They went to full speed when under linux... what sfp's are you using... perhaps it's a driver issue
Qotom Denverton fanless system with 4 SFP+
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I looked hard at the Qotom offerings but went with a N100 router I married to a x710-da2 just to use newer 10gig / n100 intel offerings. I posted it here and am aware it doesn't pass the sexy test.
I get 10gig iperf3 tests one way, and around 6-7gig --bidir results which was really surprising. My wan is capped out at 1.8gig (all Xfinity offers me here), so I know I am set. I did repaste the cpu when I janked it all together. It idles around 12-13w which is high, but when I enabled ASPM it idled around 10w. Some people cited instability with x226 ASPM (I never saw it) so I just left it off (2-3w isn't worth the worry). Chip never gets over 53C under stress test.
Opnsense worked great (25.7) and I have a pretty normie setup. No Suricata, PPPoe, just 3 subnets, but a hell of a lot of active users (big family) and friends always over constantly using my Plex server. PFsense CE wouldn't even boot, so I had no choice but OPNsense.
Really happy with it, but I know its not for everyone. I got the whole thing (n100 box, x710-da2, memory, storage) for around $200-ish.
I did do a lot of the tweaks on this page to maximize the performance based on reading here Hardware Tuning and Troubleshooting | pfSense Documentation and FreeBSD Network Performance Tuning @ Calomel.org and OPNsense Performance Tuning for Multi-Gigabit Internet | Binary Impulse
Thanks for reading my blog.
This is definitely not bad solution. The coolest thing about this CWWK box is definitely the PCIe slot. I’m not going to lie—a huge plate sticking out of the side of a mini PC is kind of ugly, but it’s better to have a PCIe slot than not. Maybe by using an extension cable from that slot, the card could be positioned differently. So, as long as it works, it’s a fine solution. There are a few alternatives that offer a similar level of flexibility, but not many.
Regarding the CPU, I also think the N100/N305 is a more universal solution. I chose this one and am currently waiting for it:
N305 Processor Q10932h6 10gb And 2.5gb 6 Lan Switch Fanless Business Mini Pc With Dp Hd Type-c - Buy Fanless Business Mini Pc mini Pc With Dp mini Pc With Type-c mini Pc With Hd Product on Alibaba.com
It doesn’t have a PCIe slot, but it has plenty of Ethernet ports, so I don’t need to expand it. If it works as intended, I’ll be pretty happy. The biggest downside is that apparently those 10G ports won’t work in BSD, so no OPNsense. I’ll be forced to use OpenWrt or something else.
I’m continuing to explore various solutions. Here are my top picks, which also offer some level of flexibility:
- M920q.
It has a PCIe slot and a single 1G Ethernet port built in. Power consumption should be the same or better than the N100. Some people report 4–6W idle, but I’ve seen others say 12–15W. It’s a really nice device, but it has its limits. You can install one network card into the PCIe slot, which could provide up to four 2.5G ports, but what if I also want a 10G port? I could get creative and use an M.2-adapted 10G NIC, but based on what I see online, it may or may not work, regardless of what you do. Will it work on my OS? Where would I place this additional 10G port? In general, it might be possible, but the final cost, the look of the setup, and the power consumption are all questionable. And what about cooling? Maybe a box that’s less “flexible” but specifically oriented toward networking—with all the required ports included—would be a better solution.
- This motherboard:
https://a.co/d/8wgi9Od
There’s a video showing a project based on it. I have no complaints; with two PCIe slots, you can get enough ports. But the price isn’t very low, and you’d have to buy more components to assemble it. It still might not be too expensive overall. There are also some other motherboards on Chinese websites with a CPU slot where you could install a “T” unit like the one in the M920q, but newer. They also have a lot of Ethernet/SFP ports out of the box:
Piesia Oem 12th Gen 6 Lan 4*10g Sfp Firewall Pfsense Motherboard Lga 1700 H610 H670 Q670 2*ddr4 Industrial 1u Server Motherboard - Buy Server Motherboard motherboard Server firewall Motherboard motherboard Pfsense pfsense Motherboard Firewall Pfsense Motherboard 1u Server Motherboard router Motherboard h610 Motherboard h670 Motherboard q670 Motherboard lga 1700 Motherboard motherboard Lga 1700 6 Lan Firewall Motherboard 4*10g Sfp Firewall Pfsense intel 12th Gen 6 Lan Firewall Product on Alibaba.com
In theory, this is great. If there was at least one good review, I’d buy it. Without that, I’m not sure how large it would be once assembled or how much power it would draw. It also costs quite a bit.
- MS-01:
If I don’t stop researching this stuff, I might buy it just because it is so cool. I was looking for reviews to see how much power it draws. If it’s around 10–15W idle, that might be the best solution I’ve found—at least for my needs.
As for the Qotom box in question, it’s not bad either. However, the lack of 10GBase-T, relatively high power consumption, and apparently no integrated GPU made me look elsewhere. The port selection is awesome, though! If a GPU isn’t needed and the power consumption can be optimized, it’s a great box.
I looked at this hard as well. It is a very proven solution based on the shear number of people using it. The CPU is definitely more beefy than the n100. The low power draw only applies to the lower c-state OS like windows / linux. I didn't find a single opnsense / pfsense instance showing it that low.
I went with the CWWK because it gave me 2x2.5GB AND 2x10GB ports which the m920q does not. Some people add a 2.5gb port via a wifi m2 dongle in addition to a network 2x10gb card, but that would look worse than my jankrouter anyway and I would still not have two ports. Clearly there is a cwwk box that has this many ports, but I felt the x710-da2 was worth doing this jank solution for over the ancient 82599 controller.
This solution worked ideal because of the network setup my home. Maybe I am old school, but I love physical network seperation via subnets and police all inter-subnet traffic via firewall rules and not VLANs. I am very new to VLANS and I am sure you wizards could do this easy peazy, but my setup just werks minus a few bugs with PLex DVR detection, etc.
I'd recommend this board if I had to do it again. For $110 ish, its a steal although you have to get a cheap intel cpu for it.
Good point. I will show myself out now and foreever. Ave atque vale.Maybe you could take all that off topic discussion to a separate thread?
Attachments
Kind of a weird reaction to be honest.
This discussion, that might be useful for other people too is better had in a separate thread instead of hidden inside an unrelated one. Don't you agree? I've been contemplating one of these + XL710-QDA1 (w/ QSFP -> 4 x SFP+ breakout). Seems like the card is at the absolute maximum length and the normal concerns about the temperature of the card itself.
There was no sass in my quote. Your point was clear and agreed. The roman quote I mentioned was often said by soldiers never to return; relevant to this thread and my action. I do confess my sins necro'ing a slow thread talking about this. This Qotom thread has been interesting to me although I do not admittedly own the hardware. I will say I work in an industry highly dependent on engagement farming, and most other tech boards cut a lot of slack to participants when asked "what should I buy?" if the answers aren't the tech product the thread was made for.Kind of a weird reaction to be honest.
Clearly I totally misinterpreted your reply.
Sorry about that. I don't think anyone has a problem discussing other hardware options as well in this thread when this Qotom box is at least one of them. I just felt that we were getting further and further away from the topic of this thread, with no clear end in sight. It also meant that useful discussion could be hard to find later when buried in an unrelated thread.
Nice case extension and NIC mounting solution btw.
I measured 13-14W idle with a pair of MS-01 (i5-12600H and i9-13900H) under Linux, with 64G of RAM and a 990 Pro 4T in each.
Minisforum MS-01 Power Use
A few months ago I mentioned that I was serving this site from a pair of Minisforum MS-01 mini-PCs. The MS-01 is a smallish PC with an Intel laptop CPU, 2 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, 2 10 GbE SFP+ interfaces, and a low-profile PCIe slot. I was able to get amazingly good performance–almost 60...
I'm pretty happy with the things, although I'm really curious what the MS-A2 can do.
Why don't you try asking in the thread about the MS-01, instead of a thread about a totally unrelated piece of hardware?
I guess everyone wants to hang with the cool kids.Why don't you try asking in the thread about the MS-01, instead of a thread about a totally unrelated piece of hardware?
Sorry, I wanted to ask about the 1U Rack Qotom and got confused by the previous comment.Why don't you try asking in the thread about the MS-01, instead of a thread about a totally unrelated piece of hardware?
My Qotom 1U has a WiFi card, dual M.2 NVMe SSDs, dual SATAIII SSDs and a 10BASE-T copper SFP adapter.
All these components get hot inside the chassis, so I want to add something to cool them.
Did any of you try DIY-ing a fan to blow air down on the motherboard?
I was thinking of drilling a 80mm hole through the top cover and mounting a 5V fan there.
Not sure how effective it would be, though.
All these components get hot inside the chassis, so I want to add something to cool them.
Did any of you try DIY-ing a fan to blow air down on the motherboard?
I was thinking of drilling a 80mm hole through the top cover and mounting a 5V fan there.
Not sure how effective it would be, though.
Understandable based on a number of the previous comments recently.
To answer your question, it could work of it actually has a PCI-E switch. I think the M.2 slot is limited to PCI-E 3.0 x2 or something like that though, so performance would be limited and the heat buildup might become a problem.
I have the fanless model so I don't remember exactly how the airflow is directed on the rack model.
Still, I would try to make sure it doesn't fight the airflow of the included fan.
Hopefully someone else has a more detailed answer.People who re-pasted the CPU -- were you re-pasting the rackmount version with its dinky HSF combo, or did you re-paste the passively cooled desktop edition?
I don't have an actual rack, so I have the desktop version, but I'm wondering if it's worth pulling it apart and slapping some arctic silver "ceramique" in there (which is the only paste I have on hand right now, but surely it's better than the factory Qotom stuff?)
Anybody else add a fan to the bottom of their desktop / passive version? I drilled a 40mm hole and stuck a 40x20mm Noctua in the bottom. I'm trying to decide if it makes more sense to use that single fan as intake, or exhaust. I have it mounted right below the RAM area, blowing into it right now. I taped over the antenna holes and the external SATA SFF-whatever plug, with the hopes that any "exhaust" happens through the SFP+ cages... But I fear that the single 40x20mm fan doesn't have the pressure to do much (I certainly can't feel any real exhaust). I have a second thinner Noctua (40x10mm) that I was thinking about putting on the other side, maybe dual intake would help? I haven't been able to figure out if there's any way to control the fan speed or even monitor it - BIOS doesn't seem to show anything even...
I have a pair of NVMe drives in mine, currently have Proxmox installed with the drives in ZFS Mirror... Intent is virtualized OPNsense or possibly other router software, plus some utility containers or other VMs (Unifi, Pihole, etc). I was going to do PCI-passthrough of two 10Gb ports to OPNsense, and one of them would get a WAS-110 ONU stick in it (I'm on AT&T Fiber and this is to bypass the ATT "BGW" gateway).
I don't have an actual rack, so I have the desktop version, but I'm wondering if it's worth pulling it apart and slapping some arctic silver "ceramique" in there (which is the only paste I have on hand right now, but surely it's better than the factory Qotom stuff?)
Anybody else add a fan to the bottom of their desktop / passive version? I drilled a 40mm hole and stuck a 40x20mm Noctua in the bottom. I'm trying to decide if it makes more sense to use that single fan as intake, or exhaust. I have it mounted right below the RAM area, blowing into it right now. I taped over the antenna holes and the external SATA SFF-whatever plug, with the hopes that any "exhaust" happens through the SFP+ cages... But I fear that the single 40x20mm fan doesn't have the pressure to do much (I certainly can't feel any real exhaust). I have a second thinner Noctua (40x10mm) that I was thinking about putting on the other side, maybe dual intake would help? I haven't been able to figure out if there's any way to control the fan speed or even monitor it - BIOS doesn't seem to show anything even...
I have a pair of NVMe drives in mine, currently have Proxmox installed with the drives in ZFS Mirror... Intent is virtualized OPNsense or possibly other router software, plus some utility containers or other VMs (Unifi, Pihole, etc). I was going to do PCI-passthrough of two 10Gb ports to OPNsense, and one of them would get a WAS-110 ONU stick in it (I'm on AT&T Fiber and this is to bypass the ATT "BGW" gateway).
I applied LTT PTM7950 on the CPU in my 1U Rack Qotom. It's a 10-15 minute process that involves removing 4 screws and putting them back without over-tightening the thermal solution. Should be easy enough to do, though IMO it's not worth it. PTM7950 did shave off 3-4 degrees when running a synthetic load (AIDA64), but under normal usage it didn't make a noticeable difference.
A high-volume low-pressure solution would require a decent sized "exhaust" hole and a fan larger than 40mm. On the other hand, a low-volume high-pressure solution (like this one) could work with a small "exhaust" through the SFP ports, but the noise might be more than you want from a desktop device.
BTW, if you want a WiFi module with a M.2 B Key that actually fits the Qotom board, I tested this one: AWM27921U
It works with both Windows 11 and OpenWrt, and leaves you with 2 usable M.2 slots for a dual NVMe SSD setup. Drivers are available on the manufacturer's website. I bought the module from this webstore, but unfortunately the seller currently lists it as "out of stock"
It works with both Windows 11 and OpenWrt, and leaves you with 2 usable M.2 slots for a dual NVMe SSD setup. Drivers are available on the manufacturer's website. I bought the module from this webstore, but unfortunately the seller currently lists it as "out of stock"