Topton Jasper Lake Quad i225V Mini PC Report

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howardkent

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Jan 19, 2023
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That's why i'm waiting for David from Gowin to announce their new RS86 boxes. At least he replies on reddit and here as well. So, a bit more visibility. With aliexpress can be a hit and miss.

According to intel's ark, 6005 only goes to 16GB.
People have had success installing above 16GB, the limitation being that it becomes headless.
 
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casulo

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Nov 30, 2022
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They are at a price where you can mount a more serious set up (with more TDP of course but still)
Yes, of course. I'm talking about tiny cute boxes. For serious VM stuff, used hp/dell/ibm server would be my pick. I have one, but it's a watts sucker, even with just one cpu and ssd/nvme disks.
 
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Stovar

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Dec 27, 2022
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My last experience with CWWK hasn't been the greatest:

On a N5105 with 4x i226 v5:
- constant IO delay between 0.7 and 1.5% for no apparent reason after a fresh install of Proxmox

On a N6005 with 4x i226 v5:
- bios does not support 32gb of RAM
- bios does not have the option for the 'smart fan function' (PWM)

Both units do NOT support the DMA identifier of the devices via IOMMU.

Support was useless, they offered a refund after shipping back the unit. By the way, they are NOT the manufacturer of the boards.

You buy cheap you get cheap I guess.
Just curious was that IO delay still there without promox and just pfsense, opensense, openwrt directly on the box?

I got the same N5105 but 6x i226 on route from cwwk.

Things can certainly be hit and miss, but I think that is decent of cwwk for offering a refund at least so you can re-try another product later.
 

skimikes

Member
Jun 27, 2022
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My last experience with CWWK hasn't been the greatest:

On a N5105 with 4x i226 v5:
- constant IO delay between 0.7 and 1.5% for no apparent reason after a fresh install of Proxmox

On a N6005 with 4x i226 v5:
- bios does not support 32gb of RAM
- bios does not have the option for the 'smart fan function' (PWM)

Both units do NOT support the DMA identifier of the devices via IOMMU.

Support was useless, they offered a refund after shipping back the unit. By the way, they are NOT the manufacturer of the boards.

You buy cheap you get cheap I guess.
I'm not surprised that you see IO delay. Watching various io tools like vmstat, iostat, and iotop, it looks like Proxmox is writing a few MB of data approximately every 2 seconds.
 
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DomFel

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Sep 5, 2022
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I'm not surprised that you see IO delay. Watching various io tools like vmstat, iostat, and iotop, it looks like Proxmox is writing a few MB of data approximately every 2 seconds.
I am surprised, because I have other boxes, from CWWK, with 0 delay and similar hardware.

That's why i'm waiting for David from Gowin to announce their new RS86 boxes. At least he replies on reddit and here as well. So, a bit more visibility. With aliexpress can be a hit and miss.

According to intel's ark, 6005 only goes to 16GB.
I wish I knew earlier about Gowin. FYI, Intel is selling NUCs with N6005 and advertising 32gb of ram supported.
Just curious was that IO delay still there without promox and just pfsense, opensense, openwrt directly on the box?

I got the same N5105 but 6x i226 on route from cwwk.

Things can certainly be hit and miss, but I think that is decent of cwwk for offering a refund at least so you can re-try another product later.
Can't measure the IO delay like Proxmox does.

It would have been decent if CWWK offered to fix the issue, instead of selling something and offering a refund because it doesn't work properly.
After all, China is not that easy for returns.
 
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skimikes

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Jun 27, 2022
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I am surprised, because I have other boxes, from CWWK, with 0 delay and similar hardware.
This is what I see from the J6413 which I am currently using as primary:
j6413_cpu_io.png.jpg

The J6413 uses mSATA. The N5105 and N6005 units both take m.2 NVME but their graphs were nearly identical.
When viewing this through the 1 second lens of vmstat, this equates to mostly iowait of 0 with spikes:

Code:
root@proxmox:~# vmstat 1
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ------cpu-----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa st
 1  0      0 42756364    336 220780    0    0     2   287   26   15  2  0 97  0  0
 0  0      0 42756364    336 220780    0    0     0     0  863 1013  1  1 99  0  0
 1  0      0 42756364    336 220780    0    0     0     0  397  551  1  0 99  0  0
 0  0      0 42752612    336 220780    0    0     0  4364 2087 3111  8  1 78 12  0
 1  0      0 42752484    336 220780    0    0     0     0  609  851  2  0 98  0  0
 0  0      0 42752484    336 220780    0    0    24  4720 1452 2355  2  0 90  7  0
 0  0      0 42752484    336 220780    0    0     0     0  464  633  0  0 100  0  0
 0  0      0 42752484    336 220780    0    0     0     0  329  505  0  0 100  0  0
 0  0      0 42752492    336 220780    0    0     0  5048 1395 1931  7  1 82 10  0
 0  0      0 42752236    336 220780    0    0     0     0  373  583  0  0 100  0  0
 0  0      0 42752236    336 220780    0    0    40  1964 1323 1952  0  0 99  1  0
 0  0      0 42752236    336 220780    0    0     0     0  575  814  1  0 99  0  0
 0  0      0 42752236    336 220780    0    0     0     0  374  542  0  0 100  0  0
 1  0      0 42747856    336 220780    0    0     0  3388 1174 1775  4  1 94  1  0
iostat paints a similar picture but is more precise in that it provides float rather than int so I sometimes see 0.25 - 0.30% instead of 0.00.
 

howardkent

New Member
Jan 19, 2023
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N6005 v5 with nvme:
View attachment 26711

N5105 v5 with nvme:
View attachment 26712

And according to other users here, I'm not the only one having issues with the N5105.
I don't think you understand what the metric is telling you. If the machine is idle then seeing some IO delay is acceptable. It doesn't mean anything is wrong. Try loading the CPU and compare results.

Try switching the nvme drives between the machines.
 
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skimikes

Member
Jun 27, 2022
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N6005 v5 with nvme:
View attachment 26711

N5105 v5 with nvme:
View attachment 26712

And according to other users here, I'm not the only one having issues with the N5105.
vmstat 1 and iostat -xk1 would be interesting to see on the N5105. I'm curious if it is actually constantly doing io or if there is bogus reporting going on (or it's just being smoothed out).

The only way I am able to get my io metrics chart to look like that is to switch to a week average. Have you tried choosing week or month average and then switch back to hourly average?
 

DomFel

Member
Sep 5, 2022
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The only way I am able to get my io metrics chart to look like that is to switch to a week average. Have you tried choosing week or month average and then switch back to hourly average?
Same issue, IO delay is always constant, regardless of the load.

I don't think you understand what the metric is telling you. If the machine is idle then seeing some IO delay is acceptable. It doesn't mean anything is wrong. Try loading the CPU and compare results.

Try switching the nvme drives between the machines.
I didn't say it's not acceptable, I did say it shouldn't be there at all, considering on similar units, same manufacturer, same hardware, it's 0.
They are using same NVME drives.
 

skimikes

Member
Jun 27, 2022
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Same issue, IO delay is always constant, regardless of the load.


I didn't say it's not acceptable, I did say it shouldn't be there at all, considering on similar units, same manufacturer, same hardware, it's 0.
They are using same NVME drives.
Another question: are you using zfs and if so, how much memory do you have and what is the size of your zfs arc? I have this really vague recollection that I had some issues with constant IO with smaller (16GB) memory configurations when I had vms running that were 50% of memory and the zfs arc also grew to 50% of memory.
 

DomFel

Member
Sep 5, 2022
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Another question: are you using zfs and if so, how much memory do you have and what is the size of your zfs arc? I have this really vague recollection that I had some issues with constant IO with smaller (16GB) memory configurations when I had vms running that were 50% of memory and the zfs arc also grew to 50% of memory.
16gb of RAM (more is not supported), 250gb nvme, arc size 2276.48mb (N6005), same configuration on the N5105, ARC size 600.838mb.

RAM usage hovers between 55 and 60% of usage on the unit with N6005 and 0% IO delay, 15-20% of usage on the N5105 with 1.5% IO delay.

Using Edge kernel 6.0.15 here, since kernel 6.1 is having some issues with ZFS for now. No VMs hanging in fact.


The only issue I'm having with VM is OpenMediaVault, where if I use qbittorrent in a Container it will spike the RAM usage of the VM to 95% for no apparent reason, and the only way to get it back to normal is to reboot the VM. Tried to use the pve kernel with OMV, but no success still.
 

howardkent

New Member
Jan 19, 2023
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I didn't say it's not acceptable, I did say it shouldn't be there at all, considering on similar units, same manufacturer, same hardware, it's 0.
They are using same NVME drives.
You're comparing apples with oranges. Different CPU models will have different delays.

Also I meant change the NVMe drives as apart from make, model and revision you'll have different workloads in Proxmox configured. The IO delay should decrease if the CPU is busy, but this comes back to what the metric is measuring. If it were above say 20% then you might have a hardware issue, probably a configuration issue though.

I am not saying you should keep the machine if you are unhappy with it I just feel your conclusions need more evidence and I think the seller offering a refund is a positive outcome. I'm not clear on distance selling applying globally but I think it does and you could press them to pay the return charges if you're inside the distance selling window.
 
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DomFel

Member
Sep 5, 2022
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You're comparing apples with oranges. Different CPU models will have different delays.

Also I meant change the NVMe drives as apart from make, model and revision you'll have different workloads in Proxmox configured. The IO delay should decrease if the CPU is busy, but this comes back to what the metric is measuring. If it were above say 20% then you might have a hardware issue, probably a configuration issue though.

I am not saying you should keep the machine if you are unhappy with it I just feel your conclusions need more evidence and I think the seller offering a refund is a positive outcome. I'm not clear on distance selling applying globally but I think it does and you could press them to pay the return charges if you're inside the distance selling window.
I compared an N5105 to an N6005, not to a Xeon, an AMD, or a Core processor. They share the same architecture (and same motherboard), hence my doubts on the BIOS configuration (that's probably where the issue lies).

If I had an IO delay of 20% I would have returned the units already. I swapped a different NVME drive in and the results are exactly the same, while idling a fresh install the IO delay sits at 1.5%.

While you consider a positive outcome, I consider it a 'meh'. In my opinion a positive outcome on a product is to try to fix it, instead of saying 'if you're not happy feel free to ship it back'.
If humanity applied the same principle we would still be at Neanderthal age.

To wrap it up, let's agree to disagree here.
 
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