Power Consumption and Noise
The 150W FSP power supply is a step up from the This GoWin R86S Pro as a nice internal unit.
At idle, we are seeing 5W package power consumption and 27-29W for the system. Noise is not silent at 44dba in a 34.5dba noise floor studio. Under load, the package power consumption rises to 15W, and the total system is at 51W range or so. Noise raises to 48-49dba. Again, this is far from a silent system. Something to keep in mind here is that the 25GbE NIC is around 10W of typical power consumption.
The fan, however, is the one thing we would change. 150W is more than this system needs, and getting a quieter power supply would be a big win, especially when we looked at the fanless adjacent unit that only had this fan.
Key Lessons Learned
This is most certainly one of the most creative systems we have ever reviewed on STH. It has a ton of I/O and to get there, it is using things like PCIe switches and USB hubs for lower-performance I/O.
This is perhaps the limit of the Intel Core i3-N305. While the CPU has great performance, the system is very much at its maximum (and a bit beyond) in terms of I/O.
What this represents, however, is something really cool. This is a system that tries to do everything reasonably well, and accomplishes that task.
The one thing that I wish GoWin would do is to put its products on Amazon and AliExpress so folks can use their standard storefronts instead of GoWinFanless.com. It just feels like that would open these up to much larger markets by making the buying process easier.
Final Words
Overall, this system has so much in it that I think a lot of STH readers are going to at least appreciate what is being done to make this unit.
As the team reviewed the system, a common discussion point was how cool will it be when the Atom C5000/P5000 parts get less expensive and can be used in this space. If you have a 25Gbps WAN connection probably a valid point could be made that spending a few hundred more and getting a next-level hardware device could be worthwhile. On the other hand, if we look at this like a 10Gbps firewall/ router with room to grow, it is awesome.
Overall, it is easy to be impressed by this little box. It worked very well for us. Since we covered it in the video, we also tested the fanless-adjacent version that removes the chassis fans, 25GbE NIC fan, and replaces the CPU heatsink with something huge. That unit is hopefully going to be released soon, but it is also fascinating. We will follow-up this review with a review of that one in a week or two.
can it run fq_codel or cake or libreqos?
Great review! What firewall/OS were you running when you got 17Gbps throughput on the 24GbE SFP+ ports?
I was one of the first people to receive this one. The fan on the PSU is absolute garbage and made it impossible for me to sit next to the machine. I ordered a Noctua NF-A4x20 replacement, spliced it in. That fixed the noise issue immediately. I’m still thinking if it’s worth it (and possible) to replace it with something like a Seasonic.
Also worth mentioning that the onboard SATA ports are not really SATA, those are 2 USB-SATA adapters, which make them almost useless for any real data storage on a modern filesystem like ZFS or Btrfs.
Another quirk is that the board does NOT shut down. The CPU will and system will, but it keeps drawing around 15W when the board is “powered off”, and it screws with the SFP ports because of this, some modules could not come up without replugging them after shutdown (there is a workaround for this on the mellanox side of things). This is because the board does NOT unlatch the PS_ON# pin. Yes, this means that the PSU fan will keep spinning even when the board is “shut down”. And while we’re on the power consumption side, enabling power saving in linux for the i210/i226 NICs makes the whole system crash.
Overall I’m happy-ish with the system, made it work for me. But Gowin has this mentality of designing a new version of hardware right as the first customers get the current version, and if you have issues with it? Tough luck, you can buy the new version which is right around the corner. Caveat emptor
I prefer buying from the company that made an item I’m buying, and given a choice that’s exactly how I shop. At least then I know I’m buying the real thing. I have very little trust in Amazon.
You get these machines that are obviously network appliances and you tell us how many times they can compile the Linux kernel per hour. Yeah, I need to get a nox with a low spec CPU and a lot of fast NICs for my C++ work. It’s so obvious! Please, give these things to your network guy so he can run a proper router or firewall OS on them and do a proper network appliance review.
Any product link?
They will never achieve anything close to 25G on those interfaces. Probably the only thing those would be good for is electrical isolation using fiber transceivers.
The link for product link is https://www.gowinfanless.com/products/network-device/1u-2u-server/
For systems where we’ve seen the CPU a bunch of times before, it’s safe to say we know how it fits into the overall landscape against other chips.
It might be more informative to see its performance compared to other boxes based around the same chip, so we can see if maybe one particular box is hosing up the config, perhaps by a suboptimal memory layout, PCIe lane config, poor default BIOS settings, cooling solution, or whatever. Especially if there’s a reference Intel board (say a NUC or something, in this space?) that could presumably represent a bench mark against which the other integrators could be compared.
The headline is a 25Gb product and barely a paragraph about that. Not what was used, not how it was configured…nada.
Barely passable content for page hits. Nothing more.
Is this a first draft of a review? It does not matter to me how many kernel compiles you can do per day on a network appliance.
What Software did you run? What settings etc
Thank you for the professional review.We will keep upgrade for the next version with cost down and function on.
The article mentions: “At the same time, there is still a good reason to use Parker Ridge/ Snow Ridge Intel Atom C5000 series parts with QAT and onboard 25GbE if you want to go faster”. A link to such a product reviewed by you in this article (or even the comments here) would be tremendously helpful. Thanks!