New CPU, New Dream 2.5GbE Router/ Firewall?

hey guys this is Patrick from sth and this tiny little system has six two and a half gig ethernet ports and it has a low power processor now if you've been following the sth YouTube channel you've probably seen us do a number of these small AliExpress units this is the brand new Elkhart Lake unit and that I think has a lot of people excited this is a new you know J series Celeron it's um you know a new new processor so is this any good and that's a question that um you know I think I have some interesting answers to especially when we get to a platform level this is definitely completely different than I thought the system was going to be when we actually ordered it and when it arrived and um you know I I think that we have a lot to unpack on this one and so I'm very excited to kind of show you this we're also going to have a different recommendation than we've had on some of the recent ones in terms of turning this into either a bare metal PF sense or OPN sense openwrt type of router firewall device or using this as something that's more of a like virtualized device with something like proxmox and real quick this unit is being sponsored by the sth YouTube members so if you want to support us with going out not an AliExpress and buying more of these units so you can actually see what they look like before you order or you know if you're just wondering what do these things even look like well you can go down below and you'll see that there's a join feature and you can use that join feature to help us kind of get a little Revenue so we can go buy these things with that the basic game plan is that we're going to look at the hardware then we're going to talk about the performance we're going to show you the power consumption this is a fanless unit so there's not really any noise but then I also want to talk about my key Lessons Learned and who I think this is for versus some of the other systems that we've looked at with that let's get to the hardware foreign so the first thing I want to get to is the front of this unit now you might be thinking that hey Patrick why would you even want to look at the front of this unit aren't they all basically the same and this one has some different features that we have not seen before and also some that we have you'll see that we have four USB ports we have two USB two and two USB 3 ports again if you're gonna use something like a tiny pilot and do remote media mounting you definitely want to be using the USB 3 ports because most likely you'll experience some issues if you try using USB 2 ports for that however if you just go hook up a keyboard mouse those are the USB 2 ports another pretty standard feature on these is we get the HDMI port some of the older units actually had VGA ports but I like the fact that the newer ones have HDMI ports I know people are going to have wildly different views on what they would like to see in terms of video output but I think that most people these days have access to like an HDMI TV and so this I feel like is pretty darn easy to be able to go and just hook up to something pretty easily so I do like the fact that these are HDMI now and because there is an integrated GPU in this you could actually run a 4K a display off of this little firewall although I don't really know if that's something you'd really want to do one of the newer features is that this has a Serial console Port older units didn't have a console and a lot of people when they run firewalls they don't like to have out-of-band management because that's another attack surface or security surface so instead just having something easy like a Serial console Port is what we tend to allow the networking folks really like and so this newer generation has that which I like in this but then things get a little bit more interesting because there's a reset button that you pretty much need like a paper clip or something to go and hit but that's not the weirdest thing by far so let me just kind of point you to the power button right and so if you look at the power button which is right here hopefully we'll have some b-roll on this but the power button is upside down and so I just kind of think that that's funny and that's just how it was installed when it got to us but that's not the only power button that you see on here because there's also an on off button on this side but it's not really an on off button they instead decided to have like a dip switch type of of setup that's recessed so it's an absolute pain to get to I I don't really know why you would you would want something like this um but there that is there we haven't really used it okay now moving to the other side of the chassis this is where we get the really exciting part right we get the six two and a half gig ethernet ports these are Intel i226v ports which means that they're the newer generation so we've seen these before with the i-225vs this is kind of the update with which is the i-226 the big thing here though is that you do not get the same compatibility between the i225 and i226 they are different like Nicks and drivers and stuff so there are os's that we'll talk about later that uh don't work out of the box with these but they do work out of the box with the older i225 versions just something to keep in mind right now that of course goes away over time but I would assume that if you're buying a 200 something dollar box you probably want to use it right away and not uh not care about this kind of stuff the next thing I want to talk about is just the chassis so this is the larger chassis even though this is a relatively low power CPU this is probably the larger chassis format that we've seen on these units which I really like um you know I I know folks do like the smaller ones just because they're smaller and lighter but these things tend to cool a little bit better just giving you some idea at idle the thing the soc on here will run at something like 39.40 so it's definitely not too bad at all and I think that the larger chassis has a lot to do with that now I will note that some folks have gotten these units especially previous gens where they've seen things where like for example there's no thermal interface material between the CPU and the chassis so the CPU just kind of heats up Non-Stop and so we have a big form thread on that we'll link that in the description so you can go check it out but uh you know if that's the case you could usually go in and do a little modification and make these things work pretty well this one actually had pretty good thermal interface so we got pretty cool temps with the big case and the low power processor so I did like that a lot moving to the bottom of the unit we do see the newer design and so with the older systems we you'd have is a lot more kind of flat and solid bottom the newer systems have more perforations and they have things like space for a 40 millimeter fan so if you did want to put a fan in here you could go do that the other feature though that you can put onto the bottom of this is you can actually put a two and a half inch SSD I would advise against that because that covers up a lot of these holes and really restricts the airflow while it's also adding that heat source so in these types of just fanless systems the general rule of thumb that you want to think about is how do I minimize the heat that I'm generating and maximize the ability to dissipate that heat and so adding a two and a half inch hard drive you can mount it to this bottom but at the same time it defeats the purpose of a fanless system like this okay so getting in the system is uh super easy and you basically have four four screws and then once you have those four screws done the bottom just kind of Pops off and you kind of see those perforations hopefully a little bit better and then inside the system we get something that is actually quite different from what we've seen in some of the previous generations I'm going to go over some of those changes as well and so you know the first thing that is you know immediately should strike out to you is that there are two so dim slots and so you can put you know up to two Esso dims a lot of these units when you purchase them pre-configured with memory and storage will only come with one dim that helps reduce cost but also reduce power consumption and that's typically why you see only one dim we ordered this unit with both memory and storage just because well number one we have the sdh YouTube memberships which is helping to pay for this but also I just kind of want to show you folks like what you get with these in this unit you get a vaseki or something v-a-s-e-k-y memory and SSD so you don't necessarily get the name brands that you would get in if you were to go build something and buy like these components on Amazon the other thing though that is kind of interesting with this is really the storage and expansion now in a lot of the units that we've been seeing recently you'll see things like you'll see a lot of m.2 and m.2 has become a lot more popular we saw some like MP cie and stuff like that back in earlier in 2022 but then as the year moved on and we went through generation and generation of these things we started to see a big migration towards the m.2 form factors this is kind of a regression in that way because we have an msata SSD here which is uh is not as cool underneath that I think we have another mpcie slot and then you'll see that there is a little card for a SIM card slot apparently you can order modems on this uh we never do because um I've heard that they're not great but in theory you could do that but that also means that we don't have an nvme SSD in this this is an old-fashioned SATA SSD which is totally weird again this is a vaseki SSD and in our unit we got 16 gigabytes of memory as well as a 256 gig SSD which is absolutely plenty for most of these things I think for a lot of folks if you're just gonna run firewall a lot of folks will be fine with like eight gigs and 128 gigs absolutely no problem I just wanted to kind of show you this and actually try out some of the virtualization stuff some other quick notes on the inside of the system are that at the bottom you'll see that we have the little SATA so if you want to go put that side SSD and a two and a half inches you can do that and there's also the header for the cable that you can put in here and the other thing that I just want to point out is that if you do want to go put a little fan this particular motherboard we don't see a three pin or four pin just kind of like standard pwm fan header or something like that so um you're gonna have to go and find some of the other headers get some power off of that and use that for the fan so I just kind of it's just kind of a bummer that you're losing those features as well now something that this unit does take that is a newer Trend in these units is that a lot of the older units we would actually see the two and a half gig nics on this side so the same side as the storage as well as the memory and what that did was it would add you know call it like a watt Watt and a half somewhere in there of power per Nic which is somewhere in the you know four to six depending on how many ports you have this one has six so you know you're probably talking somewhere getting kind of close to maybe you know 9 10 watts worth of power and you'd have that heat dissipation on this side which would heat up the memory and the storage and then um you know that's when bad things can happen in terms of overheating and so it's something that we've seen these units migrate to is putting the Knicks on the other side of the motherboard and so the actual little chips you can see that the bottom side of them here but on the actual actual PCB they are over there and the other thing that you'll see that we've started to see a lot more of is that this unit has little blocks it looks like a little aluminum block or something and some pads and you'll see that that is how they're doing the thermal transfer between the Nyx to the chassis to kind of make sure that those stay cool these Intel i226 snakes are definitely not the hottest Nicks out there by any means but at the same time it is nice that because there's six of them that there is some thought done to cooling something I did notice is that the pads were there they worked but they were a little bit sloppy in terms of how they were you know put into our system and so I just think that this is a theme where every once in a while you see these little quality burps from the manufacturers in China the good news is though that the CPU itself did have a nice interface between the CPU and the chassis using a little copper block that means that we are getting a cool CPU in the system which is absolutely nice to see with that let's talk a little bit about the performance of this unit so the performance of this this is using the Intel Celeron J 6413 and a fun little story here is that we actually purchased not just the j6413 but we also purchased the j6412 and the idea was hey you know these are both options let's go test both of them and see which one is better now after ordering both units we waited for a while and they never showed up and they ended up shipping them and then a day or two later they responded and said hey sorry that these things were late but we're going to upgrade your j6412 to a 6413 and so we ended up getting two units that were exactly the same so that was not not overly helpful for being honest but it was a nice gesture I understand why they did it and my theory going into it was that the the 12 model would just not be that much slower than the 13 although we don't actually have that to test well we do have to test though is this this versus a lot of the other options in the market because the dominant architecture dominant CPU in this space right now is the Intel Celeron n5105 now there's a 6005 which is also very good and we just looked at a really cool r86s system that I think is awesome and that uses the n6005 in that one there is also a n5095 but I think that that is definitely just not really worth taking uh taking a little bit lower performance and having that extra power consumption I just don't think that's a good trade-off especially just to save a couple dollars but then the question was how does the j6413 compared to that n5105 and the answer is that realistically they are very very close in the majority of workloads we saw we actually got a little bit better results with the n5105 and there are other things if you look at ARC and you kind of just scroll down you'll see a couple other things where the n5105 is probably a higher end chip but at the same time just kind of raw CPU performance they are pretty darn close I think the n6005 is a nice little speed step above this and it is also considerably faster than the previous generation that we saw which was the j4125 or 4215 but the j6413 is also a lot faster and you'll see a lot of benchmarks that the vendors are showing they're saying it's a lot faster than the previous gen which was the j4125 and that was actually one of the first systems that we looked at in this little AliExpress Mini PC series and this is definitely a lot faster than the previous gen so gen on gen this one is definitely faster but I wouldn't necessarily get the j6413 over an n5105 my top pick is still the n5105 okay so let's talk a little bit about power consumption I brought the power meter here so we can see what the power consumption is but uh you know first thing is just the fact that this one came with the newer light on power supply the light on power supply we found is more efficient than the older replacement AC adapters that these used to come from this is definitely a step up in that direction okay and then what we're going to do is we're gonna plug this in real quick I just want to kind of show you what the power consumption is of this unit um and so you're gonna see that this is starting up now we have the little starting boot you can hear that there's no noise okay so this is now booted into the OS and you see that with this configuration we're hovering just below 12 Watts which is not too too bad it's definitely not the best we've seen but also not bad um I'm gonna go plug a ethernet cable in just to kind of show you what the power consumption impact is of a two and a half gig network connection and what you'll see is that it incrementally added another about half water so and sometimes if you have a really really like crazy long cable that can go up a bit as well just telling you and then the other side to it is that you can also put up to and connect up to six of these ports and so just kind of think about another you know maybe what to maybe half a watt per Port times six okay so now what we're doing is we have one Nick connected and then I'm just running geekbench just to kind of show you so you're gonna see that we should get up to about like you know 14 15 watts so we add in the single threaded performance side we're gonna add uh you know something somewhere around maybe a two to three watt bump okay now we're in the part of the benchmarks where we're starting to get into those multi-threaded workloads and here we're getting in the 20 to 21 watt range using all four cores so I think the right way to think of the power consumption of this is probably at the low end you're probably talking 11 12 Watts at the higher end you're probably talking 20 to 22 Watts foreign okay so let's talk a little bit about the operating system situation so this unit because we got it configured with the memory as well as the storage this came with opnsense 22.7 that was pre-installed that's important a lot of these units will come with either OPN sense or pfSense pfSense it used to be the dominant one that we would see although we did recently see a system that r86s with open wrt with it but now we're seeing OPN sense because that has support for the Intel i226 NYX out of the box pfSense 2.6 does not out of the box it will have it in 2.7 it is just kind of waiting for that to actually release as we're recording this video hopefully it doesn't come out between now and then because uh then people will be like what the heck but the key thing here is if you're going to run it as a firewall or router you have options between openwrt opnsense or PF sense we also did a Ubuntu desktop 22.04 installation that worked of course no problem but the bigger one I think was really the proximox ve installation we used proximoxbe 7.3 and this unit installed no problem and we could run virtual machines and all that kind of stuff there were a couple things though that I think are important with this that you should think about and one of the big ones is I did not see a setting in the bios for Sri OV and I also was not able to get the Nyx passed through properly on this so if you're doing something you want something like a Nick Pastor I wasn't able to do that on the j6413 and so that was a little bit of a bummer especially if you're going to be using the extra CPU performance you have for doing something like you know having a virtual virtualized host and then running your firewall and router package in a virtual manner with like physical Nicks like that's one of the really good things that you can do with this is like or some of the other units is you could say like okay I'm going to use two Nicks or three Nicks for my PF sense or OPN sense and the rest I'm going to use for proxbox and VMS and usually have enough power that that's no problem so although this did work with proximox ve personally I would go get the n5105 box and use that with proximox if I really wanted a virtualized firewall router I think that this one is probably better as a bare metal one now the good news of course on the bare metal PF sense and OPN sense open wrt side is that we have absolutely no problem taking like pairs of these and saying like you know Lan Wan land Wan and then going and running just traffic through them this actually has enough performance that running two and a half gigs per second uh through through pairs like that is no problem what you will see is that you definitely can run some firewall rules but if you start doing things like deep packet inspection and stuff like that on here and you really kind of get into the bigger security aspects and bigger security features of those packages that's where the CPU performance is just um is just not enough and frankly that kind of makes sense right like on a 200 something dollar box you maybe you can do some things but you can't do everything we have looked at these where you have the core i7s and those uh those clearly have enough performance also the ryzens um you know the ryzen box that we looked at that has enough performance to do pretty much whatever you want but on these I think that these are kind of more because they basically not set up or a basic firewall setup now in terms of cost these seats have actually fallen in price by a pretty decent amount since we purchased them but they're now about 214 215 dollars or so when you compare that to the n5105 from the same vendor a pretty similar setup with six nics what you'll see is that that tends to carry a eight to ten dollar premium I mentioned earlier that we ordered the J 6412 as well now that one tends to have a eight to ten dollar discount compared to the 13. um I I I personally think that if you're going for absolutely lowest dollar I just think that that makes sense but I tend to say just I would get the the 13th okay so with all of these we have key Lessons Learned and uh I would say we definitely learned a couple things with this box now the first thing I really like the fact that you get these six Intel igt6 nics that gives you six two and a half gig ethernet ports that is plenty for a lot of folks and I think that is a great configuration price wise in that you know 220 225 range I think that's about right for something like this but still I do look back at the n5105 ones that we have and you know we see things like we have vtd as an option if you don't have here we see like SRI V is an option on a lot of those and we don't see that here I just personally feel like I would prefer to have the n5105 even if it would cost a couple dollars more if it was about the same price which they are so I don't necessarily think that I feel like I got upgraded with the new Elkhart Lake processors versus the older ones although they came out basically at the same time so when it comes to my key Lessons Learned I think that there are pretty much two of them the first one I think is that the n5105 units because they're starting to use things like m.2 or more m.2 they have processor that has some interesting features as well as just the just four cores I I personally think that that is the better option in general at the same time though I have to say that this unit has worked flawlessly even we've been running proxmox on it and you know not being able to pass through the mix but just kind of using using virtualization and and still even with that this unit has been Rock Solid for us I think that the build quality on this unit is much better than some of the ones that we saw earlier this year and so overall I would say this is um is definitely one that I'm pretty happy with it's just I think that the n5105 is probably better I also think though that if you were to purchase this unit and you just wanted a barometer firewall and you're just like hey I'm going to get it pre-configured I'm not going to touch anything I'm just gonna hey maybe you want the OPN Sims already installed I don't know but if that were the case and you're just like the easiest person easiest buyer in the world I think you'd be really happy with this unit right this is definitely a nice unit it's just I think that having reviewed so many of them we have just that little bit of context to kind of talk about what's a little bit better in some of these versus other hey guys I hope you like this look at this little tiny six two and a half gig ethernet box this is definitely a really cool one and it's one that we've gotten a lot of requests for to look at the j6413 and now that we've done it I can say well we've done it I don't necessarily know if I love it but we have looked at it and hey if you did like this video well if you could give this video a like click subscribe and turn on those notifications so you can see whenever we come out with great new videos that'd be awesome thanks so much and have an awesome day

Channel: ServeTheHome

Views: 101,788

Keywords: servethehome, serve the home, intel, intel n5105, wifi, router, firewall, openwrt, pfsense, opnsense, proxmox ve, proxmox, esxi 8, intel celeron, intel j6413, j6413, intel celeron j6413, intel j6413 vs n5105, virtualization, fanless, quiet, low power

Id: axL5M6nVyEo

Length: 22min 1sec (1321 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 03 2023