SON OF THE FORBIDDEN ROUTER! How to Build a Blazing Fast Router on a Budget

hello and welcome to level one we're gonna build an extremely high performance router that's designed for you if you have an internet connection faster than a gigabit so it turns out any potato class anything can handle a one gig internet connection but we are seeing 2.55 and even 10 gig internet connections that are rolling out most of the time you don't want a canned standard router those aren't really entering mass production in such a way is to be able to handle that higher performance high-speed connection if we look at the modems that at T offers things like the uh the Gateway 350-505 it's got a built-in ont and three one gig ethernet ports and one five Giga ethernet port that's kind of trash it sort of craps out when you've got more than you know two or three thousand connections open and wants to do not it wants to do your wireless it wants to do everything else it's not particularly good at any of those things kind of sucks so what are you gonna do well you can build a router that's what we're going to do today I did the Forbidden router which is based on AMD epic if you do that it's going to cost thousands upon thousands of dollars I'm going to show you how to do it a little bit more economically so let's let's Dive In [Music] first the Easy Button solution which is not what I've laid out here it'd be a system like this from Super Micro this is this is sort of their 1u rack short depth storage platform I did a video on this separately this is not Alder Lake but this is a very fast Intel platform this has four SATA Bays it has one x16 expansion slot it has some some on-board mix you can you know super micro has this with up to eight onboard Nicks and you could throw in the you know dual 10 gig adapter this is almost too slow because you really want even more high-speed ethernet devices if we're talking about you know routing and doing uh security filtering and that sort of thing on a 2.5 to 5 to 10 gigabit internet interface in your house but this is an easy button solution you can just go buy this load some software on it maybe maybe not install a Nick and you're good to go I'm going to show you how to build one though and it's probably not going to be cheaper than that but it will be a little bit newer this is the gigabyte mw34 sp0 this is an incredibly cost efficient w680 motherboard w680 is a workstation chipset for Intel Alder Lake that's LGA 1700 and probably soon some other LGA 1700 CPUs this is a ddr4 motherboard so you're going to be able to get inexpensive ddr4 but it also supports unregistered error correcting memory and Alder Lake CPUs the desktop CPUs like the 12 500 support error correction now I'm going to be using not the I3 12 100 this would also be a really good choice I'm going to be using the I5 12 400 why because you can get that the 12 400 at Micro Center for like 110 120 that's six Alder Lake P cores the whole reason that we're doing this is because we really want Alder lake or newer the reason we want Alder lake or newer is because those P cores the performance cores in the Alder Lake architecture are incredibly high performance especially when we're talking about Network tasks a lot of the time when we're talking about a high-speed file server high-speed you know packet routing that sort of thing when we're not talking about specialty Hardware that's that is an application specific integrated circuit we're talking about a general purpose compute you want that single thread performance to be as fast as possible it's going to be minimal latency highest performance highest throughput this is relatively inexpensive you know desktop workstation class Alder Lake motherboard we're going to pair this with the 12 400 which has six Alder Lake pcores if you saw our other Alder Lake platform we're not even going to install a routing platform on this we're gonna install the virtualization platform and then actually deploy our router as a virtual machine which is the forbidden part of the Forbidden router but if you want to do something a little bit more pedestrian with this you totally can meaning that you're going to deploy PF Sense on this or open sense or open wrt or some other distribution of FreeBSD or Linux to actually do your routing and your internet traffic and your filtering we have got a bunch of guides for that kind of stuff on the level one Forum we'll come back to that we'll talk a little bit more about that in a second but I just want to sort of run through your Hardware options here this motherboard has onboard two and a half gig it's only a single onboard two and a half gig Nick it's got onboard audio it has DisplayPort and HDMI out for the igpu but you don't really even need that it has an a-speed 2600 for Remote Management and that's what the other Nick is at the rear i o here and it's also VGA out for that the other thing is our case this is a really really nice incredibly high-end sliger 3u case that I've put in EVGA sfx power supply in it's 550 watt this case will work great with sfx or sfxl power supplies generally I recommend sfx we use the same case for our AMD epic based forbidden router build that we did a while ago we're going to use it again and this is actually the most expensive component because I want something that's nice looking and rackable and this is a very nice looking case it's a very well designed it's very thoughtfully designed they didn't pay me to say that I literally paid for this with my own money but I am hoping that uh I'm gonna get some other variations of this case um soon to show maybe what this would look like if we were going to go for three and a half inch drive storage because this case is a great case for everything unless you want a Home Server that has a whole bunch of three and a half inch drives and they have some other models for that so we're probably gonna pick up one of those because I was trying to do the whole all flash Nas thing but I found my media collection sort of exceeds what I'm willing to pay for all flash storage so here we are you might be thinking our gigabyte platform is pretty Limited in the networking Department there is a version of this that has a high performance onboard SFP you can look around for that maybe that'll be available in your area maybe not but I did a video called you know cheat codes for doing this kind of thing this is one of those cheat codes this m.2 module it's about forty dollars U.S you can pick it up uh at AliExpress you can get it on eBay maybe for a little bit less there's a few resellers here in the in the states maybe something I should carry in the level one tech store but this is an Intel i225v 2.5 gigabit Nick and it can be installed in an m.2 slot and then you have more two and a half gig connectivity this is pretty awesome this motherboard also has eight onboard Sega connections four of which share Lanes with uh your uh in one of your m.2 slots but one of your m.2s is connected directly to the CPU and the other three go through the chipset now they make single and dual two and a half gig and a little bit more rare but you can get a 10 gigabit m.2 as well those are a little harder to find they're a little more expensive the best deal the best thing to do if you're in the home internet scenario is the Intel x550 T2 this is a fabulous 10 gigabit Ethernet card Intel really like this genre of Intel they really shines it's an incredible networking platform the earlier x550 t2s can be a little Troublesome when you want to link up a two and a half and five gig strictly speaking they need a firmware update and Intel doesn't call it a firmware update they call it an NVM update non-volatile memory it seems as though if you install the driver on Windows that it will update the NVM to make two and a half gig work I don't it's a very weird thing that happened when I was setting up for this video I had some of these like basically launch day x550 t2s that I pulled from systems that were originally servers for upgrades and the x550 is the oldest card if you want to get as like a 700 series Intel ethernet Nick that would be even better the problem is that two and a half and five gig a lot of those ISP connections the hardware they provide such as the formation Gateway from ATT will only link up a five they won't link up at 10 and the auto negotiation on these cards because they're so old kind of sucks they want to do one gigabit or 10 gigabit but not 2.5 and not 5 gigabit the NVM update resolves that the other wrinkle the other problem that exists with that is that when you're uh you know Intel and making a bajillion of these HP wants a special version for their servers Dell wants a special version for their servers and so you have to be careful about that on eBay because the NVM update for the Dell version of this card that you would uh you know have has to come from the Dell website which is basically impossible to find because anything older than three years Dell basically writes off and it's almost impossible to find the Intel NVM update for some of the Dell versions of these cards or HP the retail version you can find on Intel's website thankfully and that works really well so you have to run a command line utility either in Linux or FreeBSD or Windows and it'll detect the card it'll apply the apply the NVM update and you're good to go but this is by far the most economical option that will give you the two and a half or five gig link speeds that you might need for your isps equipment when your isps equipment won't necessarily do raw 10 gig sometimes depending on your ISP you may be able to do a direct SFP plus connection or a direct you know fiber optic SFP plus transceiver that is a much better situation it's not you're not required to have ISP Hardware that is by far a better situation that's strangely the case with uh att's one gig stuff but it's not the case with their two and a half and five gig stuff you're required to have their crappy modem because the crappy modem can't really give you the five gigabit service I guess in all scenarios in terms of cooling when you pick up one of those retail CPUs that's going to come with this uh very modest let's say CPU Cooler this is fine you don't need anything more advanced than this this is going to work fabulously in our Sligo 3u case if you don't want to get the case and you want to save you know a few bucks and just throw it in a cheap ATX desktop case you could totally get a 50 cheap ATX desktop case with a really inexpensive power supply and be ready you know this CPU budget 300 watts for an alder Lake CPU for your power supply so definitely don't go under like 350 Watts for your power supply but other Lake's also very power friendly when it's not being heavily loaded so when your router is not super heavy under load you're probably looking at like a 25 30 watt nominal draw assuming that you add the Nick and some other things and and probably no mechanical storage because those are like 10 watts each when they're running now for the software stack my primary recommendations are PF sense and an open sense those are those are based on FreeBSD that work really well on Alder Lake and all this works really well if you opt for the I5 or anything beyond the 12 400 be aware that P core and e-core handling you know you have your P core for performance and your e-core for efficiency I don't think the e-cores really give you anything at this scale even if you're going to run the virtual virtualization software even if you're going to run a bunch of virtual machines six core is overkill I'm going to run a Docker machine and have pie hole and portainer and just go completely nuts with virtual machines six cores is fine because those six P cores are insanely fast for Linux based distros newer versions of the Linux kernel can use those e-cores a little bit better than FreeBSD but again for this application for this scenario I don't think those e-cors really give you anything if you have any anomalous performance or any anomalous Behavior just disable your e-cores one reason that you might move up to some of those higher end processors is because according to Intel Arc you know that I5 is going to support error correcting ddr4 memory but only when you use it with this w680 chipset you couldn't use couldn't take advantage of error correcting memory on a desktop platform do you really need air correcting memory in your router that's a whole other debate I'm about you know I would say that it's a nice to have but it's definitely not a requirement I'm going to have it in mind you know you do you that's a you thing it's totally fine uh there is one other thing I'll mention this is an MSI 10 gigabit adapter there's actually in a quantia chipset and so aquantia is another reasonable 10 gigabit Ethernet interface that also works at two and a half and five gigabit so if you can't get the x550 or the x550 x550 t2 is too expensive you can pick up these and they work pretty well but this is only a single Nick on this pcie card and this is only I think there's a PCI Express two lanes two PC express lanes yeah so it's not really making efficient use of your three physical slots that you have on your motherboard it is worth mentioning that when we're talking about 10 gig and Beyond 10 gig maybe you want to go for 25 gig it's really not super efficient to do that with a CPU it's super inefficient to use your CPU to shuttle those packets around it's worse in terms of latency than other Hardware it's worse in terms of software complexity and a whole other thing because the platforms really haven't super caught up yet but that's also part of the reason why I would recommend using Alder Lake versus an older platform in the past our internet connections were so slow that we could use a garbage to your computer from 10 years ago and have a much better internet routing experience but today with a Fiber Optic internet connection and something that's very low latency you want to service the packets in and out of the machine as fast as possible and with connections that are exceeding one gigabit in speed it's a little bit more difficult to have that super amazing positive user experience on older hardware and Alder lake is brand new you know it's only been out for not even two years and this is sort of what I feel like you need if you are on the upper high end of what's available in terms of internet connections if you're rocking starlink and you're getting you know 100 Meg down and 20 meg up you don't need this something like the 1u super micro is even a really really good experience but for something that that is a little higher end you want to run pie hole you want to run virtual machines you want to run Steam cache that kind of thing this platform is fabulous for that you can everything that I showed you how to do in the Forbidden router video you can also do with this platform way more economically including error correction and everything else anyway that's enough chatter let's get this thing put together there's our I5 12400 installed the cover removes itself consider I3 over there I've got another project in mind for the I3 and that's what we're working with for this build or at least the start of it not bad in case I didn't mention it before one thing I really like about this 3u case is that you get full height cards these are what's called half height cards it's either they're only this tall this is a popular thing in servers but I've got a full height bracket on it and this is a full height case so you can use big peripherals so the Slugger case also has a five and a quarter inch expansion Bay case that wasn't obvious you should check out the separate review that I did but this bracket will also hold you know low profile two and a half inch drives there's some room underneath it you got quite a bit of room in this case for additional internal drives which I am going to take advantage of although maybe not in this particular build if you do see older Nicks like the Intel X540 I mean that does work at 10 gig but you're not going to be able to run two and a half or five gig with the X540 only the x550 in newer ah sorry for all the server room noise not really server room noise I actually brought this out of the server room for testing and kind of a follow-up because sort of the low cost forbidden router all right what's the verdict first I'm blown away six P cores this CPU is around a hundred dollars this blows the doors off of any previous generation Xeon that I've seen I was a real Enthusiast about like the Xeon 1230 and like the V2 V3 V4 with their incremental improvements this is dramatically different this actually puts like the Broadwell like the V2 V3 V4 even xeons to shame this six core I would rather have than a Broadwell V4 dual six core even a dual eight core because it's that monstrous now the gigabyte motherboard is in short supply but it is an incredible motherboard is this would it make sense to do a group buy a level one group buy for this class of Server Motherboard I mean I could do a Kickstarter and we could do that if that's something you're interested sit in I think this or the am5 socket maybe for like the Home Server thing you could go more than six P cores you could go as far as I think the 12 700k I wouldn't do the 12 900k because the e-cores don't really give you a lot in this case I'm using xcpng it doesn't really give you a lot of Awesomeness mixing those p and e chords the kernel being what it is and the scheduler and some other details if you're going to do that I would recommend that you run vanilla Linux vanilla Linux can take better advantage of the mixed P core and e-core situation on those CPUs and it's going to be doubly true with a 13 900k I mean that 24 core monster eight P cores and 16 e chords that should be an incredible home labbing platform on a motherboard like this but the fly in the ointment is the hypervisor support and all of the little detailed minutia that goes into that because I can tell you right now VMware Microsoft those companies they are not putting any work at all and in making sure that everything runs correctly in terms of picking which core what workload goes on you're only going to experience that with the vanilla Linux kernel you've got a shot at something like proxmox and maybe to a lesser extent xcpng working with that but I got to tell you those Engineers aren't really working on that either I've got a thread on the xcpng forums which has gone ignored for a year and a half two years where Turbo doesn't exactly work correctly on AMD CPUs I mean it's not that it doesn't work it just doesn't work as well as it should there's some kind of oversight or some kind of problem in the Zen kernel where it just doesn't turbo as high as it could at least on bare metal at least with a vanilla Linux kernel running something like KVM maybe it's just the way that Zen works and the trade-off really admittedly isn't huge but that kind of a problem is only compounded when you've got mixed p and e chords all of that aside this is an incredible incredible platform we did iperf testing just for Giggles tested this with a five gigabit ISP and it had no problem completely saturating the link actually even past five gigabit the technician from the ISP said he'd never seen anything that fast we also tested this of course with vanilla 10 gigabit Ethernet just using our Arista switch here which is also to an older School old school 10 gig ethernet to our kick butt you know dual Milan X server now of course the Milan X server is going to be better in every single way our original forbidden router is thousands and thousands of dollars of equipment of course it is superior but this little tiny router with its hundred dollar CPU can hold its own not just a 10 gig Maybe to be curious I also went to 25 gig and yes the Plucky little Peak horse can saturate a 25 gig connection with iperf SMB is a different story it can't saturate I can't saturate 25 gig with Samba unless you go multi-channel and it's going to use more than one core and then yeah it absolutely can saturate 25 gig but you're using a lot of CPU when you do that but just raw iperf with the hardware acceleration using a melanox connect X4 I think it was not a problem so that's a very very impressive for this platform if you want something like this to be your router and your Docker host and storage and everything else it absolutely can do it and it looks Lilliputian in our 3u slider case as well so very impressed with this motherboard very impressed with the platform very impressed with Alder Lake P cores sort of wearing two hats in this sort of server role I'm surprised that it works as well as it does a 13th gen if there is something similar to the 12 400 which you know there probably is going to be 13 400 and it has the similar larger cash that's also probably going to help in these server workloads more cash will help you where the e-cores won't necessarily help you but this has been a really interesting look at this platform if you have any questions about this or anything that you want to run test whatever I'm Wendell this is level one I'm signing out you can find me in a level one forums and that's where you can ask your questions and whatever else all right it's a bit loud I'm getting out of here thank you

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 105,995

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: OcLcCfReeOQ

Length: 21min 37sec (1297 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 27 2022