n5105 units, cooling and chassis difference

[psyko_chewbacca]

Hi,

I want to purchase a n5105 + i226-V 4 port firewall unit from Topton.
They offer the same hardware in 3 different cases.
There's 1 unit cheaper in a smaller chassis, I was wondering if temperature wise, it would be a bad move to cheap out a bit and get this over the bigger units that seem to have more thermal mass and more heatsink fins.

Unit in question: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004824817567.html

Larger unit (and more expensive) for comparison: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004337800876.html


If there are temperature issues with the smaller unit, I will fork out the extra cash. But obviously, if I can avoid paying more well...

Thanks.

 

[thestryker6]

I think it very much depends on what your workload is going to be. I'm running a basic pfsense box with 3 ports bridged to act like a switch with pfblocker_ng running and don't have any issues. However the CPU gets very hot under sustained workload so I wouldn't want to use one of these if the CPU was going to be pegged for any length of time. I did replace the paste and used some thermal putty on mine, but it will easily get into the 80C range just the same (I've left default boost running so it does hit 2.9ghz fairly often).

This is the case design I've got: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256804676785241.html

 

[psyko_chewbacca]

I think it very much depends on what your workload is going to be. I'm running a basic pfsense box with 3 ports bridged to act like a switch with pfblocker_ng running and don't have any issues. However the CPU gets very hot under sustained workload so I wouldn't want to use one of these if the CPU was going to be pegged for any length of time. I did replace the paste and used some thermal putty on mine, but it will easily get into the 80C range just the same (I've left default boost running so it does hit 2.9ghz fairly often).

This is the case design I've got: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256804676785241.html

Thanks for the reply.

I don't plan on having intense workloads 24/7.
It's going to act as my main firewall/router with a couple virtualized services
nginx to reverse proxy to all my services.
Pi-Hole
unbound

Basic VLAN and maybe port based QoS. Will have to see if I need it with my new 1.5/1Gbps connection.