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[EC300]

I got it out of the box, installed the 16Gb RAM and M2 SSD, plugged it in and hit the start button with a USB stick containing OPNsense image and was installed and in the WebUI in under an hour. So straightforward, a bit of an anti-climax nerd-wise. 

I am not going to press it straight into service as I want to fiddle about with the OPNsense install without affecting our home connection, so currently its on a static IP on my LAN. I was interested in power consumption so I have hooked it up to a power monitor, its obviously not under load but it runs at about 12W with nothing attached, during the install I saw 20W briefly and which point I had a keyboard (with lots of LED's!) and mouse attached.

The case is warm to the touch and OPNsense reports 38-43C at zero CPU load, its fairly cool in my room (18c)

I took a few pictures which I have attached for those who are interested, I no longer have webspace so I can't host and link them in the way I used to, sorry ....

C

Have you enabled power states on the CPU?  Not sure if this is enabled by default on OPNsense.  The power consumption seems high for idle.  My older i7-7500 Kettop appliance idles at 4-5 watts and the cores are reporting 18-19C, in a room that is 14C. I think perhaps your CPU isn't powering down at idle and may need Intel Speed Shift (or whatever they are calling it these days) enabling.

[Alex Atkin UK]

New review:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNEmRaMC7qo

This looks pretty poor unless you really need the size as the N95 is slower than the N100 and the N300 is slower than the N305, plus the appliances all have real i226 ports whereas that one the 4th is a Realtek USB port.  Also not being able to use the common size of M.2 drive limits the storage.  Having an active fan that can fail/clog for a chip that can passively cool is also a huge negative IMO.

It actually makes me laugh how often he goes on about "but you can connect a JBOD", which unless you need to move those drives between different PCs often seems crazy to have all that clutter of multiple boxes.  Granted, my NAS case cost more than a MiniPC alone, but it holds 8 full sized drives.

Have you enabled power states on the CPU?  Not sure if this is enabled by default on OPNsense.  The power consumption seems high for idle.  My older i7-7500 Kettop appliance idles at 4-5 watts and the cores are reporting 18-19C, in a room that is 14C. I think perhaps your CPU isn't powering down at idle and may need Intel Speed Shift (or whatever they are calling it these days) enabling.

I don't know about OPNsense, but pfSense has added Intel Speed Shift as the default option now which has less latency when switching speeds.  It seems PowerD was doing this at the software level whereas Speed Shift is done at the hardware, although I'm not 100% on that as can't find an explanation of how PowerD works

[EC300]

I don't know about OPNsense, but pfSense has added Intel Speed Shift as the default option now which has less latency when switching speeds.  It seems PowerD was doing this at the software level whereas Speed Shift is done at the hardware, although I'm not 100% on that as can't find an explanation of how PowerD works

Yes PowerD was sort of software based, it stopped working in the 2.7.0 update from memory when I noticed as my CPU temps went up quite a bit whilst idle, so it then needed Tunable settings in pfSense added to enable Intel's power saving options. The Intel option appeared in 2.7.1 I think.

[Alex Atkin UK]

This is really interesting, the Power Preference slider makes a HUGE difference, but not quite how I would expect.

If I crank it all the way to efficiency it doesn't seem to let any core boost above 1600Mhz, even under load.  This halves OpenVPN throughput, kinda sucks as I had hoped it would just boost a single core.

But if I put it right in the middle the cores drop to between 1200Mhz and 1600Mhz and boost to 2922Mhz under load, but ALL cores boost when the traffic is going over OpenVPN, which I shouldn't think is necessary.    Idle temp has dropped 3-4C though.

Using sysctl -a dev.cpu | grep 'freq:' to show core speed.

[Chrysalis]

Hi guys

OPNsense, fanless N100/N305 barebone router options

I think I will upgrade my PCEngines APU2C4 home router running pfSense in the near future, it has been fantastic for 6 years but I think its time for it to be upgraded and I want to switch to OPNsense, be familiar / up and running before upgrading to (proper) fibre. Sadly PCEngines seem to have ground to a halt with their stuff EOL, no new boards.

Tenbury Wells is due to be upgraded to fibre in the next 12-24 months (we currently only have ADSL on Zen) so plan is to upgrade to a router capable of handling higher throughput before then, option to run with VPN, switch to OPNsense from pfSense, have 2.5 Gb lan capability and get something that will see me through another 6 years or so.

I am currently connected via an ancient Zyxel 8924 acting as ADSL modem and use two Ubiquiti WAP's to cover the house, its 11ac but can't see any need to upgrade wifi until fibre arrives. I have a NAS and a TV server running, 4 adults in the house a lot of the time, all fairly demanding users with lots of devices - we also have a quite a lot of cameras and smart home devices.

Started looking at my options, initially wanted to avoid Chinese stuff but now realise its pointless to even try so been browsing websites and looking at AliExpress / Amazon

Currently leaning towards N100 or N305 box, N305 obviously being more expensive but more cores and higher clock speed. I did like the N5105 also but the N100 offers what appears to be significant performance boost for small price increase, for future proofing I also am inclined to 'go overkill' slightly as long as the power consumption isn't massively increased.

I will probably buy barebone unit and buy my own branded DDR5 SODIMM and SSD drive, looks like I'm not going to save much (if anything) buying off Aliexpress and better off buying on UK Amazon - anyone tried this?  If I add import duty to the Aliexpress prices its basically the same as UK.

Any thoughts or experience you can share?

Chunks

My price on ali was inclusive of any duty, I didnt have to pay it on top.  I have actually ended up ordering a second N100 to replace my laptop, these N100 units on ali I feel are amazing value.

Since cost came up, I paid £168 including 16 gig ram and 256 gig NVME storage, insane pricing considering current state of PC market, and the thing uses barely 10 watts, the TDP has lived up to its name, and that 10 watts is for the entire unit.

The one I ordered is at this link.  You will need to manually select CPU  and other specs you want.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004360072281.html

Noticed now you went with a N305, hope it works out well, but probably even more overkill than the N100.

[EC300]

This is really interesting, the Power Preference slider makes a HUGE difference, but not quite how I would expect.

If I crank it all the way to efficiency it doesn't seem to let any core boost above 1600Mhz, even under load.  This halves OpenVPN throughput, kinda sucks as I had hoped it would just boost a single core.

But if I put it right in the middle the cores drop to between 1200Mhz and 1600Mhz and boost to 2922Mhz under load, but ALL cores boost when the traffic is going over OpenVPN, which I shouldn't think is necessary.    Idle temp has dropped 3-4C though.

Using sysctl -a dev.cpu | grep 'freq:' to show core speed.

I've got mine set to Core Level Control and I find putting the slider at 70 seems to give good behaviour between throttling down and ramping up when needed.  I tried the sysctl command to read the CPU speeds but I have a suspicion that running the command itself is throttling up the CPUs as it is always at or near maximum. On my dashboard the CPU is shown idling at 999MHz and then raises if I put a load on pfSense such as a speed test.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I've got mine set to Core Level Control and I find putting the slider at 70 seems to give good behaviour between throttling down and ramping up when needed.  I tried the sysctl command to read the CPU speeds but I have a suspicion that running the command itself is throttling up the CPUs as it is always at or near maximum. On my dashboard the CPU is shown idling at 999MHz and then raises if I put a load on pfSense such as a speed test.

Setting to 70 for me prevents it boosting for OpenVPN traffic.

My box is never exactly idle, so I can't comment on if the command causes boosting, but it definitely isn't causing boosting to maximum and I don't see why it would cause an issue at all given you have to be able to monitor the behaviour somehow - the WebUI is surely just doing the same thing only its got way more overhead with all the PHP stuff running so more likely to cause boosting.

I do notice some parameters are broken too, like its showing max clock as 800Mhz in the UI and sysctl.  I can only assume this is a glitch with it being hardware scaling so they aren't pulling the actual max clock correctly, or its not exposed at all.

[Chunkers]

Have you enabled power states on the CPU?  Not sure if this is enabled by default on OPNsense.  The power consumption seems high for idle.  My older i7-7500 Kettop appliance idles at 4-5 watts and the cores are reporting 18-19C, in a room that is 14C. I think perhaps your CPU isn't powering down at idle and may need Intel Speed Shift (or whatever they are calling it these days) enabling.

I did enable PowerD, its off by default along with the crypto hardware acceleration and thermal sensors , but not until after I removed the power monitor plug, next time I plan a reboot Ill put the monitor back on and see if it does anything

C

[Chrysalis]

PowerD should still be working and in my testing works as expected.

The n100 has a big gap between base clock and turbo, so turbo will show as 801mhz. (freebsd doesnt show and detect turbo clocks, instead it adds +1 mhz to the max clock when the cpu is in any turbo clocks).

PowerD has hiadaptive if agressive clocks are desired.

If PowerD isnt running, I dont think the chip will turbo either.  At least thats how things worked before.

I expect the N100 to easily be able to do 100s of mbits on VPN without turbo clocks.

I have no idea what you guys are talking about on 2.7.1 intel controls though, I dont see anything in there related to speedshift or core control.

--

Ok I found what you guys are talking about.

https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/14047

So it only shows in the UI when hardware p-states is detected and the driver loads, my unit must not be enabling it then which is interesting, the bios on my unit offers no controls at all for the CPU most bare bones bios I ever seen so no way for me to force speedshift on.

At least I know what you guys are on about now.

I havent seen my unit pull more than 10w, unless I am doing something like running a all core benchmark on it.

[Alex Atkin UK]

It wasn't about power saving for me, I was hoping it would allow a single core to boost higher to get a bit more out of OpenVPN.

I have to use OpenVPN as for some reason Wireguard is extremely unreliable and periodically runs into severe performance issues.

[Chunkers]

No change in power consumption, hardly a surprise, with my current connection the cpu utilisation is on zero most of the time anyway.

[EC300]

No change in power consumption, hardly a surprise, with my current connection the cpu utilisation is on zero most of the time anyway.

I did enable PowerD, its off by default along with the crypto hardware acceleration and thermal sensors , but not until after I removed the power monitor plug, next time I plan a reboot Ill put the monitor back on and see if it does anything

C

I thought I had read for pfSense anyway that PowerD was no longer working with Intel CPUs as SpeedStep took priority, initially I lost all power saving on a pfSense update that came along with a newer version of FreeBSD and had to enable it manually using tunable settings in pfSense, which is doing something like this in the loader.conf, so I had:

Code: [Select]

dev.hwpstate_intel.0.epp=70
dev.hwpstate_intel.1.epp=70
dev.hwpstate_intel.2.epp=70
dev.hwpstate_intel.03.epp=70

With an update to pfSense these settings are now set from the UI which add the same settings.  Not sure how OPNsense has these settings in the UI.

[Chrysalis]

PowerD works.  However I am not sure if it requires speedshift to be disabled, as PowerD utilises software p-states whilst speedshift is hardware p-states.

It seems prior to 2.7.1 pfSense always utilised software p-states only.  But now this has changed if hardware p-states is enabled in the bios.

If the hwpstate module doesnt load (due to no speedshift support on system), then the system will be utilising software p-states and PowerD is the mechanism to control that.

My 2nd N100 is a different seller to the first one I got, so when it arrives I will see if that one utilises speedshift and experiment with those tunables.

Interesting to learn about this change.

[heavyrain]

I'm also looking at getting one of these units for either OPNsense or OpenWRT. Not fully decided yet. My plan is have this connected to the modem/ONT and then connect my Eero system to an ethernet port to provide wifi.

I don't know much about CPU but it seems like getting the N100 would be fine. I definitely want 4 Ethernet ports (may aswell be 2.5 Gbps I guess). 1 for WAN, 1 for Eero and allowing 2 wired connections for PCs. Since it's a really basic network I think going for as little RAM as possible and sotrage would be more than ok. 4 GB and 128 GB? I've managed with super basic OpenWRT on 256MB RAM so that's probably overkill.

Is the only option really aliexpress for this? Is it trustworthy?

[Chrysalis]

You can I assume buy a NUC from somewhere like amazon but it will be more expensive.

Everything I have purchased from ali has arrived in working order, the issue with them is people buying things like fake branded samsung storage that is too good to be true.  But these NUC's are the real deal on hardware.

Ali also has buyer protection.