CWWK/Topton/... Nxxx quad NIC router

[johny_mnemonic]

So there's something wrong about the reported speed in pfSense (1700-2000MHz, 806MHz fixed max), but I can't tell what the root of the problem is. The BIOS or pfSense software itself?

I think this was posted here multiple times.
What pfSense shows you in the UI is nonsense. Go to CLI and either check cpu info in kernel/sysctl directly or use some tool for monitoring CPU frequency. This looks like a good description.
Another issue with pfSense (BSD) is that it can't work very well with C states. Someone reported only C1x states are supported but deeper ones are not (could have improved with latest BSD version though).

 

[gaaf]

There seem to be some concerns about temperatures. So here's my take on the temperatures and the cooling.

I Have a v2 model N305 4x2.5Gb with large fins, 32 GB RAM and 2TB WD black nvme. The case has the large fins. Unit is rack mounted on a shelf in a closet with an environmental temp of ~20°C.

Completely enclosed and without fans, but with very light load (almost idle), the CPU temp would rise to above 45°C. A simple `dd `on the nvme would let its temp rise to above 70°C within a sec and cause it to throttle almost immediately (1.6GB/sec > 200MB/sec). RAM became very hot, impossible to touch by hand. Kinda useless configuration out of the box.

I added a 12cm fan on top of the fins and set a very low fan curve in the BIOS. The fan runs at ~140RPM when CPU is almost idle. The CPU temp is now 32°C on low load and rises until 60°C under full load. No throttling and the fan at 700RPM is still inaudible. The huge fins have decent cooling capacity, it just needs a little bit of forced air through it.

The bottom side is another story. Adding a 8010 fan inside the case on the bottom plate (as by design) is completely useless. Due to the placement of the vent holes and the low clearance on the bottom outside of the case, the fan sucks or blows the just extracted heated air back through the case. No effective cooling possible.

I removed the bottom plate and mounted the 8010 fan on the shelf with a 80mm hole below it. It runs at 1.2kRPM on idle and sucks the air through the hole in the shelf and blows it into the bottom of the unit. Now there is a decent flow of cool air and the nvme doesn't throttle anymore, no matter how many GB it pumps. RAM stays cooler too. Still silent.

My conclusion: unless you don't need any performance, some tinkering is required. With properly adjusted fans, it's still silent. Just the looks of the otherwise nice looking unit suffer a bit.

 

[MBehr]

The bottom side is another story. Adding a 8010 fan inside the case on the bottom plate (as by design) is completely useless. Due to the placement of the vent holes and the low clearance on the bottom outside of the case, the fan sucks or blows the just extracted heated air back through the case. No effective cooling possible.

I actually preferred this method, as I stand my N305 (6L) and 1335U (6L) on their sides. In that arrangement it draws air in through the screened cutouts and exhausts it via the internal fan. I use no additional cooling fans. The temps usually run around 31ºC-39ºC (N305) and 35ºC-39ºC (1335U)

 

[francesc0]

Which bios option enables wake on lan? I can't seem to find it. "s5 rtc wake settings" is something different, right?

 

[mariosfx]

hi everybody, any recommendation for 5g modem module for those devices?

 

[AnthonyUK]

hi everybody, any recommendation for 5g modem module for those devices?

What OS are you looking at?

 

[mariosfx]

What OS are you looking at?

i am using pfsense on top of proxmox. so almost any os.

 

[mavrrick]

Similar to @gaaf my experience hasn't been to bad with temps.

I have the V1 version of the N305 4x2.5Gb with large fins. I also have the 4x m.2 NVME drive board and have 4 of the slots populated. One of the drives is below the M.2 expansion board. It is also running a 32GB DDR5 module.

The choice in M.2 drives is very important as some run allot hotter then others. My m.2 drivers are 2 Crucial P3Plus 4TB drives, a 1TB WD SN770 drive and a 2TB WD SN650E drive pulled from a Sandisk external drive. The WD drives run freaking hot. They idle doing nothing in the low to mid 40 degree's and under load the ramp up to 65-70 degree's C quickly. Fortunately they have never gone much beyond that. The Crucial P3 drives run very cool comparatively. One on the m.2 expansion board so and is the coolest drive in the unit. It generally stays around 35 degrees C and under load gets into the high 40's. The other is under the expansion board and runs a bit warmer, but is never as host as the WD drives. Make sure you get the right drives.

I have a AC Infinity USB powered 120mm fan that I set on top of the unit blowing down. This keeps the entire unit cool as a cucumber generally idling just under 30 degrees. Under full load the system hums along around 2300mhz and 60 degrees celsius. Things get exciting when you try max out only a few cores though as getting 2 cores to 3.8ghz will cause the temp to get around 75 degrees.

I 100% suggest a fan blowing on the top fins to help move the heat off. Otherwise you are depending on convection to pull the heat off. That may be fine when idle but under load you are just basically waiting for the case to fully heat soak and then temps will be horrible.

 

[gaaf]

Keep in mind that your M.2 drives probably never reach their rated performance as you put them in a x1 slot. That will also limit heat production. I sometimes need the full M.2. performance, hence the use of the x4 slot. This increases the heat production significantly and requires cooling on the underside of the case.

 

[mavrrick]

Keep in mind that your M.2 drives probably never reach their rated performance as you put them in a x1 slot.

Very true. The drives are running at 3x1 which is about 1GB/s. Generally is see arong 800-900MB. But that doesn't keep the heat down on all drives. As stated the WD drives run really darn hot even in 1x slots. If i wasn't running the 4xm.2 board i would probably have some kind of fan in the bottom with a Heatsink on whatever drive was their. I am thinking i would like to 3d print a 120mm Fan holder so i could remove the bottom cover and blow cool air up on the M.2 drives.

Regardless of that the Crucial P3Plus drive is considerably cooler then then WD SN650E or SN770 drives

 

[jatesh]

Very true. The drives are running at 3x1 which is about 1GB/s. Generally is see arong 800-900MB. But that doesn't keep the heat down on all drives. As stated the WD drives run really darn hot even in 1x slots. If i wasn't running the 4xm.2 board i would probably have some kind of fan in the bottom with a Heatsink on whatever drive was their. I am thinking i would like to 3d print a 120mm Fan holder so i could remove the bottom cover and blow cool air up on the M.2 drives.

Regardless of that the Crucial P3Plus drive is considerably cooler then then WD SN650E or SN770 drives

This is my solution, Drilled a large hole in the black plate and added an 80 mm Noctua fan. I also removed the front and back cover for air to escape.
With this my SSD temps are down to 30-33 C previously it was around 57-60 on normal operation without any load. Also, this is helping with CPU temp as well.

 

[fabZe]

Hello,
I have been the owner of a Hunsun N100 with six LAN ports for a few months now and wanted to ask if anyone has a bios with more options such as power limit etc., or where I can download it?
The bios says it is a CW-ADLN-6L bios. Many thanks

 

[TimoVerbrugghe]

Ey guys,

So I recently bought a N100 mini pc from aliexpress with this link: https://aliexpress.com/item/1005006213958117.html. Already my fourth minipc (I have 2 N100 with fan, 1 N5105 fanless and now this one). But admittedly, first time buying this specific version from this buyer.

First 3 all rock-solid, all running proxmox with a VM and iGPU passed through. But this one is causing issues, it's just randomly locking up (so full crash, display that I connected to it to see what would appear just gets a "no signal detected"), but the computer itself is still "running" (aka the power button still has a light). Only way to resolve is to cut the power and replug it in. Logs in proxmox and the VM tell me nothing, they just randomly stop, so I'm starting to suspect hardware...

- Ran a memtet86+ (bought the unit barebones, ram is from corsair), passed
- Currently running an s-tui stresstest on proxmox with no VMs running, idle temps around 55 degrees, temps under 30 min stress test load around 75 degrees (celcius)
- Replaced the power supply
- Latest version of proxmox with intel-microcode running

Am I missing something here or did I just get bad luck with a bad unit?

 

[Tzvia]

Hello,
I have been the owner of a Hunsun N100 with six LAN ports for a few months now and wanted to ask if anyone has a bios with more options such as power limit etc., or where I can download it?
The bios says it is a CW-ADLN-6L bios. Many thanks

I have the 6x i226v port Hunsn with the tall fins, but with the Pentium 8505 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BZPCYKQD/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_image?ie=UTF8&th=1 and found info on settings, along with a modded bios from user 'fta' here in this thread: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/cwwk-i5-1235u-6-port-i226-report.39341/. After verifying that that bios would work on mine, I flashed it and discovered all the 'missing' settings including Cstates. I took my time reading through all that thread, noting all the settings and am now very happy with it. I'm running PFSense on it bare metal, and it idles arouind 27~29c and when it boosts over 3ghz, it climbs into the upper 30s c. I was nervous flashing the bios as there seems to be quite a few different models from CWWK with similar spec but different bios's, and flashing the wrong bios for your PC would not be such a good idea... Thankfully I didn't have an issue. At the very least you might find some good information in that thread.

 

[famzilla]

Ey guys,

So I recently bought a N100 mini pc from aliexpress with this link: https://aliexpress.com/item/1005006213958117.html. Already my fourth minipc (I have 2 N100 with fan, 1 N5105 fanless and now this one). But admittedly, first time buying this specific version from this buyer.

First 3 all rock-solid, all running proxmox with a VM and iGPU passed through. But this one is causing issues, it's just randomly locking up (so full crash, display that I connected to it to see what would appear just gets a "no signal detected"), but the computer itself is still "running" (aka the power button still has a light). Only way to resolve is to cut the power and replug it in. Logs in proxmox and the VM tell me nothing, they just randomly stop, so I'm starting to suspect hardware...

- Ran a memtet86+ (bought the unit barebones, ram is from corsair), passed
- Currently running an s-tui stresstest on proxmox with no VMs running, idle temps around 55 degrees, temps under 30 min stress test load around 75 degrees (celcius)
- Replaced the power supply
- Latest version of proxmox with intel-microcode running

Am I missing something here or did I just get bad luck with a bad unit?

I've seen elsewhere in this forum that possibly repasting the CPU could help. If there's a significant gap between the CPU and heatsink then get some copper shims to make the gap a lil smaller.

 

[paulbram]

So I'm super tempted to pick up one of these N100 devices, but a bit nervous given the cooling issues people seem to be having. I then stumbled on this Beelink EQ12 on Amazon: Amazon.com: Beelink Mini-PC, EQ12 16GB DDR5 500GB SSD, Intel Alder Lake-N100 (up to 3.4GHz), 2.5G Dual LAN Mini-Computer Supports WiFi6, BT5.2, USB3.2, 4K@60Hz Triple Display, Home-Server/Network Firewall : Electronics

I get that it only has 2 ports, but for pfsense that's all I want/need anyway. Am I missing something? Or is this a far better deal than one of these aliexpress machines? Wifi6, USB3, USBC etc. I get that this thing is meant to be more of a workstation PC, but the fact that this appears to have some active cooling seems like an advantage.

Thoughts?

 

[mrmr256]

I wanted to update you all on my TopTon/Ali Express issue. The Topton Seller has finally provided me with return shipping address. However, when I google the return shipping address there are numerous references as a shipping/forwarding location that has been used by fraudulant overseas buyers. I messaged TopTon via Ali Express for clarification and verification. Has anyone else had similar return experience and was it the same address?

7515 n leadbetter rd, portland, Oregon - Google Search

 

[TimoVerbrugghe]

I've seen elsewhere in this forum that possibly repasting the CPU could help. If there's a significant gap between the CPU and heatsink then get some copper shims to make the gap a lil smaller.

Yeah tried that, still crashing . Also already tried another PSU so I think it’s just unstable due to hardware issue… hope that I can get another or a refund :s

 

[famzilla]

Yeah tried that, still crashing . Also already tried another PSU so I think it’s just unstable due to hardware issue… hope that I can get another or a refund :s

Any idea what temps your SSD/RAM area are reaching? What's the temp readout on the NVME?

 

[TimoVerbrugghe]

Any idea what temps your SSD/RAM area are reaching? What's the temp readout on the NVME?

mmm, I don’t have a temperature reader that I can point at it. Does an nvme drive expose temperature through sensors or s-tui command? NVME drive I used is from Lexar.

The bottom of the case (where the nvme drive is) is cooler than the top though and cpu temps are around 65-70 degrees while stress testing so within limits…