Finally my N305 box (no RAM no SSD) has arrived
from CWWK on Aliexpress. The box came with DAJING power adapter and pre-installed H-board that transforms M.2 WiFi slot into a 2280 NVMe and a couple of additional boards the nice guys threw in since I asked the questions in this regard, but they have difficulties testing the boards. Maybe some day I will come down to test them.
It has
case variation B with Y-shapes. I have to say that the copper heat conduct between the CPU and the case is not very flat.
I have both side of this cooper thing repasted with MX-4, which got me +50C max in stress tests with Package PL1 = 10000 and PL2 = 25000. In the stress tests the CPU frequency of all cores is throttled down to 2200MHz after about 30 seconds. I do not like it at all, maybe I will risk to increase Package PL2 to play with. Or would be that a bad idea? In my use case this is a OPNsense appliance aka a main router in the apartment and additionally a server for a bunch of jails with various services. Most of the time I expect the load 10-20% tops, but sometimes I build pkgs in poudriere (a lot of pkgs) for an update and it make the load almost max for hours.
I successfully tested 32GB Crucial CT32G48C40S5 4800MHz, which I have found with a nice 120 months (10 years, Carl!) warranty, with two passes of memtest86+ and some PassMark tests as well without any errors in Windows and Ubuntu (more are ahead). Even in the open case on the table it gets very hot to touch (impossible to touch, actually) in the memtests and sensors in memtest86+ report about 78C max and in OpenHardware in Windows shows about 65C in full Prime95 stress tests. Cannot find any heatsink for SO-DIMM, alas.
I also successfully tested Apacer PP3480 AP1TPP3480-R 1TB SSD in both M.2 slots (one in H-PCB). It came with quite nice 5 years warranty and claimed 2000 TBW and DWPD 1.1 (they position it as a NAS SSD, whatever that means). The second Apacer SSD on the way to allow me a ZFS mirror. As a heatsink I bought a cooper slug about 3mm height and replace the thermal pad with one that claim 20W/m.k. Actually, even without the heatsink a SSD does not go above 53C, but since this is a "server", you know.
I notice that an SSD on the H-board leaves less than 10mm to the cover (about 8.5-9mm, hard to measure exactly), which makes impossible to install even 80x80x10 fan. Since I added a heatsink to each SSD I have abandoned the idea to have an internal fan. If I after some tests see a heat problem with SSDs I think of an external 4pin 80x80 fan (among ones with decent CFM the thinnest are 25mm, grrrr) for an inbound airflow, but it would require some additional holders for the case.
First time power-on took several minutes to POST, I even went to find a DP cable but, eventually, heard the comforting beeps. HDMI works without issues with my ancient Dell U2410 192x1200. It boots from TF/MicroSD card as well as from various USB flash drives. In BIOS Boot section you can select exactly boot device among all USB used you prefer to boot from.
So far I have managed only to tune the BIOS according to the
Becks0815's suggestions (thank you very much!) and run Passmark:
Code:
PassMark PerformanceTest Linux
Intel Core i3-N305 (x86_64)
8 cores @ 3800 MHz | 31.2 GiB RAM
Number of Processes: 8 | Test Iterations: 1 | Test Duration: Medium
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
CPU Mark: 9340
Integer Math 36167 Million Operations/s
Floating Point Math 22296 Million Operations/s
Prime Numbers 31.3 Million Primes/s
Sorting 13759 Thousand Strings/s
Encryption 7246 MB/s
Compression 93149 KB/s
CPU Single Threaded 2314 Million Operations/s
Physics 719 Frames/s
Extended Instructions (SSE) 4180 Million Matrices/s
Memory Mark: 2910
Database Operations 6235 Thousand Operations/s
Memory Read Cached 21310 MB/s
Memory Read Uncached 12713 MB/s
Memory Write 10925 MB/s
Available RAM 25783 Megabytes
Memory Latency 30 Nanoseconds
Memory Threaded 32595 MB/s
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm quite disappointed with CPU passmark since the page on Ali claims 10475 for N305. Maybe some tuning in FreeBSD / OPNsense will fix that. Maybe this is because of the Package PL2 cap. Will see. I'll report on other tests and OPNsens / FreeBSD installation with ZFS mirror later.
github.com
link.springer.com
