Hello everyone
I am in the fortunate position of being able to get a 10gb internet connection and i am looking for a router, however my apartment is small , and noise is a big concern.
Until now, the most common solutions have 2 10gb ports and some 1g ports, that would require another device(switch) which again would need more physical space.
In the end , i have a nas that can do 10gb, a lenovo tiny that has 10gb and a router that cannot use that(ax4200) ...so what would you guys recommend ?
the most common solution, 2 10gb ports, and another device(switch).
keep in mind a 10GbE switch will probably not be fan less.
That is my concern as well, I was wondering if there is such a thing as a non managed 10gb switch, or a router that has more 10g ports so that i would have only 1 additional fan...preferably not small sever fans that go loud.
Cisco? Hpe?
I had one for a while, can't remember what it was, but a 1U Netgear 8,10 or 12 port, all 10GbE, no multi gig, so an older gen.
The fan noise was terrible, had to sell it again.
Downgraded to a MS510TX, only one 10GbE, but multiple 2.5GbE.
Got a fan too, but it's mostly running at low RPMs.
What type of ports You have? Sfp+ or rj45 , 4 ports min plus 2.5gig? Smallest 10gig switch is mikrotik crs305 fanless, i have zyxel xgs1210 switch and also fanless, works very nice as room switch. Core switch i have is tp-link T1700G-28TQ with four sfp+ in my rack cabinet to connect servers and uplinks. I have om4 fibers and some dac cause they are cheap and not heat much. For main router today the best choice is atom c3xxx series or some custom build, bpi r4 still can't route full 10 gig. Or some more custom build with mellanox or intel cards.
IKoolcore R2 Max just released, it has N100 or N305, with dual 10G RJ45 + Dual 2.5GbE, you can pre order it.
BPI R4 plus whatever 10G switch delivers enough ports. Not sure where this story of it not routing 10G comes from.
The mikrotik mentioned seems like a good option (here are two versions, one with all SFP+ and one with all RJ45, servethehome loves them, personally I find mikrotik software very meh) and there are a few cheap (~100 USD) Chinese ones with 8 SFP+ ports, too.
Sadly that one can't use fiber optics and I still have not seen any solid data if the 10gig ports actually run at wirespeed (the NX00 are a bit short on pci-e)?
Alder Lake-N doesn't have many PCI-E lanes (PCI-E 3.0 x 9 lanes), which is true, however a special designed mainboard allow manufacturers to re-claim some lanes for other purposes.
For example, I own the CWWK Magic N100, it doesn't even have USB3 ports, and besides the onboard 2 x 2.5GbE NIC, it has a dedicated PCI-E slot with x4 bandwidth! And PCI-E 3.0 x4 is capable to allow dual port 10G NIC to run both ports at full speed (I have Mellanox ConnectX-3 dual port which is working fine), from what I know the iKoolCore R2 Max is using AQC113 x 2 so PCI-E x4 is enough. Other platform like R86S with the same N100/N305 but using Intel 82599 dual port (which is exactly the super old X520 dual port) won't have enough bandwidth due to the nature of PCI-E 2.0.
I was thinking about this type of board, what os You use as router/ firewall ? what power consumption level You have? what other devices You use? i have to decide over this board You mntioned or some s1700 itx plus i3-12100 or am4 plus ryzen 5650g and i have cx-4 dual 25gig card.
For my router, I'm using a Wyse 5070 Extended thin client with an Intel X550 NIC in the PCIe slot. I'll have to double-check what link speed the PCIe slot has, but in my case, I just wanted 10-gigabit LAN and 2.5-gigabit WAN. I also used a ConnectX-3 NIC in the thing previously.
One downside of using x86 machines is that the root partition is stupidly tiny. There's enough room for Wireguard, but not enough room for Tailscale alongside a couple of other small packages.
Up side is it's very easy to resize, or use the rest of the drive as extroot.
resize2fs and cfdisk extended /dev/loop0 for me fine on an x86 VM?
Yeah, maybe it works for the moment, but when you go to do attendedsysupgrade, it goes back to being too-small, so you'll have to remove packages for the image build not to fail.
There are many recommendations and I love that, but I'm still not sure what would be the best choice.
On one side x86 equipment is great but all the prebuilt tiny stuff has gotchas or some kind o unexpected behavior (minisforum ms-01 has many threads with 10g issues), and without some kind of hardware offload, there will be a hell of a lot more power usage....meaning heat.
The banana pi r4 router looks great and promises wifi7($$$ dlc content 
) but it has a fan( i don't know if it's loud)...until know this would be my choice, but I really need to be sure that it is stable before spending that amount of money.
The variant of using EOL 10g enterprise network equipment is also interesting , but mostly it is loud and already big...add another switch , and i will have to get into screwing stuff under the desk....which will probably get me heat issues.
I feel like my issue is very first-world , and I mostly usre that currently , my expectations are unreasonable size/noise wise .
10GBe copper ethernet is power hungry either way.
Power usage of these is even higher - and it typically doesn't support the recent addition of 'multi-gig' (non-)standards, so not very useful in a hybrid world of 1000BASE-T, 2.5GBASE-T and the upcoming 5GBASE-T world, not everything it 10GBASE-T yet - and these enterprise ethernet chipset can only to (10BASE-T, 100BASE-T,) 1000BASE-T and 10GBASE-T, not these modern intermediary steps which are all so common.
I hate loud fans with passion but the one on the R4 is almost silent. And technically it works without plugging in the fan, just gets hotter (but just sitting there doing NAT, the entire thing uses about 5W with 10g fiber optic and a 10G DAC so not that much heat either way). There are also some passive heatsinks that should work (I have a few here but the fan is quiet enough that I never bothered to try, go figure)...
Different story if you use Wifi7 or 10g Rj45, though.
I think Mikrotik has some proper 10G fanless stuff too (the Rb5009 does not really count though as it has only 1 10g cage) but I can't stand routeros so never really investigated after the R4 hit the scene.
direct attach copper and SFP's yeah. Otherwise 10G gets very power hungry. I guess there are the cheaper aliexpress SFP+ rtl9303 switches one can use? Plus the hope of eventual openwrt support but I'm not game to get one myself yet.
Regarding mini PC's. I also avoid the cheaper ones as they don't typically have network appliance like features from what I can read? From what I recall there are c3758 etc appliances for a reasonable price on aliexpress "new" now?
I just ended up with used SNB/IVB rack servers and riverbed appliances. But power consumption and noise weren't a huge concern....
https://www.servethehome.com/ikoolcore-r2-max-dual-10gbase-t-2-5gbe-mini-pc-intel-marvell-hands-on/ it seems pretty well done