Intel Pentium Silver J5005 Benchmarks and Review

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
1,394
511
113
<htpc derail>
I'd be willing to bet a 2200G or a 200GE might be a better choice of chip for an HTPC especially if you wanted the capability of doing some light gaming. The ryzen APUs are very frugal and use *way* less power than their TDPs might suggest under mostly-CPU-or-video workloads. Video playback on my 2400G system clocks in at about 10-12W at the wall (and a sizeable chunk of that is from the SSD, NIC and PSU).
</htpc derail>

The J5005 board looks like a great contender for a network appliance though. Do the power consumption figures in these reviews come from the wall (and if so which PSUs are used?) or from the lines going into the MB?
 

Rain

Active Member
May 13, 2013
276
124
43
I wonder how this handles pfsense
If I'm not mistaken one of the 1GbE connections is handled by a Realtek controller (the other is Intel). I've never been a fan of Realtek network products but they've been better in recent years, it seems.

I'd still prefer an all Intel NIC solution, though. The J5005 looks like it could be a great fit for low-power network appliances, but the Fujitsu product shown in the review doesn't quite look like it is the board for the job.
 
  • Like
Reactions: gigatexal

mstone

Active Member
Mar 11, 2015
505
118
43
46
If I'm not mistaken one of the 1GbE connections is handled by a Realtek controller (the other is Intel). I've never been a fan of Realtek network products but they've been better in recent years, it seems.
They work fine on other OSs, but they tend to be horrible on FreeBSD/pfsense. Some people report good results with the vendor drivers rather than the in-tree drivers.
 

mstone

Active Member
Mar 11, 2015
505
118
43
46
Intel's naming conventions continue to suck. So this is a J part, which used to mean low-end low-power desktop chip, but it's also a "silver" which I thought meant something about servers, except this is called a desktop chip. And, importantly, it's a pentium and not a celeron! What they really need to do is throw on a couple of more generic words (trademarked of course) or letters to muddy the waters further.
 

EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
1,394
511
113
They work fine on other OSs, but they tend to be horrible on FreeBSD/pfsense.
My info is at least a decade old now since I've been using Intel NICs at home ever since (and I've never knowingly seen a Realtek at work), but their drivers certainly used to suck under linux as well. They were fine for regular workloads - running a file server or an office machine (never tried doing anything "exotic" with them in windows) - but any "weird" load, like lots of little packets of the sort a router would perform, and they'd often hang for long periods of time, chew all the CPU, crash, or all three.

What they really need to do is throw on a couple of more generic words (trademarked of course) or letters to muddy the waters further.
I think if they called it a Celertium i9 Extreme BitchinFast 3D 2000 K6 Edition Pro Vega SX it would eliminate any confusion.
 

PigLover

Moderator
Jan 26, 2011
3,184
1,545
113
For a small server or pfSense box you probably want the J4105 instead. Same core with a slightly reduced max clock (2.5 vs 2.8) and a lower spec GPU (UHD 600 vs 605). Most importantly, however, is only 2/3 the list price...

Note that despite Intel's 'official' specs on Ark both of these chips play nice with 2x16gb dimms giving you up to 32gb to play with.

I've been playing with an Odroid-H2 as a small docker host. It has the J4105, dual Realtek nics and x4 M.2 NVMe, all for $111 (when they are in stock again). So far it has exceeded all my expectations.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Patrick

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
12,511
5,792
113
I totally agree with @PigLover

On the Fujitsu side, there is a different customer set and vendor requirements for industrial platforms like the one we are using here.
 

mstone

Active Member
Mar 11, 2015
505
118
43
46
My info is at least a decade old now since I've been using Intel NICs at home ever since (and I've never knowingly seen a Realtek at work), but their drivers certainly used to suck under linux as well.
Well, not only the drivers have improved but also the NICs have changed a lot over the years. On other OSs (even openbsd) the realtek NICs are perfectly fine in my experience--certainly nothing like the mess I've seen on freebsd.

For a small server or pfSense box you probably want the J4105 instead. Same core with a slightly reduced max clock (2.5 vs 2.8) and a lower spec GPU (UHD 600 vs 605). Most importantly, however, is only 2/3 the list price...
Depends on how important VPN speed is to you. Yeah, you're mostly paying for better graphics, but it's a small enough amount of money that it might be worth it to get the slightly faster clock. Mostly the decision will be based on what chips the vendors decide to sell, more than anything else, and the price will similarly depend more on the volume of the sales than the list price.
 

AdrianB

Member
Mar 3, 2017
34
17
8
62
They work fine on other OSs, but they tend to be horrible on FreeBSD/pfsense. Some people report good results with the vendor drivers rather than the in-tree drivers.
Until recently I have seldom used Realtek, and I thought that maybe there are no longer problems with them.

Nevertheless, recently I had problems with Realtek, on 2 different kinds of new small computers (a Zotac PI335 Gemini Lake & a LattePanda Alpha).

I have seen no problems in normal usage, but the weird thing was that DHCP was extremely slow. A long time passed until the interface was configured, so long that after many attempts I finally gave up and I have configured static IP addresses on the Realtek interfaces.

Other computers from at least 7-8 different vendors, all with Intel interfaces connected to the same DHCP server (a Supermicro Xeon D board) got their DHCP configurations very fast.

The slow DHCP happened both with the in-kernel Linux drivers of various 4.17, 4.18, 4.19 & 4.20 kernels and also with the out-of-kernel r8168 Realtek driver.

Even more strange was that DHCP was equally slow and in many cases it failed and the computers had to be reset, with the Realtek drivers from their BIOSes, with PXE activated.
 

MiniKnight

Well-Known Member
Mar 30, 2012
3,072
973
113
NYC
Realtek is fine for things like basic web browsing on a desktop.

There are too many cases where stuff goes strange. You get Intel i210at and it works in every OS.

Realtek has had these corner case issues for a decade. If they haven't fixed them by now, they're not going to. It isn't a priority when you're selling the cheapest NIC out there.
 

denywinarto

Active Member
Aug 11, 2016
238
29
28
40
Any idea where to get about 3 dozens of these?
cant seem to find it online, the websites that list this restrict buyers to their customers and i can’t even register.
Or is this the boards that have like 1000 of moq?
 

mstone

Active Member
Mar 11, 2015
505
118
43
46
Realtek is fine for things like basic web browsing on a desktop.

There are too many cases where stuff goes strange. You get Intel i210at and it works in every OS.
In my opinion, the real issue is that people have gotten into the habit of using "intel NIC" as shorthand for "not absolute bottom barrel components". The issues with RTL gear in recent years isn't the chipset, it's a crappy voltage controller or dodgy capacitor or PoS PHY or somesuch, because that's what you get when you buy a board that retails for $50. You couldn't get an intel NIC on a board that cheap, so by default you tended to get higher quality components. Now that the intel NIC is integrated, you're starting to see them on $50 boards with crappy components, and yes, it's becoming more common to find intel NICs with the same sorts of wacky problems that you used to see with RTL NICs (not even talking about the counterfeits!) In both cases it's still not the network controller that's bad, it's something else in the physical stack. In either case you roll the dice and figure if you get a bad $50 board you might still come out ahead buying another one instead of one $200 board. Unless you're running freebsd, then you've got to buy intel because it's the only driver likely to work.
 
  • Like
Reactions: AdrianB

AdrianB

Member
Mar 3, 2017
34
17
8
62
In my opinion, the real issue is that people have gotten into the habit of using "intel NIC" as shorthand for "not absolute bottom barrel components". The issues with RTL gear in recent years isn't the chipset, it's a crappy voltage controller or dodgy capacitor or PoS PHY or somesuch, because that's what you get when you buy a board that retails for $50. You couldn't get an intel NIC on a board that cheap, so by default you tended to get higher quality components. Now that the intel NIC is integrated, you're starting to see them on $50 boards with crappy components, and yes, it's becoming more common to find intel NICs with the same sorts of wacky problems that you used to see with RTL NICs (not even talking about the counterfeits!) In both cases it's still not the network controller that's bad, it's something else in the physical stack. In either case you roll the dice and figure if you get a bad $50 board you might still come out ahead buying another one instead of one $200 board. Unless you're running freebsd, then you've got to buy intel because it's the only driver likely to work.

I agree with everything you wrote, but the last sentence about FreeBSD really amused me.

As a happy user of FreeBSD during more than 20 years, I know very well that even if what you wrote is not true, it also is quite close of being true.

This is not something specific to NICs, for any kind of hardware, if there is something made by Intel, then it is much better supported by FreeBSD than anything from other vendors.

A few years ago I decided to no longer connect the modem of my ISP to an internal Ethernet interface of my router, but to a USB 3.0 GbE interface.

(There were 2 reasons, one was to allow me to substitute the router whenever I want without wasting time in discussions with the ISP to update their allowed-to-connect MAC address, the other reason was that I prefer an USB Ethernet interface for facing the hostile Internet, instead of an internal Intel interface, about which I cannot be really sure that any method of remote administration is completely disabled).


The USB Ethernet happened to use the ASIX chipset and, because I use FreeBSD on the router, there were several moments of suspense when I connected it, while I wondered whether it will work well or not.

Fortunately the GENERIC FreeBSD kernel works OK with ASIX, but one is not always so lucky, so it is indeed better to avoid risks by using Intel NICs.