THIS 25GbE Server and Firewall Has it All

25 gig ethernet an 8 core processor 32 gigs of memory multiple nvme drives 2 and a half gig ethernet 1 gig all kinds of stuff in this little oneu chassis and there are slots for a 4G LTE or 5G module and a Wi-Fi module this system has something for almost everyone so let's get to it hey guys this is Patrick from s and this is the brand new 25 GB ethernet go in oneu rack server now we reviewed both the r 86s and the r86 s pro versions and in both of those one of the biggest pieces of feedback we saw in comments was simply we wish that there was a rack mount unit and David from Goen has made that possible and sitting in front of me today is not just one unit you'll see that we actually have two units and there's a good reason for that now through an email exchange I was given some feedback on the original spec for the 25 gig solution and one of the things I said was like Hey you know it is great the fact that you have this system and there's all these fans and all that kind of stuff in it and it stays cool fine but I think that folks are going to want a quieter fanless unit and so what I told David was I said hey look I will go buy your just kind of Base vanilla version but then he said cool but I'm going to show you the new fanless version and I'm going to send that to you as well in your order and I said okay cool let's go do this and so one of the really cool things is we were able to test both of these at the same time and I think that this is a pretty cool version this new kind of fanless or giant heat sink version but we're going to talk about why um there there are definitely some things about it that are definitely different and we're going to show that in our review also I just want to say thank you to all of the St YouTube members who have joined down below and are really supporting us doing things like even just getting SFP modules or sfp28 modules in this case to go plug in and try out and if you can support us it would be super awesome because we've been buying a lot of stuff to really level up the testing and what we're showing you in all of these reviews with that well let's get to the hardware okay so let's talk about the system and specifically let's talk about the front of the system now you're going to notice really quickly that we do have a clear case here because the go in folks said hey uh would that help you in doing this and like putting this on camera and I said yes and so they made this little thing there normally this is a metal case but um and we have that as well but just for showing it off I'm going to leave this clear plastic cover on now let's talk about the chassis the chassis is a custom Goin one so you're going to see their logo this chassis actually has pretty thick metal it's a lot thicker actually than a lot of the oneu servers that we see from many vendors out there so I actually kind of like the quality of this chassis now next to this go in logo you're going to see the power button next to that we get a comp Port because a lot of firewalls are managed via a comp Port now next to that we get an HDMI port this HDMI port can power a 4K display and we're going to show you that in our power and cooling section below that you're going to see that we have a TF card slot now the TF card slot is basically a Micro SD card slot without the licensing involved now one of the reasons that a lot of folks might want to put a Micro SD card in here is just because you know you may want to put like an embedded Os or something like that on that this actually has 128 GB of emmc memory so there is an onboard option if you're running something like an open wrt or something like that you can install that on the onboard EMC and use that as your storage I would probably make sure I had something else to go do my logging but at least for your OS image you could do that on there now you're going to see next that we have Network ports but what we really want to get to is the USB ports just one quick note is that whenever we had a usb3 drive installed here and we also were trying to use like a USB 2 like dongle for our like wireless keyboard and mouse it was just constantly that we're running into issues with interference so my one tip on this system particularly is that if you do have like a wireless keyboard and mouse I would go get one of those little like extension cables cuz that will help you and make your life so much better managing the system okay so let's get to the networking and on a lot of systems you'll see we have 2 and2 gig ethernet other systems we have 1 gig ethernet this system has both and multiple ports of both because we get a total of two Intel I 226v 2 and2 gig ethernet ports and we get a total of three Intel i210 at ports and that Intel i210 at we saw in like probably 100 plus servers that we reviewed so even if your OS doesn't support the Intel I 226v out of the box and you can get drivers for it or something like that if you have a network connection well this Intel i210 these uh these three ports are definitely going to get you there one of the ports however has Poe and that's something that just to me feels a little bit like that might be the feature that if I could pick a feature out of this that I would discard I think that might be it but all of that is super low speed networking cuz what we're really here for is the 25 gig ethernet these two ports over here are sfp28 ports they're labeled as SFP ports but they're sfp28 and that allows us to have 25 gig ethernet now the card that they're on is a melanox connectx 4 LX which is also a Nvidia now connect X4 LX now that we've looked at the front of the system let's turn it around so I can show you what's around back okay so taking a look at the back of the system uh there's a couple features that are just going to be obvious to you so the first thing is that we do get an internal power supply and it's a pretty nice power supply it's an fsp 150 wat power supply which is frankly way too much for the system um and so it's just kind of nice that we get a nice power supply but I'm going to show you one of the things I don't like about it a little bit later the other feature that you're going to notice is that we have two fans in this model we do have the other unit that will show you that does not have these fans which should make people very excited because it makes me excited there's also a VGA connector on the back of the system now the other big feature here is that we get five of these little antenna mounting points and that's because there are multiple Wireless options in the system and before we get inside the system I want to show you the fanless unit to just show you some of the things that are a little bit different okay so on the fanless unit the first thing you're going to notice is that we have this kind of like heat sink thing here uh which is sticking out from the chassis which is kind of a different design frankly but it also means just being very practical again that you you don't want to like put this underneath something else so like if you have be stacked this one would be on top and then we would not want anything on top of it because you need to get some air flow over these fins on the heat sink to actually have Cooling in this now the front is exactly the same but the back is a little bit different the first thing you're going to notice is that we don't have the fans in the middle of the back of this chassis because those chassis fans are gone the other thing you're going to notice is that over here there's a little bit more venting next to the power supply than we got on the fand unit but with that let's get into side and see how these things are made okay so taking a look inside this unit there is a lot going on guys the first thing uh since we're going to just talk about is that on both of these units we have a set of antenna leads that go to that back antenna array so if you do get things like a Wi-Fi card or an LTE or 5G modem then well you know you can go and connect those to the antenna leads in the back of the system on the other side we have our power supply and this is the same same power supply between the two units and the reason that's important is because you're going to see this little feature right here which is a fan in the power supply even though we say that the other unit is a fanless model it's actually not a fanless model because there's a power supply fan and I'm going to let you hear that in our power consumption and noise section but with the standard system that has I guess more fans you get two chassis fans at the back and these are actually pretty quiet so I wouldn't necessarily say that this would be the first thing I would want to go like do a noctua swap on or something like that I wouldn't spend the money i' would probably you know use these see how you think they are and then maybe make a change in the future if you really really want to but frankly the power supply fan is the loudest one by far now on this side you're going to see that we have the fsp power supply which is a nice power supply but we have a lot of extra cables because of that it has a 24 pin ATX connector which connects to our motherboard which is here and then we have this which is a little riser for an ocp Nick 2.0 connectx 4lx card and then at the very end over here we have room for 2 and 1/2 in storage now this 2 and 1 12 in storage is common between the two models and the way that it works is that you get a little SATA data and power connector you connect them to the motherboard and then that's how you get data and power over to two drives but that's far from the only storage option because we already mentioned that there's 128 gigs of emmc memory on board and you're going to see that we have two m.2 slots specifically for nvme ssds now of course you're not going to get like full PCI gen 3x4 performance on these because well you just don't have enough pcie Lanes in this platform but on the other hand it is nice to just be able to use inexpensive drives in a system like this and nvme m.2 drives are so plentiful these days guys that I think that that's just kind of the option that people use for boot drives these days or alternatively if you're using the emmc memory for a boot drive you may want to have a m.2 nvme drive for your logging and all of your like application like when you need to actually write data uh you don't want to really write it to emmc so an m.2 MVM SSD is usually a better option but underneath those m.2 slots you're going to see that there's another m.2 slap for a Wi-Fi card so if you do want to put Wi-Fi in this system what you do is you plug it in here and then you go get one of the antenna leads and then you use that antenna lead to go and put a antenna on the back one other fun feature that you might see is that we have two pwm four pin power connectors for the fans and underneath those we actually have a power button because I think this motherboard was designed for like a big bigger chassis or something like that and so uh you actually have a power button inside the system because it was I guess designed for multiple use cases now just down here you can see that we have another m.2 slot and that is really for a 5G or 4G LTE modem you also see that there's a little SIM card slot underneath that so if you do want to do it we didn't get to but if you do want to try it out that would be something that you know at least is there now the connectx 4 LX card is an option there are 10 gig options as well but what they're doing here is they have a o CP Nick 2.0 which is an older form factor but they're repurposing the cards onto this little form factor just like they do in the r86 S pro there's a little ribbon cable that provides the pcie lanes to an adapter board that adapter board has the connect X4 LX on it and there is a custom cooling solution so there's a heat sink on there with its own little fan and that's how they are cooling the 25 gig Nick so underneath this big heat sink you can see that we have the Intel core I3 n305 processor that's an 8 core processor Alder Lake end generation and it also has an igpu so it has things like quick sync video if you need video output or if you just want to drive like a 4k monitor you can do that from here you can't do that on a lot of other systems we recently looked at an Intel atom c3758 system that use an aspeed Graphics chip uh or aspeed BMC with a you know using that for graphics and like that can't drive a 4k monitor because you just don't have enough power in that thing now next to the CPU you're going to see that we have a couple of big big chips and one of the big chips that's kind of all by itself that one's the emmc Chip And that's 128 GB of emmc memory but then the other two chips are super interesting this system has a total of 32 GB of LP ddr5 memory that are soldered onto the system so the good news is that you're probably not going to put more than 32 gigs on an n305 anyway uh but if you uh if you did want to swap it out you're pretty much out of luck but it's on there and you don't have to fiddle with it but the flip side to it is if you wanted only 8 GB memory there's really not an option for that there is another model which has 16 GB of memory and an n100 on it so but I think if you're going to get the n305 the high-end a core processor anyway I think that you know I would probably get 32 gbt of memory for my system in that case but those 32 GB are kind of weird because if you look at the chips you're going to see that we have the Micron logo covered up by a black box and I don't really know what that means is that bad might be bad I have no idea okay so getting inside the fanless system um I'm just want to show you guys this real quick so there are a ton of screws here there's a total of 10 screws just on the chassis and then there are an additional six screws around this heat sink you can see this heat sink is pretty big it has heat pipes in it and it's a pretty darn large heat sink especially for like a 15 watt TDP CPU I mean this is uh pretty substantial now the other thing that happens though with this big heat sink is that there are a bunch of thermal pads that are added onto the connectx 4 Nick and that is another cooling method it goes I guess cools through the PCB and to this heat sink which isn't super efficient but it seems to be what they're trying to do here now we did look at the Nick in the fanless is unit and that did not have a little fan so we got the same connect X4 LX and we got the same heat sink but we did not get the fan on this one and then the other big difference inside this unit is the fact that we don't have those two chassis fans but we still do have that fan that's in the power supply so it is not technically a fanless unit with that though let's talk about performance and uh really talk about how fast these things are [Music] okay so let's talk about the performance of the system I want to talk about the CPU performance first the uh Intel core I3 n305 is a new Alder Lake n processor it uses all ecores but just being clear just because this thing uses all ecores doesn't mean that it sucks right like a lot of old ecores frankly sucked pretty bad but in this generation the E cores are roughly equivalent to maybe like a Zeon E5 V4 maybe a Skylake Zeon like somewhere in there level of performance maybe not like ABX 512 or anything like that but like just general integer performance that's about where they are and that makes them pretty darn fast and because the system is so fast something like just running 2 and a half gig Ethernet or 1 gig ethernet as a firewall this thing is way faster than you need for that right I mean this is this is a couple steps up from a a 10 gig firewall in terms of CPU performance with that a core CPU and so what you're going to see is that we just kind of set up a little firewall between you know the we had the like 25 gig Nick in and out and all that kind of stuff and we're able to get not necessarily like 25 gbits per second but we're able to get well over 10 gbits per second now there is also an Intel n100 version which is a pretty good four core option but of course I think that the n305 is really the one that um you know at least to me in this generation feels like it's a huge upgrade over the previous jet one thing you don't have though is you do not have quick assists so if you want to do something like have crypto and compression offload four something like an IPC VPN tunnel or something like that you're just not going to have the quick assist accelerator in this you should be looking for something like denverton or you know Snow Ridge Parker Ridge something like that but the other thing is with all these Nicks and having all ecores because we don't have peores on the CPU it's all eor that means we're homogeneous and that means that it runs just pretty much everything out of the box super easily if you want to run Windows or Ubuntu go for it if you want to run proxmoxve of course and of course because we don't have hybrid cores unlike modern Intel processors that have p and E cores if you're running something like VMware you don't have to deal with doing the ugly workaround to be able to go and get like both sets of cores working right so like overall this processor pretty fast it's not the fastest but it is decent performance and it runs just about everything pretty easily so that's definitely something that I personally like but let's talk about the power consumption for a second because I think that's a big store here okay so let's talk about the power consumption here now we have the fanned unit or fully fanned unit sitting over here and you're going to see that the package power consumption is something around 5 watts and on the power meter that's over here we're going to see that the total system power consumption is really sitting somewhere in that maybe 27 to 30 watt range but the other super important thing is noise this thing is far from a silent system despite the fact that it really isn't using that much power we are seeing noise somewhere in that 44 maybe a little over 44 DBA range in our 30 4 A2 DBA noise floor studio so it is something that just standing this far away I can definitely hear this thing at idle and it's very noticeable and just one other thing that's really important here is that the noise you may think is coming from the CPU heat sink or maybe you think it's from the chassis fans or the 25 gig Nick fan or something like that and that's not really the case instead what we're seeing is that the noise is really coming from the power supply okay so let's stress the CPU and see what happens what you're going to see now that we're have some load on the system is that our package power consumption is no longer 5 Watts instead our package power consumption is now up around that 15 watt range now that means that the overall System is using a lot more power and when we go to our power meter we see that we're going well over 50 Watts now the noise has increased with the extra load and now we're starting to see that noise is somewhere in the 48 to 49 DBA range so it is up a little bit it's not necessarily like you know going crazy like a 70 DBA or 80 DBA uh you know server or anything like that but it also is not very quiet for that we should definitely look at the fanless or single fan unit and let's go plug that in real quick okay so plugging this unit in and uh we'll have a nice little screen saver going over here but plugging this unit in you could probably hear this and I'll let you I'll just move a little closer so you can probably hear it a little better and the big thing here is that this is not a silent unit so if you think of this thing as like a fanless unit you're probably expecting it to be darn quiet but the answer is that it's actually somewhere in that maybe 40 to 42 d VA range in our studio the other thing though is that this system has to sit on the top of a rack because if you cover up the vent that's on top of this hopefully we're going to not break stuff and show you this but you can see that we have the vent right there and if you were to go and cover this up well all of a sudden this whole vent and uh this heat sink would be covered up and you would start to get a lot of heat build up which is something that you don't necessarily want now removing the CPU fan the chassis fans and then also the 25 gig Nick fans certainly does make this much quieter I mean this is somewhere in the 40 to 42 DBA range and we also see lower power consumption as a result anywhere from maybe 2 to 4 Watts lower at both idle and underload so to me although the power supply is a very nice fsp unit on the other hand I wish that this was a completely fanless unit because that would just give it more utility especially in places that you just don't need the noise like we get a lot of people in comments saying hey you know I do like audio engineering or something like that and I wish that this thing just was not as loud and that's really good feedback right this could be a silent unit if the power supply was silent or near silent it's just a bummer but of course being a fanless adjacent unit means that it is at least a little bit better than the totally fann unit okay so let's talk about key lessons learn and let's start on that power side right so this thing has this 150 wat power supply which is a nice SSP power supply is a good power supply but on the other hand I don't necessarily think that that's the right size I think that you could get away with a 100 wat power supply and if I could get a 100 wat power supply in this even with my 15 watts of pee out and all that kind of stuff I really think that a a 100 wat power supply in a system like this gives you enough Headroom and if you could make it quieter that would be a huge win the other thing though is just that the ports on this are absolutely crazy guys I mean we have 25 gig ethernet we have 1 gig ethernet 2 and a half gig ethernet we have a PE outport I mean there are all kinds of different ports on here now one of the really cool things is that we're not using any junky Nicks on this these are all pretty nice Nicks they're all Intel the i210 that thing has been around for forever and that is a rock solid Nick you have the i26 V which is a lower power 2 and half gig Intel Nick and so that's good has a couple revisions over the it25 version so awesome there and the connectx 4 LX 25 gig from melanox or Nvidia is awesome and that thing has been you know I mean we have tons of servers that are deployed with that today I do also like the fact that you get the mount points for the Wi-Fi antennas or 5G LTE antennas whatever you want to put in this and you have the space to go do that I know folks are going to be really upset that they don't get like two PCI Gen 4 uh nvme drives in the system and of course you're not going to get buy four on those cuz that would be eight Lanes just for the nvme nothing else in the system and the CPU only has nine Lanes to start with so like at some point guys you know you just kind of get stuck because you're using a lower power processor and you just don't get all the PCI Lanes you get in some of the bigger more expensive platforms the other thing I just want to point out though is that I think think that this is one of the kind of strangest companies and let me tell you why like on one hand David at Go Solution I mean I've had a dialogue with him for many many months now and he's on things like Reddit and stuff like that getting feedback for these they're iterating on them I think that's awesome they took the feedback of like when people said hey here's the r86 S and like you know why can we have a oneu version out there taking that feedback on the other hand I can't buy this thing on Amazon it's kind of a pain to go purchase and so I do wish that they had some kind of storefront even if it costs more money I wish that they just made these things easier to buy now although there are 10 screws to get inside this I am not going to complain about the case quality I think it's pretty nice actually now one thing I know a lot of folks are going to comment on is just how much power this used and it did use quite a bit of power but I do want to point out that the typical power consumption of a connectx 4lx is something like 10 watts and you go a little over that as well so you know when you look at the system and you're seeing something like you know 20s something Watts just remember that like more than 10 of that is being used by that 25 gig ethernet Nick so if you don't need 10 gig ethernet then frankly um well you don't need to have that high of power consumption but overall guys I mean we test something like I don't know maybe 50 100 servers a year on the St main site and frankly these things are absolutely awesome these are different there is a design principle and an idea behind them that I think is iterating based on feedback which I really just like the fact that that's happening because these products are getting better every generation now are there things that could be improved heck yes they are but on the other hand if you're looking at the R6S Pro and you're thinking like hey that is perfect I just want a rack mount version of it then this is an awesome upgrade for you and guys I love getting to try these things out and so if you did like this video why don't you share with your friends but also why don't you give this video like click subscribe and turn on those 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: 120,573

Keywords: servethehome, serve the home, i3-n305, core i3-n305, router, firewall, virtualization, homelab, proxmox, proxmox ve, pfsense, opnsense, linux, 25gbe, 10gbe, 2.5gbe, r86s, gowin, virtualization host, fanless, vmware, connectx-4 lx, nvidia, mellanox, connectx-4, intel srktu, i226-v, i210-at, intel i210, poe

Id: aY0Okb6eI-E

Length: 22min 21sec (1341 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 08 2024