lol the VP6630 costs 5 times as much as the n100 box.
They are more expensive indeed than a N100 box from China, but the VP6630 is a more powerful processor and it has 2 SFP slots. My reasoning is, if I'm paying a premium for something 'branded' that will have a usable warranty and ongoing support with BIOS updates, I might as well invest in something that will last a length of time and is upgradeable. A similar spec'd equivalent to the VP6630 direct from China would cost me ~£425 but that is barebones so would need memory and storage, so lets call it £500, the VP6630 bare bones is €599 which is around £500, so lets call it £575 with memory and storage, and also comes with a real warranty, technical support and firmware updates. Someone would be silly to buy a similar spec'd box to the VP6630 from a no name Chinese seller to save £75.00!
exactly, many do calculation about power consumption and extreme optimizing to squeeze out those ~3-4w but it makes little to no sense to spend 5x times the amount of those boxes to get a lower electric bill.. how many months/years have to pass to get even and start to save up something?
It's not all about the cost of power, there are other considerations, such as cooling and longevity of the components when they bake 24/7, and run time on a UPS. Although in terms of power costs, my current box I've had for 7 years running 24/7 and at todays rates that would have cost at 12 watt over 7 years around £180, whereas it runs at 4 watt idle and so has cost me ~£60.00, the savings are actually much greater than that but hard to quantify exactly, but the current box is using much less power when under load compared to the N100. If it wasn't for the fact of needing 2.5G Ethernet ports to take advantage of faster Internet service, I'd still be using the same box and could see it going on for another 7 years.
I also wonder what is wrong with these boxes to need to draw so much power, especially given the N100 is suppose to be a low power chip, so how long will it last? I'm also frustrated with the lack of support from these Chinese companies, I emailed CWWK asking about BIOS updates and power consumption months ago and heard nothing. The BIOS will never get updated no matter what vulnerability is discovered. You get what you pay for.
Many of us except these types of kit from China are cheap for a reason and if they break after a year, we just buy another one, they are almost disposable, and we take a gamble when we buy them. That gamble for me hasn't paid off as this N100 appliance I don't feel confident in using, so I have to write off that expense and look for something else, so it doesn't always work out cheaper chancing what we get direct from China.
