Qotom Q30952UE Internal Hardware Overview
Inside the system, we can see the fan attached to the bottom panel of the chassis. The motherboard design places the CPU on the opposite side of the motherboard to take advantage of the chassis’s passive cooling.
In motherboard designs like this, that can mean minimal airflow for the SSD(s) and memory. Here, Qotom fixed that by adding a fan. So the strange part is that the CPU cooling is fanless, but the memory and storage have a fan.
On the subject of memory, this system has a single DDR4 SODIMM slot, so that means a maximum of 32GB. On the plus side, DDR4 is less costly than DDR5 these days, so some may find this to be a major benefit.
Next, there is a stack of M.2 slots. We did not populate these, but it includes an M.2 2230 E key slot for WiFi. There is also an M.2 3042/ 3052 B-key slot for 4G and 5G.
If you saw the cable, there is a SATA data and power cable for a 2.5″ SSD.
Next, you can see there is a TWSC 128GB SSD that came with ours. The M.2 slot is only PCIe Gen3 x1, so a lower-speed and lower-power/ lower-cost SSD is the better match here.
The SFP+ cages are bare, so at least the fan helps cool them a bit.
Next, let us get to the BIOS.
Qotom Q30952UE BIOS
The American Megatrends BIOS that came on this is perhaps old enough to call “vintage” at this point, given the system shipped with roughly 6-7 quarter-old BIOS.
Overall, there is not too much exciting here, but you can set different performance options. One useful one is max non-Turbo performance since in a network device, especially with older CPUs, the state transitions for turbo can introduce a lot of jitter.
Next, let us get to the topology.
Qotom Q30952UE Topology
Here is the system topology, where you can see all the PCIe NICs.
You will also notice we had to install 16GB because we needed 2GB/thread for our benchmarks. With four cores and eight threads in the CPU, it is different from the Denverton and Alder Lake-N cores without SMT.
Next, let us get to the performance.
