Ultimate Homelab Revolution Unreal 2.5-10GbE Mini PC

hey guys this is Patrick from sdh and today we are going to talk about this system right here which might be the absolute perfect system for home labs and basically anybody that wants really fast networking in a light low power box now quick specs here this unit has three two and a half gig ethernet ports it has two 10 gigabit Ethernet ports and it even has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth it is called the r86s and I'm going to go through in this video why I think this might be the coolest system that we've reviewed this year so game plan for today is we're gonna go through the hardware of the system it's definitely different than a lot of the other systems that we've reviewed but I think it's also really nice so I want to actually show off the hardware that goes into this then we're going to talk about the performance we'll talk about some of the use cases just kind of running through you know we've run this thing through a ton of different software suite so I want to kind of give you some idea of what we learned when we did that we'll have a section where we go through the different pricing and options this is definitely the higher end unit of of all of these and just kind of giving you some rough idea as a higher end unit it's probably about 400 25 dollars and then finally in the key Lessons Learned I want to talk about who I think this box is for now you can find this unit under the r86s name from a number of different vendors but the one that sent it to us is actually called go in and you see that a lot of the stuff in here is labeled as GW I think they might actually be the company that makes these now we don't have a sponsor for this video but if you do want to help out the sdh YouTube channel you can always join our Channel Down Below there's a little membership feature and that will just help us go buy a lot of the things that we use to either test this unit but also just buy a lot of the units that are just kind of fun to just try out and get to show you guys so with that let's get to the hardware overview foreign okay so let's talk about the exterior of this chassis because I think a lot of folks are going to see the pictures of this and not exactly understand what's going on here this is not a passively cooled chassis but it is a very heavy metal chassis I mean that's kind of the first thing that you notice when you pick up this unit I think this 10 gigabit version is something around like 460 grams or so and then in terms of Dimensions this is 119 by 79 by 41. okay so let's start talking about the hardware that goes into this right now let's start with this side over here because this is actually the most problematic side and I'll tell you why it's a fun little story the first thing you see is that we have USB 3 port and then we have a TF slot now TF is basically used because it's a Micro SD card slot but you don't want to go and pay the micro SD licensing fee so we have a TF card slot and then we also have our HDMI output now why I said this was actually a little bit of a problematic side is that there's a little tiny power button over here and that little tiny power button actually came off and so I when I was putting it together just before like doing this video just to refresh my memory on the hardware in here um I actually forgot to go and put the little power button back in place and kind of have to you have to kind of like get it in there just right so everything kind of puts together and stays in place and so like I put it together and also I heard this like little rattling and it was a power button rattling around in there so I call it problematic but that's just because I took it apart and uh that's the issue that I had that was my fault though okay but let's get to the exciting side and that's this little face right here along the top you're gonna see we have a DC 12 volt and then we also have another USB 3 slot next to those you're gonna see three ethernet ports now these are Intel i225 V based ports which means that these are two and a half gig ethernet ports if you're thinking hey that sounds exciting that's because it is but what's more exciting might be what's below that because we have a total of two SFP plus 10 gigabit ports these ports also will run at one gigabit speeds but we tested them out and we could not get them to run at two and a half or five gigabit speeds and so just want to say that these are either one or ten if you want to use Optics or Dax but they're not going to run at multi-gig speeds now you might think in a low-cost device these must be not very good 10 gig ethernet Nicks and that is is completely false as we're going to see when we get inside this unit because this is totally crazy inside I do want to point out that on the top of this unit there is a fan and this is not a fanless unit let's just be very clear it does get warm even though uh even though there is a fan but that's not the only fan you're gonna see when we get inside that there's actually another fan and the vent for that is right here on the back of the unit or underneath the Wi-Fi antennas now we don't normally talk about packaging because the vast majority of the units like you see the firewall units that we have back here those things come in like these Brown boxes maybe some just kind of like foam in there or something like that but it's it's definitely not a nice experience but on the other hand the r86s comes in a nice little box it has the model number on it you kind of open it up and inside you can see that we have a nice kind of form fitting just this kind of black foam in here and this is a little bit nicer in terms of packaging which also means that you know you're a little bit less nervous about the unit it arriving safely one of the other nice bits about the packaging is that you get this little tiny driver because there are six screws that you would use to access the inside of the system now realistically though there are two screws on the bottom that use this little tool you open it up and you have access to I think the parts that most people are going to service so by undoing the two bottom screws you're able to open this little flap and inside here I've already put a SSD but you can see we have our m.2 SSD slot and then we have the SFP cages so here I'm using a wd blue now this is not the fastest SSD but um the SSD speeds on here are actually not as good as I thought they would be and then you'll see that we have this feature right here and this is a little tiny fan now you might think that this is the CP fan but it's not this little fan is actually designed to cool the 10 gigabit Ethernet Nick you can see right here that we have the SFP plus cages that are for that 10 gig Nick and when we open up the system what you'll notice is that this Nick is actually a in Nvidia melanox connectx 3en Nick which means that we get actually a fairly decent network card this is like a real server ocp network card and the reason I say ocp is that this is actually an ocp 2.0 Nick now of course the vast majority of the you know high-end industry is all on ocp Nick 3.0 and if you buy a server today most likely you have an ocp Nick 3.0 slot but the OC pnic 2.0 was a older standard that was widely adopted and became an interesting thing because there are now companies that you can find like on eBay and elsewhere that will sell the connect X3 mix with little pcie adapters and you can buy them very inexpensively for 10 gigabit Ethernet okay so at this point we've shown off the fact that we haven't a two slot for storage we've also shown off the fact that we have the melanox connect X3 10 gig ethernet Nick super cool for our 10 gig networking but what about the rest of the system what you'll notice is that the connect X3 along with the m.2 slat those are on this like little expansion thing and then the main part of the r80 6s is actually this top part right here so you can get these things without that 10 gigs if you're not going to use the 10 gig it'd be less expensive considerably less expensive to not get that it's also smaller so we're just going to point that out but we have the unit that we have the main motherboard though is super interesting because when you pull this apart you'll see that we have the connection cables that go in that really those are providing the connections for the m.2 as well as the Nick back and those are those kind of like coppery cables but aside from those pcie cables we have the main motherboard and we pull that out you can see that there's a little copper block with the cooler and that fan that's on the top of this unit and then on the motherboard there are a couple features so on the back side closest to the connect X3 Nick you'll see that we have the three SL nmh which are the Intel i225v NYX on the flip side though is probably one of the more exciting set of features because we get a whole bunch of things there now the processor in this is super interesting because this is the Intel Pentium Silver N 6005 which we've seen a number of times in the firewall units that we've reviewed previously this is a four core it's just four cores there's no like you know eight threads or anything that is a four core processor and there is a couple features here that we should definitely talk about the first one is the fact that this has an integrated GPU so there is an igpu in here if you do want that kind of feature you can look up the features for the processor it's on Arc and all that kind of stuff but you do have an integrated GPU in this so this is not just like an atom c3000 Series where you don't have an integrated GPU it's a 10 watt TDP part which is not necessarily high-end but it is a much faster than some of the previous generation atom parts that we've seen on the board we get not just the processor there are a number of other features for example we get the dram chip this system comes standard with 16 gigabytes of memory now this memory we checked it out when we're running and it's actually running at DDR for 2933 speeds some of the low-cost firewalls that if you get them like pre-configured with memory we've seen uh we've seen much lower speeds like DDR for uh 2133 and stuff so so it actually is kind of nice that you get that on the flip side though I do wish that you had the ability to go and expand the memory so whatever you order this with whether that's eight gigs or 16 gigs that is what you're basically stuck with the other thing though is that although we have the n6005 there is another option for an n5105 and in the just kind of normal firewalls I generally say for those go get the n5105 because it's less expensive and uh it just tends to be the one that I think a lot of folks gravitate to but since we actually have the actively cooled fan here I think that the n6005 is actually doing pretty well and I would say that in this unit this would be a decent option so let's talk about the Wi-Fi here this actually comes with Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth and it's an Intel based solution so this is not some kind of like just super Cheapo solution you actually get an Intel Wi-Fi Nick here and Wi-Fi six like I think that's awesome the fact that you get a decent Wi-Fi solution in a little little box like this and so just remember that we have three two and a half gig ports we have two 10 gig ports plus we technically have a Wi-Fi as well so I mean you get like 6 network interfaces in this little tiny box the other thing though is that we have the higher end n6005 processor we have 16 gigabytes of memory and the Wi-Fi and all kind of stuff so that means we also get an emmc solution here so this little system even before we put the m.2 drive like we have here in there actually has its own storage and it's 128 gigabytes which is plenty for a lot of operating systems we'll talk a little bit more about the operating systems that this came with and what we tried it with later which is the fact that you do have some onboard storage for some applications is super awesome especially if you're just going to use this as a router or firewall device there are a couple things out of this Hardware that I've definitely change one of the big ones is clearly I think another USB port or two would be awesome and I know there's not a lot of space on here but the reason for that is just think about if you have if you have a keyboard in one you have a mouse in the other you can't plug a USB stick in to go do an OS installation so just just like little things like that of course you can have USB hub I know but just not having use a hub and just having the ability just to go and plug things in I think would be a little bit easier so that's why I would like to see at least three USB ports in a future version and of course if this had you know three USB ports I'd be telling you hey I wish it had four right because that's just kind of how USB ports are with that let's get to the performance now in terms of performance this unit comes with the you know Intel n6005 which is a little bit faster than the n5105 and the fact that this is actively cooled means that we were able to maintain a higher level performance a little bit longer than we have seen on some of the older n6005 units that we've had now on the larger kind of passively cooled ones with like the larger chassis we are able to see those and 6005 units perform pretty well but the older ones this is definitely better and unlike the two and a half gig ethernet firewall boxes that we've reviewed previously I actually think that this one can benefit from the faster processor and the reason for that is we did iperf 3 and you know we ran iperf 3 and I think on the two and a half gig Nick ports that of course everybody understands you can run iperf3 on the 10gbase T port and get a you know nine point you know Ford ish gigabits per second or a little maybe more than that if you do a little tuning and whatever but I mean you know you're basically at that 10 gigabit speed that you would normally see so I guess folks are going to ask what would I recommend this as a router and what I would definitely say about it is I think that it is fast enough if you're not really doing a lot of firewall functions to go and pass that 10 gig ethernet traffic at the same time though if you want to kind of run like a pretty high-end firewall you want to do things like deep you know deep packet inspection on stuff and like like actually do a lot of like the IDS stuff um you know you know I think you probably are going to end up wanting a faster processor I also think though if you want things like you know you want to have like a ipsec and you want to be doing 10 gig ipsec you know you're probably going to want to have quick assist on your processor not uh not not just have a kind of low end low power processor right we did a whole piece on quick assist and shown the performance of that both if you use the adding card as well as on the Xeon D parts so it's just kind of one of those things that you know I think that you need to have realistic expectations of what you're going to see on a box like this but at the same time I have a hard time telling people that this is a bad solution I mean you know if this was a thousand dollar solution I'd say I probably would want to see a lot more a lot more CPU performance and just resources there but you know on something that's 460 dollars I would say that this is a very reasonable amount of performance in here okay so let's talk about power consumption first off you get this like little power brick it's a 12 volt power brick so with that let's go plug the 12 volt adapter in and then what we do is we just go plug the little unit in right here okay now that we have the unit plugged in you're going to start hearing and you're probably going to start hearing the microphones uh just you guys know is like right here but you're probably gonna start hearing a little bit of fan noise I was just to say that all the time that I've been running this and we're running benchmarks on it there's always some fan noise um so it's not a silent unit but I don't think it's too too bad I'll let you have a listen and you can kind of see the power consumption so hopefully Alex will show you guys the power consumption over here and while this is booting I'm just gonna let you hear what this sounds like Okay so we've now booted into proxmox and I'll just kind of show you where we're at we're at about 10 and a half watts in terms of overall power consumption for this little box now we don't have a lot of things plugged into it and we're also not running the CPU at like any you know amazing amazing uh levels or anything like that one thing you can do is you can use things like these SFP to RJ45 adapters and just plugging this adapter in without even another side you're going to see that we got an immediate Spike of like like two and change Watts right so I think the big thing to keep in mind here is that we were showing the floor at about 10 and a half Watts you get a little lower than that if you don't have the m.2 in there and you're just using the emmc by the way but you know I just kind of want to show that like you know there's kind of this base of call it 10-ish watts and then as you start plugging in especially with the SFP and the Nic you're using a lot more power that melanox connect X3 is spec for I think up to around 15 or so Watts um and you know we'll actually use over 10 watts very often so just that those two 10 gig net Nick ports alone those actually use about as much as the entire system uses at idle and when I had this thing connected to one two and a half gig Nick as well as I had a 10g base T connection coming out of this little SFP right here um when I had just those connected I was already into about the 20-ish watt range when running a little bit of workloads and so you know you can definitely get this thing up into the mid-20s and a little bit higher until like 30 Watts if you go and start loading this with a kind of higher end Optics as well as like you know higher NCP utilization and then plugging all the network ports in so from a range of power consumption standpoint I would say that at the low end without you know an m.2 SSD or anything like that you're probably in that eight eight and a half watt range and then as you kind of get higher and you start adding all the you know configuration options and stuff like that you're going to start to see power consumption get into that maybe 30 watt range Anyway by the way we did test these with the SFP adapters and they totally work okay so let's talk about the operating systems that we installed with this because I think that's important as a foundational element to talk about like who is this for so in terms of the just kind of network operating systems or you know what you use as like a router firewall openwrt came with this unit so we're going to say that that works but then also we did do pfSense as well as OPN sense so for those three no problem to get them running on this box and uh you know so I think that that's that from a firewall to straight firewall perspective super easy to go do installing non-firewall os's is where things got a little bit more interesting because something I really wanted to do was install a hypervisor on the emmc and then use the m.2 as a data store because I thought like hey that would be an awesome model so the first thing we did was we put VMware esxi8 on here and of course uh because it's VMware they did not support the SFP plus Nix also VMware did not want to install onto the emmc so the option was really to install it onto the you know m.2 SSD that we had there which kind of blows up the ability to have a hypervisor OS as as well as a you know m.2 just for like kind of data store storage now we tried proxymox the E 7.3 on this as well and it worked with no problems except for one which is also that it did not want to install on the emmc the plus side of course is that because it's proxmox and we actually have good driver support we get the melanox connect X3 support no problem in here so that was very exciting to see and then once you're in proxbox you can see the emmc storage you just can't install it as your root for OS installation which is kind of a bummer actually now in terms of putting Windows on this um again emmc was a no-go m.2 it worked I don't know if I would necessarily do that I don't think this makes a great like Windows desktop and I don't think it's fast enough really to use as a Windows server but um if you wanted to you you can run Windows on here I just don't know um you know I think it's just a little bit limited for a Windows platform so from Key Lessons Learned what did we learn and I think that that OS in just the installation exercise really kind of taught us a couple things first off I think as a router firewall device I think that makes a lot of sense on this box right the fact is that with open wrtpf sense and OPN sense all working on this box and having five NYX plus the Wi-Fi you get a decent processor but you don't get things like the quick assist acceleration that you might want especially if you're doing like ipsec or something like that I also just think that a lot of folks are going to see like the 10 gig nics and they're going to be like hey I'm gonna go run like my you know high-end IDs and stuff like that I'm gonna go run all these ton tons and tons of firewall rules and like I'm gonna have amazing performance and the fact of the matter is that you just don't have a fast enough CPU in this for running like 10 gig speeds and like replacing a 10 or 20 000 firewall device right I mean this is just not that fast at the same time you're just trying to do like a pretty simple Nat setup or something like that um you know it's actually not too bad for a solution like that the hypervisor side it was a much more mixed bag than I was hoping would be they would be awesome like like if the VMware folks you could actually install VMware onto emmc on this I think this would be like end game they'd be totally just jazzed on this and they would just buy gobs of these things you know I just kind of think that it's a bummer for the VMware folks that they can't use all this really cool Hardware because they're in just such a limited ecosystem this box is probably not the right one for that however there is a version of this of course without the SFP plus so maybe that would be a better version if you just wanted a small three port two and a half gig ethernet solution at the same time though it feels kind of weird recommending this for that kind of application because at the same time we have these firewall boxes that have four Knicks and I think that's probably a better option if that's really the application that you're trying to go do also if you're just doing a two and a half gig you know firewall I kind of think the passively cooled boxes those are better to me as well because you know you don't have a fan that can fail so I just kind of like those a little bit better the proxbox I think actually this is a really interesting box because you can install proxmox onto the m.2 you can run your little virtualized firewall you can run a whole bunch of other things like guacamole or something like that and if you needed to get more storage well that's where you really use the dual 10 gig ports to provide my storage to my little hypervisor box and I think that that kind of setup where you have you know the 10 gig for your storage you have an out-of-band and then you have your win and Lan or maybe you know two two lands in one way in or something like that I think that actually makes this box super useful and that gets me to my final thoughts on this which is really that this is probably one of the absolute coolest boxes that you can possibly imagine but it's also one that is probably the hardest to go and figure out the use case for overall though I think this box is super awesome and it definitely uh definitely gets my seal of approval because this one this is probably one of my favorite boxes that we've tested this year by far with that though if you like this video why don't you give it a 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 and have an awesome day

Channel: ServeTheHome

Views: 199,308

Keywords: servethehome, serve the home, r86s, gowin r86s, intel, intel pentium, intel n6005, intel n5105, mellanox, mellanox connect-x 3, 10GbE, nvidia, nvidia connect-x 3, connectx-3, wifi, wi-fi, wifi 6, bluetooth, router, firewall, openwrt, pfsense, opnsense, ubuntu, proxmox ve, proxmox, windows, vmware, vmware esxi, esxi 8

Id: Z-YLy-RRZnM

Length: 20min 45sec (1245 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 07 2022