Just saw this introduction on CWWK N100 mini PC
So basically it has 2 x i226 onboard, however it has a PCI-E 3.0 x8 (electrical x4) which is good enough to host a Mellanox ConnectX-3 Dual 10G SFP+ card, making it a 2 x 10G + 2 x 2.5G one
Just saw this introduction on CWWK N100 mini PC
So basically it has 2 x i226 onboard, however it has a PCI-E 3.0 x8 (electrical x4) which is good enough to host a Mellanox ConnectX-3 Dual 10G SFP+ card, making it a 2 x 10G + 2 x 2.5G one
From the article you linked to:
What is less good, is the size of the chassis. It is slightly too large for a standard PCIe bracket to fit into the PCIe slot. We solved that with the NVMe cable, or just by removing the brackets, but then you have a card that is just sitting there hanging from the slot.
Regardless of how you solve the above, you still need to figure out a way to hold the PCIe card in place. All in all, this device can be a great testbench, but for daily driving, it needs a case...
I agree with this, probably need a 3D printing accessory to hold it.
It's pretty similar to the ZimaBoard, which needs extra effort to hold the expansion card.
That's exactly what Patrick at STH ended up suggesting.
There's some discussion of this model on the STH megathread, here's the first post mentioning it:
I suspect someone there will print an auxiliary box to mount the PCIe cards properly sooner or later.
Same thing as Zimaboard, but with 2.5GbE instead of 2GbE?
Yes, dual 2.5GbE, much faster processor and PCI-E slot
I'd choose Lenovo m920q plus mellanox cx-4 dual 25gig instead of this, i like my own m920q <3. Esxi on top and some vm's , one is openwrt for routing and this works awesome. Power consumption? don't care, but idlle is something like 20w -maybe more when win10 rdp is doing some weird things.
I was about to say the same.
I was using it with Intel I340-T4, and it was a beast!
Or even better, Lenovo M920x and 2 nvme drives (same hardware as Q, only 1 additional nvme slot), so it can be used as both a router and as a NAS (not that I'm promoting the idea of multi-use devices). Inbuilt Intel 1Gbps LAN can be used as a management port.
Any of those two devices is available for anywhere between $200-$400 second hand. Usually a decomissioned hardware from enterprise market, barely used or never used at all.
One thing though - don't use SFP for 10+ Gbps Ethernet, since it will get too hot and will make your CPU throttle or even overheat. Using that Mellanox card with fiber is still fine.
Frankly speaking I don't think talking about "idle power" makes sense because you want to have some load on it, and in my country power bill is an issue to some users (including me) so I would still say N100 is still attractive, also I don't like active cooling devices due to dust.
Yes, for some this can be issue, that's why i have to work 2h for whole month electricity Bill and this is without pv. But on the other side i have small pv panel with battery on my garden to simply power my camera, accesspoint , PLC and water pump for plants etc.
Unless you're a university campus with thousands of concurrent users or a p2p supernode running 24/7, the idle power consumption is the dominating factor. While the system will ramp up under load, these really high power durations tend to be rather short - and when they occur, these power peaks of the router will be least of your concerns, because the clients causing the spikes (gaming, data compression, p2p, some kind of number crunching, ...) will use multiple times the power your router needs.
EDIT: or in other words, there's no need to worry about 30-40 watts peak power usage of your router, while your gaming rig causing it to be busy is burning 250 watts on its CPU, 500 watts on the graphics card, 100 watts on the screen and 5 watts per 10GBASE-T port (the later whenever the ports are lower-up, 24/7, on both ends each (2+ ports on the router, 5+ ports on the switch, 1 port per 10GBASE-T capable client)). The 6-8 hours of your sleep, the 9-10 hours you use for work/ commute etc. and the 2-3 hours you spend streaming cat videos or browse the web is what dominates the power bill of your home router.