Dreamquest n95 mini PC

[Greg_E]

Going to be a discussion thread for the DreamQuest n95 powered mini pc. So far only one is tested but I bought 3 of them.

Although is clearly says all over the product that SATA does not work, mine shipped in with an SATA SSD installed. Great for me because I have some other m.2 SATA drives that I might use.



Windows, yes it has Windows 11 pro, and it's activated. It's also 23H2 which means you can set up a local account just by not connecting to the internet until initial set up is completed.





All of the Intel virtualization extensions were turned on in BIOS, the only thing I changed was to set the active SATA from "Hard Drive" to "SSD", not sure why they would have left the BIOS this way, but they did.

So what are these for? One of two things and I'll have to test to see which one they do.

#1 is continue running Windows and install the free NDI tools and use this for a USB 3.0 camera (uncompressed 1080/60p) to NDI conversion tool. This would then replace my old n5105 mini-pc doing this job, the n5105 would then be a mini-Kubernetese cluster.

#2 is to install another SSD (because I have them) and set up a mini-Kubernetes cluster, the old n5105 would stay Windows to handle the NDI camera functions.

The only detraction is that this uses a Realtek NIC, that can cause problems with some things, but I hope it will be "good enough" for what I need to do.

That's about it for now, the other drives are at work so some testing will need to wait a few days.

 

[Greg_E]

Hooked up to my cheapo watt meter, I'm seeing 20-21 watts while it does MS updates with the processor at 100%. Probably safe to run this on a POE+ 12v/2a splitter (24 watts), but I'm going to try and torture it a bit once the updates are done. It's looking like idle power will be around 10 watts, but won't know this for a few more update cycles since it was so far behind.

You can turn the lights off in BIOS, but they came right back on once Windows loaded I'll be revisiting this to turn them off!

I need to look around and see if there are any POE+ splitters that can give 12v at 30 watts, one of my switches is good up to 30 watts each port and 120w total, it would be nice to just power this cluster off of the POE+ and have a single power supply.

I wish 10 inch racks were cheaper, a stupid bent sheet metal shelf is $30 and the racks rival what my big Startech racks cost (per RU).

 

[Greg_E]

It seems to be stuck at 23H2 which is common with some of these cheap licenses, you get 2 years from the date of issue (for updates) so I have a few 2025 updates, but no feature updates and I'm sure that even security updates will be gone now. I'll fool with that later.

On the next reboot after updates, the lights stayed off.

I'm seeing idle with this bloated Windows at a low of 6.7, this is at the plug.

I loaded up OCCT to stress test it... It will peak at 21.6 watts for a short time, then settle down into 19 watts. Processor is at a whopping 94 C so I'm guessing this thing is limited by lack of cooling to about 21 watts max. It's idling at 50 C right now and 140Mhz clock. The smallest action sees this jump up to 9-10 watts. Started a second test and it peaked at 25.x for a few seconds so I'll have to think about the POE+ power again, might have to limit it to POE++ switches and 3a (36 watts) like an n100 machine I recently put in place.

 

[EasyRhino]

i didn't know they made these this adorably little.

 

[Greg_E]

Yeah, but as expected, it's kind of a turd because of the lack of cooling. But I needed small as a major condition, or a used Tiny Mini Micro would have been better and maybe the same price. The more I look at these, the more I think these n95 boxes will be my little Kubernetes boxes.

Bonus, the virus scan just finished an found nothing, I'm going to load up a different tool and run it again, just to be certain.

Also going to order some POE 12v3a splitters, apparently they will run up to 30watts on my AT/AF switch and I only need 26 watts for these little guys.

Need to look into some aluminum extrusions and build a little rack for these and the switch.

 

[Greg_E]

openSUSE LEAP Micro runs really fast on these stupid things. My only real point of comparison was a RasPi4, so not very telling, but as expected way less stuff going on compared to Windows.

I had 2 different "brands" of m.2 sata drives installed, put in 3 of the same Timetec 256gb drives. I may just wipe the windows off and use the 512gb drives for the kubernetes install/storage, I'll figure that out later if I install Longhorn on this cluster (very likely later down the road).

I may pull the wifi card out to save a little resources, not going to be using it anyway.

I also turned the stupid lights back on, not sure why but I did it. And the 30watt per port switch is handling present load (nothing installed but Cockpit), but I expect it will be fine and when it gets integrated back into the main lab, I'll have the full 36 watts that the POE splitters can offer.

 

[Greg_E]

Foobernetes cluster:


Using POE++ splitters that are rated to 36 watts to power these. At idle, including the cheapo switch, this system is 25-28 watts. It jumps pretty fast with even the smallest of workloads. Yes dusty stuff underneath, pretend you don't see it, pretend you don't see cables that are way longer than needed to connect this stuff.

The POE Splitters seem to register 1 watt each. The switch is rated up to 120 watts total and I think up to 60 watts per port. Since each host can get up to 30 watts, the switch is just enough headroom. [edit] the stupid LEDs don't change the power draw, but they also don't do anything. If they changed color with power draw or processor temp, I would leave them on. Just stupid lights doing no real work.

I'm currently running OpenSUSE LEAP Micro with Cockpit enabled, it's going to get RKE2 and Rancher as soon as I have time to deal with it. Too many other things dragging me down right now. I also resurrected an old Intel 4th gen laptop with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed to get me more immersion into that ecosystem.

And finally, a 10 inch rack was going to cost WAY TOO MUCH after I figured out how many shelves I needed and the price of the rack. The 19 inch shelf to match the rest of my lab was $15 shipped and I salvaged the shelf above it which is really multipurpose. Right now the Foobernetes cluster is in the real home rack. Something I need to clear out, especially if employment changes (which it might). Unseen are a bunch of old Cisco routers from when I was chasing Cisco certs, all that stuff should be removed and the rest of the lab could come home.

 

[Greg_E]

I went in and cut max power down to 18 watts, they will throttle somewhere near there anyway. If it seems to slow, I'll boost it up to 20.

Checked the LED again, just on or off, nothing about temp. or frequency associated. Would have been something of value if they changed from green or white to red when the CPU got up to throttle.

 

[Greg_E]

Pulled the SATA drives out last night and put in some short nvme drives, the power went up to 31 watts for the cluster. I messed with the clocks too, wanting to cut the thermal throttling before it really gets started. Rather it be slow all the time. It was set for 25 watts, I pulled it back to 18, no need to kill it with spikes.

 

[Greg_E]

Quick install of rke2 seems to have gone well, still less than 5% since I don't have any loads on them yet. Rancher is really the next thing to try and get running, then I have a lot of learning to do.