KING of Fanless 2.5GbE Mini PC Routers and Firewalls Now with Intel Core i5 Alder Lake

this fanless six two and a half gig ethernet platform has an Intel Core i5 Alder Lake processor with upgraded graphics and it's actually pretty darn cheap compared to the Alternatives but this is a unit that drove us absolutely mad during testing and that's why the video on it has been a little bit late however when we got it working it's a lot better than we thought it was going to be but but hold on let's back up for a sec hey guys this is Patrick from sth and this is the fanless Alder Lake platform from Chang Wang now I mentioned in the introduction that this thing has a lot of really great Hardware features but on the other hand you're also going to have a couple headaches especially if you don't watch this video and this has something inside that I am super excited about it has an Intel Core i5 1235u and you might ask well Patrick why are you so excited about that well that has only two performance cores with hyper threading so it's two cores four threads but it also has the eight cores that are efficient course so it kind of takes something that are like a fishing course and you get eight of them which is pretty darn good and then you also get get two performance cores that are alternate cores so you get something that is pretty similar to like what you would get in a desktop processor in terms of single thread performance this thing has kind of like The Best of Both Worlds and it's super interesting what we found when we looked at the hardware platform now at sth we've been doing a number of these little mini PCS but we've mostly focused on the efficient core only versions so those are like you know the j6413s or the n5000 or 5105s or something like that and so what I wanted to do was take a look at what you get if you went to a higher level unit and I just want to say thank you to the sth YouTube members your support allows us to buy these things and give an objective review with that let's get to the hardware foreign just the i o on this the first thing that you'll see on this unit that's a little different from some of the other ones that we've looked at especially if you know this looks like a router or firewall box you're going to see that we have two display outputs we actually have an HDMI port as well as a display port here and this system I will say came with Windows 11 Pro installed so this was actually set up as a desktop when we got it you still have the power button the clear CMOS button and then you have four USB type A ports and one type c Port you're not going to get things like usb4 on this but at the same time you know it's it's a pretty decent Loadout in terms of USB and then you'll also see that we have a TF card slot TF you can think of as micro SD without the licensing on the other side of this unit you'll see that we have a total of six Intel i226v ports now these are two and a half gig ethernet ports and they are the newest spec some folks have had issues with the i226v but we've actually we have a bunch of these things like we have probably somewhere around 100 ports of i226 and we really haven't seen those issues on the like kind of firewall type unit the other big feature is that we have a 12 volt DC input now I want to talk about the chassis real quick you'll see that this one actually has pretty large fins on top and a pretty dense fin configuration so this is definitely a little bit bigger than some of the other you know firewall units that we've reviewed and I know a lot of folks are going to compare this to something like the protectly line but the hardware in these just kind of feels like the protectively is kind of like an older generation but we'll talk a little bit more about that in compatibility and stuff later in this review okay on the bottom of the unit you're going to see just kind of like the standard bottom that we see on a lot of these uh it's one of the newer designs though because we do have the ability to go and put things like a fan in here or something like that one thing I will note though is just because of how this chassis is configured if you do have a fan I think you need to have like a 10 millimeter fan and like the the 80 millimeter or 80 by 80 by 10 millimeters fans are actually pretty hard to find or at least find good ones on so I'm just gonna warn folks that you know if you do want to put a fan in here your options are going to be a little bit limited I just kind of feel like especially if you're going to try doing a very high performance system in one of these uh you'll probably end up wanting a fan okay now looking inside the system you're going to see that we've changed this configuration a little bit with the original SSD uh was one of these which is a half terabyte unit from a brand that we've seen in some of the other like top 10 units King Nova units all that kind of stuff we haven't really seen from like it's not like a major US brand this came installed with Windows 11 Pro which was uh kind of cool we've just kind of saved the SSD just for that so if you did want to have a Windows desktop with six two and a half gig using reports you I guess could do that in this in the system we get two memory slots now if you don't get the high like 64 gig configuration you're most likely only going to get one so dim these are ddr4 3200s dims and you can go add more memory if you want up to 64 gigs in the system we have a wd blue nvme SSD just because we tend to use these because they are not really that fast but they're also very low power and they don't generate a lot of heat so in family systems I like having these kind of like low power ssds and under the m.2 SSD slot we get another slot which could be used for things like Wi-Fi I'm kind of bummed that this didn't come with Wi-Fi but that is is an option that they offer and frankly if I should have gotten it that was a that was an oversight if something you'll see along this side is that we have the Intel Sr KTU Knicks which are the Intel i226 v-nix and something that is a little different is that they actually are lower power because they're you know the new spin versus the i225s and what that means is that they're now on this side and they don't have an interface directly to the chassis for cooling so that is something important and that's also why I do like the idea of having a fan you'll see that we do have a fan header in this so if you do want to put a four pin fan or something like that you can do that easily okay so with that let's get to the performance of this unit now this is one of those processors that I really want to talk about in terms of the performance and we only have one of the different versions and they offer a number of different processors so I'm going to talk about the performance of what we saw but I also want to talk about well what are the other things that you could possibly get as options and why we chose this one specifically okay so first things first the Intel Core i5 1235u is a 15 watt TDP processor now of course we're going to probably be using a little bit more power than that and we'll show you that in the power consumption section next but I also just want to point out that this is a lower power processor than some of the things that we've looked at recently like for example we've looked at like Intel Nooks with the uh like core i7 1360p and stuff like that and those 1360p parts will offer about two extra performance of what you get here it's going to change a little bit based on the Benchmark and all that kind of stuff but just roughly say that this is about half the performance of something like that at the same time if you were to compare this to something like the Pentium n6005 then 5105 or just you know an Intel atom C uh like 50 315 or something like that you know you're going to expect that you will get more than 2x the performance and sometimes you know on the like four core Parts maybe like even up to three extra performance so so performance wise I mean these things are much much better because we have the newer e-course from Alder Lake as well as the two performance cores so that combination I think is just really good and just real quick if we were to compare this unit versus the protectively VP 4630 just because this is still using a 10th gen core I3 you know you're gonna see more than two extra performance on the newer part and if you did have like a core i5 version of this you're probably still in that ballpark where you're getting like more than 50 more performance so I think the big thing is that the newer Alder Lake platforms are just much higher performance than the 10th gen because it's you know two generations and a big generational change newer the other big thing I want to talk about in terms of performance though is the different options so the different options you can get a Pentium gold 8505 which is uh five cores six threads see if like one one p core and then there's also a core i5 1215u which is six cores eight threads that one was actually really interesting but the reason that I didn't get that one is the pricing wasn't that that different and you also when you upgrade to the Core i5 you get the Intel uh Iris XE Graphics the other one that didn't give me pause though is there is a core i7 1265u and that one was really interesting because it has the same you know like 10 cores 12 thread so it's a very similar core configuration but the frequency is much higher but that core i7 costs a considerable amount more and also just when these things are like thermal and power limited you tend not to get a lot more performance if you're just getting a couple hundred extra megahertz because you tend to get down clock anyway so to me I don't think that that core i7 one was going to be worth it and that's why we chose the core i5 it kind of had all the features but we're not paying that extra premium for the core i7 but overall either using it as a virtualization platform a network router platform or using as a Windows desktop the Windows desktop experiences much better than something like you know the n6005 or something like that because you do have those P cores so you have things that are single thread performance like in the ballpark of like a desktop processor so that I thought was super cool next let's get to power consumption we're not going to do noise because uh well there's there's no sound in the system okay so let's talk really quickly about the power consumption there's really no noise but I want to talk a little about the Heat and just kind of what we observed right so the first thing is that we got a Delta power supply with this which I was super surprised usually you get some kind of very inexpensive power supply now this unit is I can see a little light right there this is actually turned on and I just want to show you the idle power consumption before we get too far uh you know you're gonna see right now that wrote about that you know 12 13 14 watt range it does depend on the type of power supply so some of these units come with much worse power supplies and you'll see a lot higher power consumption because of that we're in proxbox right now so OS can make a difference and also just things like what P States and stuff like that you know you tune you can do different things with this platform but we're just kind of doing the stock configuration here and I will just say at idle uh it's warm to the touch but it's not crazy hot and just kind of looking at the temps right now uh these things are at about 33 34C Max so at idle not too bad at all and also just want to know that when we're doing this because we don't have Wi-Fi we are connected via one of the two and a half gig links and it is linked up at two and a half gigs okay so let's go start running a workload on this and just kind of show you what happens and you're gonna see power consumption right now is like 70s like 76 70 something like that watch so I mean it's actually pretty decent power consumption however what you also see is that this system as you know we've got a default is configured to clock down pretty quickly so you get that like really quick Spike up to like that mid 70s range and now we're down into about 30 Watts or so I will say that the chassis is pretty hot it's uh I can put my hand on it you can see it's still you know running at that 30-ish watt range um but but I wouldn't want to leave it there for a long time um it's just not super comfortable but it's not too too bad I do think though if you did want to go and play with some of the higher performance levels that's really where I would start looking at things like getting a unit with a fan some of these systems come with it some of them don't so that would be something to ask the seller if you you know care about that and also just the power supply um you know there's a big variance depending on which vendor you purchase from now let's talk about os's here for a little bit because that was one of the most painful things by far and if you do go and buy something like this I'm going to tell you to go look at the sth forms the sth forms have great resources for this and one of the reasons that we just did this is we had a user ask about this unit because they were having troubles and we have such good resources that I thought I want to go bring that out in a video so let's talk about some of the funky things in this first off um like like Hardware P states are not enabled by default there is someone that has hacked the bio so you can go and you know get a version of BIOS with the p-states because a lot of people like that there are also various power tuning options and all kinds of stuff that you can get in there their instructions about that all in the form thread the other challenge though was really operating systems Windows was installed by default so we had Windows 11 Pro and that was easy to use the next one though is OPN sense opnsense works out of the box and it was pretty darn easy to get that working because you just fire it up PF sense we're still waiting for the version that supports the Intel ig26 as the time that recording this video that means that you'd have to either use pfSense Plus or a development version to be able to utilize this as a pfSense router but I think that just using this as a router for a lot of people this is going to be way Overkill especially with the p cores and having all those e-cores I I just think that this is too much for that and so what I think a lot of people are going to do is they're going to install something like Ubuntu or maybe they're going to install something like proxmox and go run a virtualization notes which I think is a pretty good use case for this however when when you do that um Brian was installing this and he was like Hey like nothing's installing like why doesn't this work like if the installers just shut down so it turns out that both the Ubuntu 2204 the like current versions of that as well as proxbox we tested up to I think 7.4 they all have issues with a like kernel driver and this box proximox is super interesting though what you do is you actually install proximox ve 7.1 you then go and install the new kernel so you can opt into a new kernel for proximox and then you can upgrade to 7.4 and everything works perfectly fine after that if you didn't watch this video and you have seen that form thread you're probably cursing at this box but now that I've told you to go look for it you'll make it you know you'll fix this in five ten minutes to me though I don't love the fact that you have to go do all that extra work something that's nice on the protective box is that everything just kind of works out of the box you may be using older NYX an older processor and get way less performance and be paying more but at least the protectively box works easily but I do think that it's worth talking about the pricing on these and what's the difference so configured with 16 gigabytes of memory and a half terabyte nvme SSD I think this box is around 575 dollars coupons change that a little bit discounts and all that kind of stuff but call about 575 dollars and it will just note that that also included windows 11. The Bare Bones on the system though is you know called about 465 dollars plus or minus a couple based on discounts they save about 160 170 going down to the Pentium gold 8505 but that's a a big change on both the CPU and GPU side you can also get the core I3 version that's about 95 less based on the day again going down on course and as well as GPU but going to the core i7 where you get that extra like 400 megahertz but then you also get the you know same Iris Graphics you get the same core config as the core i5 that's like another 160 so like I just couldn't justify that because I just you're just never gonna get that performance or that much extra performance to justify that Delta in price I do think though that it would be wise to just get the Bare Bones unit and then just install your own SS SD and RAM because that would probably be way less expensive so I think the summary in terms of pricing is that if you get this protect the unit um you know it's something like 679 dollars so it's it's roughly you know 300 Bare Bones more than the Chang Wang unit they're both uh you know made in China if you look at the bottom of them they don't have things like UL markings or FCC markings or anything like that so either one you know I think is about the same on that I will say though that because of the older Hardware the protectively one in fact you can get the core Boot and stuff like that if you care um you know the protective one I think is much easier but on the other hand you're paying 300 on a 465 470 box for that ease and things like installing proxmox once you do it once it's 5-10 minutes and so you know if if 10 minutes of your time is worth more than 300 then um you know I totally think that protectively makes a lot of sense or if you just don't want to deal with it but if you want a better performance at a lower cost and you're willing to eat the 5-10 minutes to get proximox working uh frankly I'll get the Chiang Wang unit any day hey guys I hope you like this look of this really cool six two and a half gig ethernet Alder Lake Bots I just think this is really cool and it's something that's a different platform it has those P cores so it has a different performance profile than a lot of the other fanless units that we've been using I know we got a lot of requests for this one especially after we did the AMD ryzen one that was not fanless and so I wanted to make sure that we covered this off personally I went from hating this because Brian couldn't set it up to actually kind of liking it once we got the all the workarounds got the new bios all that kind of stuff going and so definitely if you do buy this thing or you want to buy this thing the first thing I would tell you to do is go look at the form thread we have a link in the description that has all of the information that you could possibly want to know about tweaking and tuning these things and hey if you did like this video why don't you give it a like click subscribe and turn on this notifications so you can see whenever we come out with great new videos as always thanks for watching have an awesome day

Channel: ServeTheHome

Views: 80,954

Keywords: servethehome, serve the home, intel, protectli, fanless, intel core i5, core i5, core i5-1235u, 2.5gbe, 2.5gbe router, 2.5gbe firewall, proxmox, vmware, ubuntu, windows, windows 11 pro, ddr4, ssd, nvme, aliexpress, wifi, intel i226, intel i226-v, proxmox ve, fanless pc, fanless mini pc, virtualization, opnsense, pfsense, homelab, firewall, router, intel nuc, home server, esxi 8, fanless pfsense, windows 11, intel n6005, fanless virtualization, fanless firewall, fanless router, fanless homelab

Id: 6rtRwKlJTgU

Length: 15min 50sec (950 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 24 2023