week, it’s a good device, I use it with bare metal opnsense install. It is good, just some things to be noted: 1) fan can become loud, due to the size they need to run relatively quick and on that size it make noise 2) there is a strange pattern in terms of of temperature across the cores, on first 4 and second 4 there is ~10 degrees celsius difference, seems a little odd, but looking at thermal paste seen on video I start suspecting that this can be due non proper contact between cpu and heat sink 3) fan in the lower deck blow air on network card chip but doesn’t seems to cool down sfp+ cage so not very confident use 10gbit copper sfp due to the temp they generate. As said previously it would be much better in those kind of review to see also behaviour with sfp module, if someone don’t need 10gbit/s there is a less expensive version without sfp+ port.
I also noticed the thermal paste job in the video, it looks really bad. I'd re-paste it properly and I bet if you do it's going to run cooler with more consistent Temps per core. I would never buy this product due to the fan and poor contact cooling as you mentioned with the sfp+, but other than that it looks pretty nice
This thing would make an awesome little pfsense firewall. Lucky they're redesigning the power input to make use of the barrel jack instead of the USB-C which is a good idea.
HOLY SH***THAT'S SO COOL. But the non-compliant USB-C power supply is an absolute bummer. On the plus side, it is 12V.... but, Would rather have the barrel charger if you're going to do something silly like that. It's more compatible with other things. I was working on a low power server/router solution and this is incredible. The 25Gb SFP's are awesome, truly awesome. It's a huge sell because it can directly interface with production equipment
Quick tip for contrast colours on charts, don't use royal blue and black. Use a bright red/green/yellow for the one that should stand out, saves us all squinting for the difference.
We have like 97% male viewership in generally 35-55. Red/green color blindness impacts like 5-8% of the male population which is why we try NOT to use them as much as possible.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo I find it hard to read the charts as well - how about black with a much lighter blue? Just some way to increase the contrast between the thing being compared, and the other items on the chart.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Maybe adding a striped texture to one bar rather than relying on colour alone might be better? That way you can use clearer colours and colour blind people still have clear differentiation. But also, thank you (from a UI nerd perspective) for considering colour-blindness, so many people forget it is surprisingly common!
This, in a 1U, with an amd CPU, 2 m.2 nvme, and many m.2 SATA (in soho use, except video editor, who needs multigigabyte per sec on each drive?) There is many holdings' offices that doesn't need more than 1 pool of SATA3 speed drives.
Good point on the poe to barrel jack splitter. I would prefer usbc for a power port and one of the ethernet ports to support poe in as an alternative port source
The massive amount of thermal compound indicates to me a poor fit between the heat sink and CPU, it's a design flaw. the cooler is mounted to the lid, not to the pcb of the motherboard. Cool device, but I would have concerns.. there's like 10 times more compound than should be there.
It's doused in thermal paste. It's absolutely too much. The i3-305n has a TDP of 15W so that sink is probably enough but like you said, it's not really ideal that the sink is attached on the lid and not the pcb itself. If something changes in the screw tower heights the sink could be clamped down at a pcb twisting force or it could barely touch the cpu package. Might work ok if their tolerances are good and Q&A is rigorous but in general a risky design choice.
You have great reviews Patrick; thorough and concise! I would like to see more formalised throughput testing / benchmarking however, especially with advanced features like IPS with the likes of OPNSense at high throughputs which is quite CPU intensive. The reason being that It's really hard to tell if some of these little boxes can handle the load when really pushed.
You explain very well what it is, but for people who are new, can you explain what uses/applications it is intended for? For example, is this just a really small form factor computer that can run Windows and be used like a regular pc for gaming, etc.? Or is it a specialized computer, only meant for specific use cases (i.e. not for avg regular users) ... ?
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Okay, "virtualization server".. what does this even mean? lol.. I guess i'm not the target demographic for this product.. that's my point/question. I'm just an average computer user, but i'm curious to know whether I should be interested in this or not, but it does not seem to be the case.
@@lordbacon4972technically nothing prevents you from using these in desktop environments. But of course they are largely aimed at enthusiasts / homelabbers with more experience since they don’t come with much in the form of documentation or support. Especially since buying off AliExpress is also a risk that sometimes requires adjustments when you get something slightly different than what you ordered as sometimes happens.
@@lordbacon4972 a virtualization server is a server for running virtual machines of various operating systems for various reasons lol. some examples for this stuff are: iot, cybersecurity/pentesting, running game servers, OS testing, software development/testing/hosting, powerful virtual desktops to use off-site in lightweight laptops like chromebooks, literally anything you want to run that uses Docker, NAS, networking & security practice, and "automation and scripting" (all from chatgpt) it's also useful, as he mentioned, for use as a firewall, or a router with network-level adblock or a vpn, particularly for a busy network (since it has 10-25GbE SFP+ ports as well as 2.5GbE RJ45 ports). if you're running a small handful of machines on your home network and don't need more than a gigabit of bandwidth, you can definitely find cheaper alternatives in the mini pc space, perhaps some on this channel. but if you have hundreds of iot devices and have crazy 8gig internet (google fiber has this in some places) and want to run a lot of network-heavy stuff at home, this may be for you. so, the general answer is that these are good for lots of home lab applications, and this one is especially good for things that require both high bandwidth and good performance (you can also find things that pick one of those two and focus more on it, like a high-performance server with only gigabit ethernet. itall depends on your use case)
@@ericneo2 yes. Though I would like to see 2x pcie slots too, one for 100gb networking and another for a HBA or equivalent on-board for low powered ceph
@@inh415 A few people get a Jonsbo N2/N3 and a mini-pc with a U series processor. They then remove the WiFi/M.2 for a break out pcb to SATA or SAS. Making it low heat, low power, great for SMB and hub offices.
I would love to see these small units put in standard format fans. For example a 60 or 80 mm fan that can be replaced. Not only can it cool better at lower RPM, it has much more cooling headroom. I have a mini pc that I stopped using as a firewall as the fan died and it wasn't easily replicable.
Virtually ALL the fans are standard sizes and available online. All ya gotta do is measure it including the thickness. 60mm or 80mm are only 2 sizes of the 20+ there are. I'd argue the 60-80mm is a dumb idea cuz it's way to big/loud for a unit this size
This is a step in the right direction, but still falls very short of what I'd want. For one, custom fans are a no-go. I will gladly accept a little more bulk in exchange for a user-replaceable 40, 60 or even 80 mm fan mount. For two, that 12V USB-like power is a hard no, and actually turned me off this purchase entirely. It could have used PD and that would have been great. Heck, if I accidentally plug the power supply into the wrong type-C port on this very device, I could fry it instantly. Other brands have done similar things and I hate it with extreme prejudice.
Neat little system. Wish they would use a better CPU around 5800u 8c/16t, ECC RAM and 2 drives, the first company to figure this out are going to make a boat load of money and nail down the market.
We would like dual nvme even if it's only gen3x2. I would like to put this in remote office to have a local access to cameras for example. Having 2 nvme would allow a RAID 1 setup so you have so if one drive fail, your system still runs before you replace it.
It would be better if it build for an AMD foundation. I would added the Radeon 5600G since the built-in GPU is superiors to any on the built-in CPU/GPU combo.
This gets SO close to what my ideal MiniPC would be. I imagine with the SFP and dual NvME boards they are connecting via PCIe through that ribbon cable. Would be awesome to be able to add an HBA here for a DAS and have a relatively inexpensive NAS. Wonder how long it'll take for someone to reverse engineer and figure out a PCIe riser for this.
This is 99.999% of what i want The only thing i'd add, is a slightly larger chassis, to fit 4*M.2 slots at 1x speed. I'd say 2x but i know there is not enough PCIe lanes for networking and M.2, it is an atom class processor after all at only 9x PCIe 3.0 lanes. Oh and if there arent enough lanes for 4*M.2 drives at 1x link, a re-driver to get it down to PCIe 2.0 i'd also like dual eMMC
I would say the inclusion of the 12v USB-C for power has to do with EU directives on chargers and connectors. Devices can no longer ship chargers with devices. My guess is they decided on the USB-C connection as almost everyone already have cables to hand. Easier than trying to find a dedicated charger. Just a guess.
I don't think this counts as a mobile device that the EU mandate applies to. I'd guess it's the vendor experimenting with eventually integrating USB-PD for power.
well I WAS excited that I just decided to built a pfsense router with my old HP elitedesk (i5-7500/32G mem/somecrappy SSD) with QUAD 2.5G and another 2.5G and ANOTHER 2.5G and then quad 1G and it was going to be AWESOME! ...but then I watched this and saw its 1/10th the size with 2x the cores and 9000x the throughput at 1/50th the wattage and now im just depressed...
Manufacturers have been abusing random connectors for serial ports for decades now. I have devices with 3.5mm stereo audio jacks, miniUSB, RJ11, RJ45, 8 pin miniDIN, BT631W to name but a few. The idea that they won't abuse other connectors for power is laughable as it's abhorrent.
@@jonathanbuzzard1376 The issue is it's dangerous. There is a protocol to abide by if you want to supply more than 5V with a USB connector. A non-USB charger with a USB-C connector can easily damage something expensive if you plug that non spec power supply into another device. You're right manufaturers will always do stupid stuff. But we as consumers have the power to not buy their stupid stuff so that manufaturer learns not to do stupid stuff. And I would have preferred Patrick to condem that product stronger than he did in that video. I think he said something along the lines of "he doesn't mind".
These look great, but the U4 model on AliExpress (the only model with the USB-C for input power) is listed as having 10GbE ports on the front, not 25GbE. In fact, _all_ of the models listed on AliExpress have 10GbE ports, none with 25GbE at all. Did you get a special model for review that is different from the available models?
Neat stuff; big shift from 5-7 years ago when STH stuff was more Intel NUC's, old towers you got used with Linux shoved on there and maybe some multi port NIC's; and then RPI's as well for lower cost computing. It's been ages since I've done any physical home lab stuff (my partner is quite sensitive to noise and in our small apartment my lab stuff only lasted a few months before it got sold and turned into Linode/AWS VM's). Years later though I'm pondering a RPI cluster, and with the RPI5 out that might be fun. But that wont' be x86 which means I might want something around for those duties. This is all headless though so I need to be careful as I don't need anything graphical or fancy in that regard. But maybe a beefier machine with VM's would do too? Such a fun hobby.
i think all of our fields are converging more with apple giving in. type-c and barrel jacks, i was just loking up usb b to type-c at 40gbps 240W ... good show, every thing is better with gan III ... this is fun o think we are about to take a huge jump in all tech with wifi7 Throughput dude
definitely neat...would love to see it or an updated version hit the market especially if it really can push at least 25gbps minimum; might be great as a little test machine for diagnosing network stuff
Great video thanks STH! Question: Can the Wi-Fi NIC operate in Wireless AP mode? I'm looking to upgrade my in-home Wireless with a newer-gen AP - being able to use it for more than that might be a stealthy way of upgrading the HomeLab capabilities for me without getting the side-eye from the wife!
@@ServeTheHomeVideo if that's the case, do you know a compatible wifi module I can swap for this for use in AP Mode? I'm not seeing much online for DIY 6e APs out there. With WF7 prices being hilariously out of touch I'm weighing my WF6e AP options.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Interesting topic, we need more DIY wifi APs, we know it has technical implications (signal, amplifier, etc.), but always needing low-performance equipment to deal with wifi is horrible.
With two M.2 SSDs and 25Gb, that would be a decent little VMware vSAN node if not for the limit on RAM. Would be great if two of those 2.5Gb ports could be disabled to lend their PCIe lanes to the 25Gb ports.
Would love some more extreme use case examples for devices like this - on the face of it, it has almost every feature desired by satellite office IT or small ISPs.
The Intel N305 specs list a maximum memory of 16 GB. I have seen reports of 32 GB and even 48 GB though. With future BIOS/UEFI updates can I expect that this will continue to work? Is there any reason a 64 GB SO-DIMM would not work?
So, the 2 x 25GE ports were able to provide TOGETHER a little over 20Gbps? And right after you say that you can get single link at a little above 20Gbps also. So that probably means it is a PCIe lanes issue and not enough are allocated to these NICs. Still pretty fast, but practically useless since you will need a 25GE switch to connect to it - which are not cheap! Imo, 10GE is more than enough. That cpu can't route traffic past 10Gbps anyway if you put a pfsense on it.
What’s the aggregate backplane bandwidth? Some switches, such as some of the Ubiquitis, only have enough backplane capacity to run one of their NICs at full speed.
There is no dedicated switching backplane. Each port is connected to NIC over PCIe to the CPU. Theoretically PCIe devices can communicate directly, but nobody is doing this because it only works specific brand, specific simple scenarios. So here you will be limited to PCIe bandwidths, but even more so to the memory and CPU speed. 4 low power cores. Maybe 20Gbps total.
Hi STH. I bought the R86S after your video and article. Great litte box. I wonder if you can check if the main PCB for the R86S pro hss the same foot print and the flex comnector is the same? Like, swapping the bottoms of the two box and both would still work? Also does this new Pro one would come with a slim version that doesn't have the sfp? I have a plan to do a shell swap (cnc) + cooler upgrade so the shell is not an issue for me but I would love to swap the main PC out since I don't need the 25G. Thank you
A fan request : Please can you also test out / review one of the mini firewall type PCs that ship with Pentium Gold 8505 that is 1P+4E Alder Lake CPU ?
We will try to get to that. We are moving to Scottsdale (the studio is still on the truck) and are moving into a dedicated AC warehouse space here. I pre-recorded ~10 videos including this one before we left Austin.
I like these e cores...but I wish they were hyperthreadable. Imagine a 16 e-core hypervisor...I am positively dying for a mega low powered hypervisor with lots of cores. The single RAM channel is a little bit of a bummer here.
FWIW these faster CPUs definitely aren’t a waste at 2.5G for anyone using VPNs heavily OR with PPPoE based uplinks. N6005 solutions with PPPoE are lucky to get to 1.5G (single core on opnsense) so the extra efficiency+performance gain is awesome. The 25G seems a little silly with that context in mind, but frankly it’s such a good nic, even at 10G as a VLANd single port firewall, it’s an excellent choice + gives you better in/out latency. But meh on the oddball sized fans. (Such bad luck with stock fan survival rates, lack of replaceability is frustrating)
I don’t get the push for tinier and tinier pcs - at the expense of cooling and storage. Isn’t ITX or mini-ITX small enough? Why not honor standards - unless the goal is proprietary lock-in? If I bought this, I would probably transplant the insides to an ITX case with an 80mm or 120mm fan.
Hopefully. Pretty busy moving to Scottsdale over the last three weeks and then getting married this past Sunday. I am a bit behind on e-mail to say the least :-) I do hope we get to test the 1U.
Right now my OPNsense firewall is a Lenovo m720 Tiny with an Intel 9700T CPU. Does the N305 beat the 9700T in performance? I run alot of plugins, including Suricata and Zen Armor, so I would like to be able to replicate this setup. With that said...If they allow us to swap out the bottom for more NVMe I am in.
