This CRAZY SMALL 2.5GbE Node will Change Everything

all right wait a sec this isn't my coffee nope this is the router we're gonna talk about today this thing is super tiny with two and a half gig ethernet wait a second let's back up for a sec hey guys this is Patrick from sth and this is one that I've been so excited to show you I first heard about this I guess months ago we got one we've been testing it for a while and this thing is absolutely cool although there is definitely a catch to it this little tiny box here is called the icool core R1 and inside we get a quad core processor we get a removable and upgradeable nvme SSD and we also get four Network ports which you can see here these four Network ports are not just a run-of-the-mill one gigabit ports oh no this is a quad two and a half gig ethernet router and just to give you some sense of how small this thing is I put it next to some of the other quad two and a half and six two and a half gig ethernet quad core Intel nodes that we reviewed and you know I've talked about before you can see those videos also the Mac Mini now just for another sense of size comparison this is the r80 success that we reviewed previously you can find a video on that super awesome but I do want to show you just the size I mean this thing absolutely is way smaller than the Goin r86s and comparing it to something like a one liter PC I mean this is way smaller than our project tiny micro PCS and just measurement wise this is a seven and a half by seven and a half centimeter square and then the height of it is 4.8 centimeters or just under 1.9 inches game plan for today we are gonna check out the hardware we're gonna get inside see what makes this thing work then we're going to talk about performance power consumption noise we're also going to do OS testing because I know a lot of people are going to want to know you know what can you actually run on this thing and what doesn't run on this thing and then I want to get to my key Lessons Learned and I just want to say thank you to our sth YouTube members for helping sponsor this video we were able to go buy an SSD that we could go and swap into this just to go try that out because of your support so thank you and if you want to join you can always click that link down below with that let's get to the hardware okay so let's take a quick look at this unit both of these ports are USB 3.2 gen 1 so they're 5 gigabit per second ports but at least you get two of them on the front of the system on the one side you get a label on the other side you get the other USB port which is a type c port and then you get a TF which is basically like a Micro SD card slot right here and I just want to point out that means we have a total of three USB ports and one of my big things that I really wanted to see on the Goin r86s was a third USB port so this kind of answers that need but let's get to the super exciting side on the main faceplate what you'll see is that we have four RJ45 ports these are all two and a half gig ethernet ports inside the system is the Intel i226v which is the newest rev now the i226v is the newest version that has some new bug fixes and stuff like that but on the other hand I think some folks are seeing some issues if you have like a consumer motherboard and windows and some folks in Linux we haven't really seen it running Linux on these but maybe that's just this platform I don't exactly know why but we've been running this thing just like 24 7 just to see if we could make these things drop other features though is that you'll see that we have an HDMI port this can support up to a 4K 60 display and then there's also a PD USB type-c which is for power delivery because this has two options for power delivery you can either use the USB type-c or you can also use the included adapter which allows you to use a DC Barrel Jack and then use that for power and if you're wondering how you mount it but you can stick it on a desk which is pretty easy you can velcro it just about anywhere and if you really want to there's also an included Visa mounting bracket which is uh which is this thing right here and that bracket goes to the underside of the system here you can see that we have a cut out for a vent for a fan I do kind of wish that we had a little bit more just kind of airflow there but there are vents on either side of this thing and you can see that there is a copper cooling block on the bottom which is uh it's just kind of cool in a system like this usually you get like the least expensive thing which would be like aluminum or something like that and so seeing something that's copper was actually like wow that's kind of cool if anyone is one wondering if this is a family system well this great should definitely answer that for you if you do want to hear the system and learn more about the power consumption noise we have a section on that you can find that just in the chapter markers below but yeah you probably want to know a lot more than here are the ports so let's go see how this thing works by looking inside so the first thing you can do is you can open and actually service one part of the system everything else is pretty much not really serviceable but one part is and that is if you open the top you just pop it out like this and then inside you have a nvme SSD I was pretty excited to find that this is a half terabyte Western Digital Drive that's actually a pretty darn decent Drive especially for like a firewall or something like that that is more capacity than you need okay so opening up the system you can see that this is a two PCB just kind of level design right the first thing that you'll see is that you have a top PCB and a bottom PCB and then there's kind of just Little supports that put those things together and then you'll see on the side that there are two ribbon cables that really provide the connectivity between the two of the boards right the top board Services the top three Lan ports but it has some extra features as well it also has the USB type-c and the TF or the SD micro SD card reader and then the other thing it has is it has that spot that m.2 slot for the NVM me SSD on the PCB itself these aren't just the ports they also have the controllers so for example we can see three of the intel i226 nics on this board the next level of the PCB though is definitely the most interesting so this level has one i-226 Nick and then there are a couple other things that are on here that I think you know folks are going to really like right so the first thing is that there is the HDMI port and there's also the USB power input there but uh the vast majority of this bottom part is really dedicated to things like the memory and also the Intel processor so the memory on these is soldered so you can't upgrade the memory which is you know frankly a little bit of a bummer I know a lot of folks would rather have so dims but when you see how much space is taken up by the memory um I think it makes a lot of sense so the memory options in this are that you can either get the 8 gig or the 16 gig option of course we have the 16 gig option because we have like the fanciest configuration you can get but this memory is dual Channel lpddr our four memory so that is kind of nice that you do get a little bit more performance than if you did have sodips now the memory again is not as a good memory it's lpddr memory and so that's soldered instead of being replaceable and that's just what it is so the idea is that you're only really servicing the m.2 SSD you're not really servicing anything else in this the processor that's in our unit is the Intel Pentium silver n6005 now this is one that we've seen in a number of the fanless firewalls and in the fanless units is probably not my favorite because I feel like you spend a lot more money for it and also just you know for being honest like sometimes the really small like these are actually some of the better chassis but some of the smaller chassis don't have enough cooling for that and that is where the active cooler for this comes in now I do want to talk really quickly about some of the options that you can get in this right so the first option is that instead of 16 gigs like we have you could get only eight gigabytes of memory and then the other option is that instead of the n6005 you can get a I think a Celeron n 5105 both of these are quad core units they're the same atom generation and so just you know there's a difference in in them in terms of clock speed but it's not necessarily like the biggest difference they're still the same core count same architecture and then the third option is just the amount of SSD space you could have just a disless one you could have a 128 gig and I think they also offer a 512 which that's what this is okay so that was super cool but let's talk about the the performance of this real quick one of these things and we always get asked like you know it's a quad core Intel processor it must be like a you know something that would be the desktop or something like that right and it really is not um you know this is frankly a big upgrade over like the previous generation j4125s but it's not necessarily something like an Intel Core is it still like the older atom core so it's not it's not like these super fast cores that you see one cool thing though is that unlike the atoms like the Intel atom c3000 or now that we're looking at the c5000 series this does have a integrated GPU so you do have an igpu in here if you are using that for any like I don't know like transcoding or something like that so this little box does have quick sync video support So under quick benchmarks the CPU performs just about as it does on some of the better fanless units it may actually hold clocks a little bit better but it seems like it's pretty much on par and it's just kind of what we would expect on a system like this in terms of networking performance that does mean that we have enough CPU to fully utilize the two and a half gig ports and we actually just set up things in OPN sense where we pass traffic between E2 ports and it was fine so I would say that um you know you can get a decent amount of traffic going through this thing and it works we're going to talk more about the alessas but you can definitely use this as a firewall or even just like a little lightweight virtualization host but that's I think why we need to talk about the power and noise of the system okay nobody likes a loud system or one that uses too much power so let's take a look at the power consumption and noise of the R1 so first off how do you even power this thing well our unit came with a icool core power adapter it's a 30 watt power adapter but it's a little different from some of the other inexpensive systems that we've seen and we've purchased before because well this is this actually has a USB type-c power end and that plugs in right here to the USB power delivery so we're going to plug that in real quick and we're going to let this start to boot and since I figure I should just show you this if you want to turn it on you can either set the setting in BIOS I wish that was default but it seems like it's not the default for some reason on these uh but what you can do is you just hit the little power button and it turns on and then always remember to go into the BIOS and turn that to always on on AC power especially if you're going to make a router out of this now you might be able to hear this now at startup it's gonna be a little bit loud I'm gonna let this I'm gonna put this thing down I just want to show you one other thing real quick is that we got in the Box this which this is the USB type c on one end and it has a DC Barrel Jack on the other end so it's an alternative way that you can power this thing okay so this thing is now booted it's in proximox I have my laptop over here and so let me just kind of show you this uh just the noise of this thing and the power consumption at idle so the first thing you're going to notice is that our power consumption is sitting at about the 12.4 12.5 watt range over here on the power meter and we do have one Nick that is plugged in so that way we can actually access it since it doesn't have Wi-Fi and so what I want to do real quick is just let you hear what this thing sounds like it's it's definitely um definitely not silent if it's you know sitting here on the desk in front of me I can I can definitely hear it and so this is about six inches away and then in terms of noise um you know we have a little decibel meter over here this decibel meter in the studio will read about 34 DBA if you know just because of all the lights and all that kind of stuff so there's some noise floor here but with this unit you know about a foot and a half away which is if you'll sit next to you it'd be about how you'd hear it or like you know how far away it would be what we're getting on here is somewhere in that like 39 to 40 ish DBA range okay at this point the stress test has been running for about a minute or so so it's definitely heated up a little bit and uh what you're gonna see just in terms of overall power consumption over here you'll see that we're about you know 20 to 21 Watts um we did see a peak earlier in the system I think of like 22 or so and in terms of noise we're still in that like 39 40 41 watt like DBA range so you really haven't heard any more noise um I do kind of wish though that the fan spun down a bit because it feels like it's just a little too loud at idle if running a stress test at 100 CPU utilization is giving you the same like just kind of decibel rating as if you're running an idle right and I'll just let you have a quick listen to this you can hear uh what what it sounds like I'll just tell you from sitting here it sounds about the same at idle and under lobe I will say though that we tortured this thing and we ran this thing under load for like 12 hours just like Non-Stop and it definitely got pretty warm but it didn't like overheat and break and you're never really gonna run these things or most people are not gonna run these things anywhere near 100 CPU utilization anyway so I don't think it's too bad okay so let's talk just a little bit about the OS support for this so this thing we've managed to run uh Ubuntu so 22.04 we ran that on this no problem we also ran proximox ve 7.3 it ran we put VMware esxi 8 on this and it ran we also put um OPN sense and it ran out of the box windows will require a Nick driver so you're gonna have to go download that and then uh you know when it says it can't find a Nick you're gonna have to like go and put that in I don't think many people are gonna put Windows on it but I guess you know there are people that will put Windows on anything and so it's an x86 processor at the end of the day there are a lot of people that are also going to want to do PF sense the challenge with this and PF sense is that the Knicks in the current psn's 2.6 are not supported because the Intel i226 is not supported in pfSense there are development releases that you can use or you can go to psn's plus I wish that the supported PF sense but on flip side I also kind of wish that pfSense just came out with their new version with the iTunes 26 support so that way pfSense would support this box so overall that is a great roster of os's listing supports just out of the box I mean you do have to have drivers which is pretty easy if you want to go run some os's and you may have to use different versions or newer versions because these are the newer Nicks but at the same time this is an Intel x86 processor so almost anything runs on it that's a big difference compared to a lot of the like arm-based sbcs where sometimes you know you might be able to get Linux but other things you're not going to be able to get working and this is a big difference on a little platform like this foreign okay so let's talk about key Lessons Learned and the first thing I want to talk about is just the pricing the pricing on this unit if you get the kind of n5105 so the just lower clock CPU and you also want to only get eight gigs of memory and you don't want an SSD maybe you have one that's a m.2 2242 SSD just kind of sitting around and uh you know if you want to do that this thing retails I think for like 199 dollars now we have like the highest end configuration with the Intel Pentium silver and 6005 the half terabyte SSD and 16 gigabytes of memory so that is actually 359 dollars which is quite a bit more and at that price you really are starting to compete with the fanless models that we've reviewed previously now personally I actually like the endnet 5105 a little bit better than the n6005 just because I think that that saves you a lot of money on this system it's like a 30 upgrade and if you're not really overly worried about the CPU performance um you know frankly that's the one I would probably get but I guess that brings me to my second key lesson learned which is like like who the heck would buy one of these things look here's the deal if you're gonna run this as a router that you're gonna have running in the same spot and you're gonna like tuck it away you never want to see it again I don't know if I would get this to me as cool as this is I probably would look at a you know fanless unit for something like that also if you don't want four two and a half gig ports and maybe you want 10 gig well then I would look at the r86s because I think well that has 10 gig ports this doesn't but then who is this even for then and to me this is like the almost perfect little tiny low power travel system and we're not even talking like suitcase right like I literally just you know throw it in my pocket here and uh you know no problem I can go take it and I can throw it over here in my coffee cup you won't even see it I mean this is like the perfect little system to go bring around and you can also power it using power delivery which means you can even use things like the little battery operated your little like batteries and you can go run it on that we tried that earlier I think that that is a awesome combination for a system but this is missing one critical feature and I think that is my last key lesson learned this unit has 10 gigabits per second of networking in four two and a half gig ethernet ports but what it does not have is Wi-Fi I wish that this thing had Wi-Fi 6E or something like that or even just Wi-Fi six just something to be able to get this onto a Wi-Fi network the ability to have a small system like this that you can just you know put down and start using I think is really nice and I wish that that was like a thing but overall if you can't tell I am super jazzed on this thing just because it's so small it's so cool a lot of folks are going to say in the comments well I need this or I should have had that or whatever but for what this is I think this is super cool or I guess this is icool core hey guys I hope you like this look at the icool core R1 if you did like this video well why don't you give it a like click subscribe and turn on those notifications so you can see whenever you come out with great new videos as always thanks for watching and have an awesome day

Channel: ServeTheHome

Views: 214,960

Keywords: servethehome, serve the home, intel, intel pentium, intel n6005, intel n5105, 10GbE, nvidia, connectx-3, wifi, bluetooth, router, firewall, openwrt, pfsense, opnsense, ubuntu, proxmox ve, proxmox, windows, vmware, vmware esxi, esxi 8, r1, ikoolcore, ikoolcore r1, n6005, mini pc, small pc, mini router, 2.5gbe router, 2.5gbe firewall, 2.5gbe, 2.5g

Id: evbuR8WvA6s

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 20 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/SurfaceDockGuy]

Very cool device based around the Intel Jasper lake platform.

https://www.ikoolcore.com/products/ikoolcore?variant=44220125511967

[u/blaze1234]

Now do TB4 ports

or at least multiple USB-C outputs with DP Alt mode

in addition to the power input

Willing to go down to only two Ethernet, and a bit bigger is OK

[u/_derpiii_]

very interesting, but what's the use case?

[u/TheXenocide]

x86? I thought those processors were 64 bit.

ETA: seems like a cool/fun concept though.

[u/fuckwit-mcbumcrumble]

If this device had the new 12th Gen. E core based CPUs it would be perfect.