This is a SUPER Homelab REVOLUTION Evolution!

this new Mini PC has three 2 and 1 12 gig ethernet ports two 25 gig ethernet ports it has 32 GB of memory and nvme SSD Wi-Fi 6 I mean this has absolutely everything I hope you guys are as excited as I am for the brand new r86 S pro well hey let's get to it hey guys this is Patrick from St and this is the brand new Goen r86 s we're going to call it the pro here instead of the n and I'm going to explain why in a second now if you've been watching St for a while you probably have seen our R 86s review and these things are awesome you have your three 2 and2 gig ethernet ports you have two 10 gig ports now something that I love about the r86 S is the fact that it's small and the new version is a little bit bigger now I do want to point out real quick that Goen did send me this unit because I think they're kind of jazzed about how you know the first unit went and the response to the first unit and the cool thing is that they have started to create new versions of this so there's a new version using the brand new core I3 n305 which is Alder Lake n that we've reviewed a couple times in different systems but the cool thing about it is that they don't just add a new processor they also have a new memory new memory capacity as well as a brand new chassis we're going to go into why it needs a new chassis in a little bit but the reason that we're saying this is the r86 S pro rather than saying it's like a specific model like the N is because I have a special version here this version has 25 gig ethernet not just 10 gig ethernet now I'm not 100% sure if they're going to make this 25 gig ethernet version available in this little chassis but if they do at least you'll know what it's like and before we get too far in this I am going to tell you that we are going to have a little Cameo with this which is the iol core R1 Pro which is another pro version another update to A system that we've seen previously we're going to have a little segment on this in here too because these are two units that I think we reviewed around the same time and they got updates around the same time but very different updates so I want to kind of cover this quickly in this video as well with that well let's get to the hardware okay let's start our external overview just taking a look at well what is the difference between this and the previous gen because I think that's something that a lot of folks are going to want to see so the first thing is that you're going to notice that it is a little bit wider and a little bit longer than the previous Gen R 86s so even though they look very similar and the height has remained the same you do get a slightly larger chassis with the new r86 S Pro versus the previous Gen R 86s and it needs it so looking around the chassis real quick you know one side there's basically nothing on the top you're going to see that we get a little heat sink metal chassis with a little fan in it and then uh you know the back we get our Wi-Fi the bottom we get our compartment which lets us open it up as well as our rubber feet and then let's get to the more exciting parts and that's over here so on the front of the system you're going to see that we get three 2 and2 gig ethernet ports these are Intel I 226 V ports and so they're the new generation of Intel 2 and2 gig ethernet controller now below that we get two melanox connect X4 LX 25 gig ethernet ports now the previously melanox but now now Nvidia connect X4 LX is a super popular adapter guys this was used in servers from like every major server vendor and it was just it was like one of the primary 25 gig ethernet Nicks of this generation and because of that the support in different os's is phenomenal I mean you can have pretty much any OS you want and today it's going to support the connectx 4lx just because it is that popular the other feature you're going to see on here is we still get our USB type a port but you're going to notice the first difference which is our power input on on the r 86s we got a DC Barrel Jack on this one we have a USB type-c but it's really a 12volt power in just using USB type-c I don't necessarily think that that's a huge upgrade but on the other hand it is a difference personally I actually like the barrel Jack better than the USBC if it's just being used for power in then the reason for that is super simple if you do have like a pee plus splitter something pe+ plus splitter uh usually you can get one with a barrel Jack pretty easily and get a 12vt one no problem and getting that and then having to convert it to USB type-c is just it's just a pain so I just I do like the barrel Jack a little bit better but is at the end of the world absolutely not but the huge changes and taking some feedback from my previous review is the side of this which is really where the magic happens you're going to still see that we get our HDMI port we get a TF which is like a Micro SD card slot without the licensing we also get things like the power button status LEDs all that kind of stuff now one big change is that we instead of one USB type a port we get two 10 GB per second so these are USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports and then we also get a USB type-c port and finally at the very end we get a little mini USB comp Port one of my biggest complaints with the original R6S was just frankly the lack of USB ports because you had two so if you have a flash drive for example in one of them on the other one you have to pick between a keyboard or a mouse and with the new version you don't have to make that choice anymore you can have a keyboard mouse a USB drive and you still have a USB type-c port a available for something else and I am more than happy to pay for those extra USB ports in chassis size because going from having not enough USB ports to having enough plus a little bit extra and that comport I think is absolutely one of the best things that I've seen in terms of an upgrade in this generation but the upgrades don't stop with just the exterior let's get inside to see all the new stuff that's in there okay now getting inside the system uh you get this little uh driver which gives you your little bit that you can go use to get inside you're not using just like a standard Philips head screwdriver which is kind of a bummer frankly but once you're inside up there's some pretty cool things happening so you first get in the system you're going to see a couple features that are always good now this system comes with onboard storage onboard emmc storage but uh for a lot of folks you're probably going to want to add an SSD so that's what we have here we have a Western Digital blue SSD it's like a one tab Drive super inexpensive and really that's just to go and boot up into an OS now the emmc storage that's on here is of course great but there are some challenges especially with different os's a good example of that is proxmox where you need to install onto an SSD you can do the emmc but they recommend against it and there are workarounds and all that kind of stuff but the standard installer for proxmox you need to do workarounds it will not install on the emfc and so that's why we ended up with this Western Digital Drive here now below that you can see something that's super cool we have an ocp Nick 2.0 and this is the melanox connect X4 ocp Nick that you can see and then we also have the fan so this unit has a custom cooler for that ocp Nick which uh you know you just never see in servers so getting inside the next part of little challenge you get four more little screws and then once you're inside you can kind of see that this thing gets a little bit wild now on this side which is the bottom you can see our Nvidia melanox connectx 4 LX Nick and then on this side you can see the main motherboard here you can see the three Intel i26 V Nix and then on the other side of the motherboard you can just see most of the things that have really changed first uh we get the Intel core I3 n305 processor we've seen this a number of times but it's an 8 core processor all ecores of the Alder Lake n generation we have definitely seen that these use more power than the Intel n515 or n605 that we saw in the previous generation of these parts but on the other hand it is faster on a per core basis and also it is faster just because you have twice as many cors this is the first time that Intel has given us eight cores all e cores in like kind of this this what used to be like the atom line right let's talk about some of the other changes though first you get 32 GB of lpddr5 memory the reason is that the previous when you get like eight or 16 gigs that was fine but with this new generation when you have eight cores having only 16 gigs of memory is only 2 gbt of core now some folks are totally fine with that and there are a lot of routers and stuff that will use 2 gbes and be more than happy with that amount of memory like 2 gbt per core but on the other hand the core I3 and 305 is very much competitive with something that was like a core i7 like a 35 watt core i7 from just a couple Generations ago and as we're going to see in our performance section the implication there is that you can run things like virtual ation and you can run VMS and they're actually pretty fast so whereas the n5105 was really like that first generation where it seemed like you you could start doing virtualization maybe have like a router firewall and then have maybe one or two other little applications running on it the n305 that thing is fast guys and before we get to the performance just real quick we also have 128 gigs of emmc memory now if you're going to run something like pfSense OPN sense or open wrt or something like that then 128 gigs of emmc are probably okay personally I like to do log not on emmc I like to do that on a you know like a NVM SSD or something like that just because of how inexpensive they are these days but on the other hand you do have a pretty good installation Target with the 128 gigs of emmc on board and the other feature inside here is that we have a Wi-Fi 6E solution which is also an Intel Nick which is awesome it's not just some kind of like Cheapo Wi-Fi and before we get to our performance section I just want to point out really quickly that if you don't want the two 25 gig ethernet ports on here there is another option so you can see that we have our 2 25 gig ethernet ports remember how we took this apart and we opened it up well there's another option here which has two nvme slots so if you just want two m.2 ssds you can get this little board replace this bottom thing and make this even smaller frankly if I just wanted this for like a 2 and 1 half gig ethernet like platform then I would totally get this one because I think that having two nvb ssds is really good okay so let's get to the performance of the system because that's uh that's kind of interesting so first off the Intel core I3 n305 is a Prett fast processor compared to the previous gen which should have been something like the Intel n605 or n5105 it's definitely one that I say is a huge upgrade like we're talking like 2x generational Improvement but the other big Improvement was one small change on the io because the new version of this has nine PCI gen 3 Lanes versus the previous gen was only eight and you might say like well one one lane is PC3 like who even cares about that Patrick and you're you're right but but in this system in particular it matters and the reason for that is just look at the ports that we have so all of the Intel I 226v controllers are PCI controller so they need each one lane which means that we are using three of our nine Lanes just for the 2 and 1 half gig ethernet and that leaves only six lanes available for The Connect X4 LX as well as the nvme SSD and so when it comes down to it you can do a by4 and a by2 and still be in pretty good shape in the previous generation you were stuck with either doing 2X tws or or you'd have to do a buy4 and a buy 1 and so you just didn't get as much performance just based on the pcie subsystem and then I want to just talk really quickly about the networking performance because I think that's going to be something that a lot of folks are going to ask about so first off on the 2 and2 gig ethernet side if you want to run something like pfSense or OPN sense and use this as a router firewall the 3 2 and half gig ethernet ports are absolutely no problem for this thing to saturate because uh you know you could do that with the old n5105 no problem and now with the new n305 you have way more CPU performance you absolutely no issue with 2 and half gig ethernet on the new Chips but 25 gig ethernet is a totally different beast and frankly we didn't hit dual 25 gig ethernet speeds on this we had a little over 20 gigs combined which is good but it's not necessarily like great on the other hand let's just be clear that also means that you can get single link performance that's much higher than the 10 gig ethernet version and also uh like 20 gigs of of bandwidth coming out of something like this is is absolutely insane but I do want to point out real quick we did not go through the entire Nvidia melanox connect X4 LX tuning guide the connect X4 LX actually had a decent amount of offloads and so doing tuning in your Linux kernel will help you hit better levels of performance now a lot of folks are going to be totally freaked out by the idea that something that's all e course can actually push 25 gig ethernet but just remember this is an all ecore CPU the n305 is an all ecore CPU that's as fast as a lot of the like previous generation like zons and stuff like that it's definitely not as weird as you might think now if you're thinking that all this performance comes at a power consumption cost you're correct so let's get to that next okay so let's talk about the power consumption and noise real quick this thing is Idle we have a 34 DBA noise floor studio and I just want to let you hear this thing idle in proxmoxve I'm going to be quiet for a sec and so we're getting pretty close to that 35 DBA now I can just tell you from sitting here that I can definitely hear this you can probably hear this on a th000 mic that's sitting there it's frankly a bit of a high-pitched wine and when we look at the power consumption we're at that like 15 to 17 watt range and just in terms of temps this thing will sit an idle in somewhere in the CPU temps in that like maybe 26 to 32 Celsius range now let's go run a workload and I'm going to let you hear this and I'm going to talk a little bit about what happens next when we go and run a 100% workload on this okay so this thing is definitely getting hot and let me just let you hear this real quick the noise on this is now just about 40 DBA and we're about 43 44 watts of power cons and this is a much higher power system and by the way we still only have one of the ethernet ports plugged in we don't we're not using the 25 gig ethernet ports although that chip is of course running and then we also have two 2 and half gig ethernet ports that aren't being used yet and I'll just say that as we've run this thing longer you will see that you do see the temperatures rise so uh that's just something that you you do have to keep in mind but on the other hand like let's face it nobody's going to be running this or very few folks are going to actually be running a system like this pegged at 100 % CPU utilization most likely you're going to be running this at like 70% CPU utilization which makes a little bit more sense for a system that's kind of like you know meant to be like a firewall Edge router home node or something like that it's probably going to see like 70% Max but realistically most of the time it's going to be at under 10 15% so while this is not realistic I just want to kind of show the upper bounds of what's happening okay so for all of these I always like to have key Lessons Learned and like what do we learn with having the new new version of this well I think a couple things the first one and the big one that I will take away from this is the fact that the Intel N35 processor is of course awesome I also love the fact that we now get a 32 gig option because I think that 16 gigs in a system like this if you want to do virtualization is just too limiting frankly a lot of folks over-provision the amount of CPU they think they need and they underprovision the amount of memory it turns out that most folks end up using a lot more memory than they think they're going to use and a lot less CPU so for that I think that's awesome I do think that in this system having the 10 gig option makes probably a little bit more sense but I do like the 25 gig SFP 28 because I just I just think that's just cool in a platform like this and before I move on I just also want to point out the fact that the USB situation on this is like perfect now with a little comport and stuff as well I just I just think that's great so Goen great job taking the feedback from our first review and incorporating it into the second generation of the product but I want to Pivot for a sec just to the R1 Pro that's been patiently waiting on the side the R1 Pro if you didn't know this we did a video on the first iol core R1 and this is a little tiny Mini PC the r 86s is huge in comparison to this thing and in some ways the upgrades to the R1 Pro mirror a little bit the r 86s or we're calling the R6S Pro because I think that one of the key themes is just the fact that we're getting these larger chassis and better chassis for better cooling now the iol core R1 Pro still has the Intel n605 and it still has its 4 22 gig eanet ports which are great you can go watch the whole video on this and by the way the n605 is plenty of CPU performance to go and push you know two sets of 2 and2 gig ports through a firewall or something like that you have plenty of performance in this four core processor but what they did with the R1 Pro over the R1 is that we have a new metal chassis that really focuses on cooling so we have a new copper cooler here with a you know better fan and stuff like that versus the previous gen which was okay but it's not necessarily the best and the other cool thing is that the new metal top plate has a little thermal pad because it's now cooling the m.2 SSD that's inside so I think the the key thing here is that companies are actually listening when we say like hey it would be cool if we had better cooling performance but are actually having better chassis because of that and that I think is a great thing now better cooling means that you have to push less air through and that usually means that you have a lower noise floor and so I overall really like what they did with the R1 Pro and I just think that if you don't need the Wi-Fi you don't need you know some of the m.2 features all that kind of stuff you just need something smaller with like four 2 and half gig ether ports I actually think the R1 Pro is Prett good but I kind of also wish that the R1 Pro was actually the R2 where youd have like Al Lake end processors cuz I just kind of think that that would be awesome for this platform even if it meant that the chassis had to get a little bit bigger to keep the noise floor down I think that would be great and for anyone that does have an R1 they actually do have a kit so you can go and put the better cooler and stuff and case from the R1 Pro on your old R1 and we actually did that and we're going to have a little b-roll of that too but I think the key lesson learned here is that please many PC companies keep giving us a little bit bigger chassis that have better coolings that way we don't have a lot of noise or as much noise I'm always willing to give up a little bit of chassis size in order to lower the noise floor we of course have reviews of all these on the S main site but I just wanted to go and show you those and hey guys I hope you really like this look at the R 86s Pro if you did well why don't you share it with your friends but also give this video a like click subscribe and turn on the 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: 237,403

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

Id: azU5kpxyu1s

Length: 17min 18sec (1038 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 11 2023