Qotom 10Gbase-T Mini PC Internal Hardware Overview
Taking off the bottom cover requires removing four screws.
On the bottom cover, we get a fan. This fan was far from silent. Something we wish was that Qotom used a standard 4-pin PWM fan header to make it that much easier for folks to swap fans on. There is plenty of space.
Inside, we have all of the user serviceable parts.
First, we have a DDR5 SODIMM slot. This system takes non-ECC memory and only supports up to DDR5-4800. It also is a single SODIMM solution.
Generally for these we use 8GB SODIMMs for routers and firewalls and then 16GB for Proxmox VE nodes. We might switch to just using 16GB in this class of systems as the price delta between the two capacities is now small. We tried both Samsung and Crucial SODIMMs in this system.
We then get a PCIe Gen3 x1 M.2 slot for storage.
In our system we had a low-cost Phison drive and also tried 1TB SK hynix models. The 128GB drive is usually a good fit for firewalls/ routers. If you are installing Ubuntu or Proxmox VE, then getting more capacity makes sense, but be aware that the Gen3 x1 is not going to give you a lot of performance. We suggest optimizing on capacity and low power rather than performance for drives used here.
On the top left of the photo below we have an extra DC input and a HDD power header but there is no easy way to add a hard drive or SATA SSD.
The unused M.2 slot is there for adding a WWAN modem in conjunction with the front SIM card slot.
On the other side of the motherboard we have the N355 SoC and the NICs that then have thermal interfaces to the chassis. There is nothing user serviceable on that side of the chassis. If you really want to see it, Sam did not grab photos, but it is near the end of the Internal Overview portion of the video.
Next, let us get to the topology and performance.
I’d ask the designers why copper 10GbE instead of SFP+?
Is it compatible with OPNsense or pfSense?
The AQC113C is currently not supported by OPNsense or pfSense, as there is no official FreeBSD driver for it yet. While some Aquantia chips like the AQC107 are partially supported, the AQC113C requires a different driver that hasn’t been integrated into FreeBSD. For a reliable home firewall setup, it’s strongly recommended to use an Intel NIC (such as the i350 or X520), which is fully supported and stable.
Typically, you would use the 2.5GbE NICs for pfSense or OPNsense on a device of this class. So think of it more like you can run a pfSense or OPNsense as one VM on a Proxmox VE hypervisor and use the 10GbE for storage since you do not have a lot of local M.2 storage.
Does the I226-V have decent Linux support yet? Often see complaints it has poor performance under Linux.
More rubbish direct from China. The idle power consumption is way too high like most of these types of device. These chips are used in laptops which don’t even draw that much power at idle with Wi-Fi connected, audio and the LCD screen on! It’s about time Serve The Home started calling them out on this, these should idle at a few watts. They cut corners with the design and we got hand warmers.
The fan is a typical China last minute, we don’t care, hacked solution to an overheating problem. It has an intake grill but no exhaust grill, so its just spinning in hot air and doing very little except making noise and using more power.
If these boxes were designed correctly and so during periods of idle time dropped to a few watts, they would run cooler and give that metal more capacity to sink heat when the CPU ramps up.
I know the Intel spec sheet says 16GB max but it would be interesting to see if this can work with a 32GB DIMM.
2.5Gb firewall VM for most is just gonna use 2 of those cores and maybe 4GB. If you’ve got 8 cores that’s a waste of your not virtualization
You can virtualize the Aquantia NIC’s with Proxmox or KVM. I have a quad Aquantia 5Gb NIC that isn’t supported by FreeBSD. I simply run Ubuntu Server and 1 KVM based OPNSense VM and manage it with Cockpit. I don’t need all of the mass management of Proxmox, so I pared it down to a basic Cockpit GUI. Works great.
Just a heads up that Qotom is promoting this on Amazon as compatible for pfSense and OPNSense, but as the earlier post from Vince states, those OS’es do not support the 2 Marvell/Aquantia 10GbE ports. You will need to virtualize the system to use thos ports.
Since I’m looking for a 10GbE solution for a firewall (5Gb fiber service), this doesn’t meet the boxes, as right now my firewall of choice is opnsense/pfsense.
The FreeBSD Aquantia driver has been dropped by Marvell for the last 3 years to focus on Windows/Linux support. Several open requests to support FreeBSD again, but I’m guessing like almost all absorbed companies, the parent company doesn’t gives a damn about product support and just wants to milk what they have without additional effort.
A couple of questions:
1. Am I reading this right that you can use this for Opnsense on the 4 2.5g ports, but not the 10g ports?
2. The links provided show the box available with the N305, but not the N355. Is the 355 not in broad distribution yet?
RTL8127 is supposedly “right behind the corner” a whole PCIe card for $15. I guess we’ll have to wait a bit longer