Asrock Ryzen V2000 embedded board - 199 USD (US-CA, local pickup LA area)

[WANg]

Mine T740 runs just fine with quad sfp+ xl710 with all ports used and two of those ports use rj45 10g sticks.

yeah well, mine ran for years with a Solarflare SFN5122, a Mellanox MCX354A (with 40GbE DACs) or a SuperMicro 10GbE dual port X710…but that’s because I had to find cards that have known low heat output (ballparking it to less than the ~20w TDP or similar to the E9173 quad port GPUs that used to be on them, but those boards are GCN4 and had a low profile cooler). I also had SolarFlare 7 series and Celsio Terminator T4 cards lock up the t740 within 20 minutes due to heat build-up. The same cards ran fine if I leave the t740 open, card connected via a PCIe slot extender and away from the chassis with a USB powered fan slapped directly on top of the heat sink for the card, so I know it’s a cooling and not a power draw issue.

Once again, it depends on which card you have, and whether it can withstand the effects of having almost no active airflow path in the enclosure for hours, if not days or weeks at a time.

 

[louie1961]

Here's my first report. With two 8gb memory sticks and an NVME SSD drive, the lowest wattage I could achieve, while running pfSense was 20 watts. This isn't terrible compared to my N100 pfSense machine which runs at 17 watts idle. With the Emulex/IBM four port 10gbe NIC I picked up for $20 (https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/quad-10gb-sfp-nic-for-20.47492/) it idles at 30 watts with one DAC in it.

pfSense supported theIBM/Emulex card right out of the box, no drivers necessary. Surprisingly, it will work with 10 base T transceivers, sort of. With one transceiver, it seemed to work fine, with two, I couldn't complete the installation of pfSense. I am not sure if it is a power draw issue, or what. But the video would blank out half way through the install with two 10 base T transceivers. No issues with DACs.

The Realtek RTL8125BG LAN port would not work in pfSense at first. Once I got pfSense installed, I was able to install the required driver with a couple of simple commands and it seems to work fine Realtek Driver Upgrade Instructions for pfSense 2.7.2 – Blueprint Coders

I used this brick to power it. There is probably a more efficient power supply out there. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CW598HV8

I think my biggest hassle was finding a DisplayPort to HDMI connector as this board only has DisplayPort outputs, and I don't use those here at all.

I may try to find a quieter CPU cooler/fan for this board. With the fan speed turned to its lowest of 5 settings, its still a little loud even though the CPU is sitting at 33 degrees. Overall I am pretty pleased so far, with both the motherboard and the Emulex 10gbe card.

 

[cmmh]

For what its worth, I low-balled an offer of 125 that got countered with 160. They still have a number of these in stock and I was hoping they were close to becoming motivated sellers.

 

[louie1961]

I have been playing with this board for a few days now and overall I am happy with it for the price. I will say, the cooling fan is way too loud and the the fan curve is not really adjustable. I swapped out the Everflow 80mm slim fan for an 80mm Noctua. I also removed the heat sink and replaced the thermal compound, which looked like it was from the tomb of an ancient Egyptian. In pfSense, before I made those changes, CPU temps were hitting 70+ degrees during an iperf3 test. After, it is hitting 59 degrees during the same test, even though the Noctua fan has a lower CFM rating. Also, for anyone playing with one of these and pfSense, turn off PowerD altogether. It doesn't save any wattage at all with this board but it does slow down the performance. I swapped out the no name power supply for a 90% efficient Meanwell GST120A24-P1M. Idle power consumption including fans and 10gbe card is 29 watts, and max during an iperf3 test is 65 watts