Qotom Q10922H6 - Fanless N100, 2x10GbE, 4x2.5GbE

[curl]

Anyone have any experience or thoughts on the Qotom Q10922H6 S13? It's a fanless mini pc with N100 cpu, 2x10GbE ports (Marvell AQC113), and 4x2.5GbE ports (Intel I226-V).



The goal would be to put my TP-Link Deco BE85 router into AP mode, and use this as a router (probably running OpenWrt, since the aqc113 apparently isn't supported in FreeBSD yet). I don't need to do anything fancy in terms of routing (no VPN, packet inspection, etc) - the Deco is just driving me crazy with its lack of even basic network management features, its occasional instability, and I'm also a bit distrustful of TP-Link security.

I also don't really want to mess around with SFP+ since my modem is 10GBASE-T, and I've already got a lot of cat6a wiring in place.

The price is certainly attractive at around $200 (shipping not included). I've had my eye on the iKoolCore R2 Max, but this is $100 less and has 2 extra 2.5GbE ports.

Questions would be:

• Can the N100 do 10Gbps throughput? Or at least close to that?
• Any concerns about overheating? This would be in a room that isn't air conditioned and can get upwards of 40C in the summer. The specs claim an operating temp up to 50C, but not sure if I trust that.
• Any other fatal flaws in my plan?

Edit: it looks like they are also make versions with N305, etc, but currently on aliexpress/amazon it looks like the N100 is the only version available.

 

[blunden]

Anyone have any experience or thoughts on the Qotom Q10922H6 S13?

Questions would be:

• Can the N100 do 10Gbps throughput? Or at least close to that?
• Any concerns about overheating? This would be in a room that isn't air conditioned and can get upwards of 40C in the summer. The specs claim an operating temp up to 50C, but not sure if I trust that.
• Any other fatal flaws in my plan?

Edit: it looks like they are also make versions with N305, etc, but currently on aliexpress/amazon it looks like the N100 is the only version available.

Interesting. I've been looking for a box like that to replace an old fanless mini server.

I have the Intel Denverton based box from Qotom that has been discussed at length at this forum (as well as reviewed by STH) as my main router and it seems to be of good quality as far as I can tell. Hopefully that applies to this new box too.

Yes, the N100 has no trouble doing NAT and routing as well as firewalling at 10 Gbps as far as I know, as long as the NIC is given enough PCI-E bandwidth. That's at least the impression I've gotten from the benchmarks I've seen.

The Aquantia chip in question should support PCI-E 3.0 so that's promising. A lot of these N100 boxes from other manufacturers tend to use PCI-E 2.0 NICs that end up being bottlenecked.

Not sure about the cooling, but the case looks decent. As with all of these fanless boxes, you should stick to power efficient SSDs, not put the latest and greatest M.2 drive available in there as some people pointlessly do.

I would imagine that the N100 model will be much easier to cool passively than the N305.

 

[curl]

Thanks for the response. I decided to order one, so will soon find out if it's any good!

 

[blunden]

Thanks for the response. I decided to order one, so will soon find out if it's any good!

I look forward to hearing your impression of it once it has arrived. Did you go for the barebones model or one of their RAM + SSD kits?

 

[curl]

Did you go for the barebones model or one of their RAM + SSD kits?

I ordered the barebones, and went with cheapest memory and SSD on Amazon:

Fanxiang S500 Pro 256 GB
Princeton 8 GB DDR5 4800 SODIMM

Although I only saved about $13 buying the memory and SSD separately (DDR5 memory was more expensive than I expected), so kind of regret not just buying the kit.

 

[blunden]

I ordered the barebones, and went with cheapest memory and SSD on Amazon:

Fanxiang S500 Pro 256 GB
Princeton 8 GB DDR5 4800 SODIMM

Although I only saved about $13 buying the memory and SSD separately (DDR5 memory was more expensive than I expected), so kind of regret not just buying the kit.

I wonder what SSD and RAM they include in their bundles. The RAM is probably good, but I don't necessarily trust their SSD. That's why I wouldn't mind having the option of including just the RAM.

 

[blunden]

I heard back from Qotom.

Apparently the two Aquantia NICs are each connected at PCI-E 3.0 x2 (instead of x4) so they won't be able to reach 10 Gbps in both directions simultaneously, unfortunately. It's a result of the Alder Lake-N CPUs only having 9 lanes of PCI-E 3.0 in total, but I had hoped they would use a PCI-E switch to allow unused lanes to be use for the NICs.

The unit also ships with a DAJING power supply, presumably the one we've seen them use before.

I might still end up ordering one, but I'll have to think about it some more. Initially I would be using one of the 2.5 Gbps interfaces anyway since I've used up all the 10 Gbps interfaces in my switch, but still. It's quite a bit more expensive than the CWWK manufactured boxes after all.

EDIT: Looking again, it's not that much more expensive than the CWWK boxes. I remember those being cheaper, but maybe not.

To clarify, PCI-E 3.0 x2 should still be roughly 16 Gbps in bandwidth so even with overhead it might still be more than one might need in practice in most cases. Would still have been nice to see a fanless box like this with full speed 10 Gbps ports. Since the Aquantia NICs support NBASE-T, they could've skipped the Intel 2.5 Gbps NICs and given that bandwidth to the 10 Gbps NICs. I assume they wanted to support multi-WAN situations though.

 

[blunden]

Further details from Qotom:

The SSDs they use are from Phison and the RAM from either Samsung or Kingston. Nice to know they use name brand stuff for those things.

 

[RomanB]

Can the N100 CPU handle running OPNsense as a router/firewall and a Jellyfin server under Proxmox? I believe that when playing a video on a TV via Jellyfin, the CPU of this box will also need to handle decoding 4K files. Can it be too much?

 

[blunden]

Can the N100 CPU handle running OPNsense as a router/firewall and a Jellyfin server under Proxmox? I believe that when playing a video on a TV via Jellyfin, the CPU of this box will also need to handle decoding 4K files. Can it be too much?

The N100 has a GPU, unlike the Denverton SoCs in the other Qotom box. I would expect the GPU to be able to handle the decoding and encoding tasks for you. I'm sure you can find posts from people who have used the N100 as a Jellyfin server if you look around on Reddit.

 

[RomanB]

Here's N305:

N355 Processor Q11032h6 10gb Aqc113 Lan And 2.5gb Lan Firewall Switch Business Mini Pc With Type-c - Buy Fanless Business Mini Pc mini Pc With Dp mini Pc With Type-c mini Pc With Hd Product on Alibaba.com

N355 Processor Q11032h6 10gb Aqc113 Lan And 2.5gb Lan Firewall Switch Business Mini Pc With Type-c - Buy Fanless Business Mini Pc mini Pc With Dp mini Pc With Type-c mini Pc With Hd Product on Alibaba.com

www.alibaba.com

This page also has a video of a product.
I'll be trying to order this one.

 

[blunden]

Here's N305:

N355 Processor Q11032h6 10gb Aqc113 Lan And 2.5gb Lan Firewall Switch Business Mini Pc With Type-c - Buy Fanless Business Mini Pc mini Pc With Dp mini Pc With Type-c mini Pc With Hd Product on Alibaba.com

N355 Processor Q11032h6 10gb Aqc113 Lan And 2.5gb Lan Firewall Switch Business Mini Pc With Type-c - Buy Fanless Business Mini Pc mini Pc With Dp mini Pc With Type-c mini Pc With Hd Product on Alibaba.com

www.alibaba.com

This page also has a video of a product.
I'll be trying to order this one.

Both are directly from Qotom, but it seems like they haven't listed the N305 model on AliExpress yet.

Nice to have a video though.

 

[curl]

The Q10922H6 arrived today and I had a couple hours to play with it. Some thoughts so far:

I was pretty impressed with the packaging from Qotom. It was wrapped in two cardboard boxes, and completely encased in dense foam.The unit itself is a brick - even heavier than I expected. Opening it up and accessing the RAM and M2 slots is very easy, although the screws were so tight (probably to prevent them coming loose during shipping) that I actually had some trouble unscrewing them with my little precision screwdriver. For ~$200 was definitely impressed with the build quality.

Installing OpenWRT is just a matter of flashing the M2 SSD with the OpenWRT image before plugging it in. There are no drivers for the two 10GbE ports in the default OpenWRT image - so that caused me some confusion as those were the ports I was initially plugged into. But once I figured out that only the 2.5GbE ports were working, I was able to access the router (via the web interface and SSH) and install the drivers in a single command. There was a bit more config needed to tell OpenWRT to use one of the 10GbE ports as the WAN interface, and all the other ports in the in the "br-lan" interface - but that was pretty much all that was needed to get it fully functional as a router (I also set a password and changed DNS to cloudflare). It took me a bit of time since it was my first time using OpenWRT, but I imagine for anyone who has experience using OpenWRT it would all be a breeze.

I didn't do any real scientific performance testing, but I did try running a bunch of speed tests and was generally seeing a max of about 8 Gbps down and 4 Gbps up. This is about the same as I would get with my old router, maybe a tad slower, and my experience is that speedtest results fluctuate a lot according to time of day, which server I connect to, etc. So I won't draw any conclusions other than it's more than fast enough for my relatively modest needs. Maybe in the future I will try assigning both 10GbE ports to the LAN and running iperf to see what the maximum throughput is (though that wouldn't be a perfect test either since it wouldn't be running firewall rules, NAT, etc).

Power draw from the wall is about 16 watts with two 10GbE ports and one 2.5GbE port in use. This was a little higher than I expected based on reviews I had read about the N100, but I guess 10GBASE-T is pretty power hungry. CPU load is pretty minimal - I don't think I saw it get higher than 0.15 when I was running speed tests. So I think there's plenty of headroom for installing other OpenWRT packages.

The case does get warm in use, but not alarmingly so. I am planning to add a heatsink to the SSD because it's kind of just stewing in its own hot air with no airflow on the underside of the case, which makes me a bit nervous.

Those are my thoughts so far. Looks like there is lots of fun stuff to play with in OpenWRT, and I'm happy to finally be rid of that horrible Deco app. If anyone has any suggestions for useful packages in OpenWRT, or how to improve performance or reduce power consumption, I'm all ears!

 

[blunden]

If anyone has any suggestions for useful packages in OpenWRT, or how to improve performance or reduce power consumption, I'm all ears!

You could look into enabling software flow offloading.

The bandwidth is probably limited to roughly 16 Gbps based on the PCI-E bandwidth.

 

[curl]

The bandwidth is probably limited to roughly 16 Gbps based on the PCI-E bandwidth.

I just ran some iperf3 tests, and the results were... better than expected?

Client is a Windows PC with a Marvell AQtion 10G network adapter, and server is an M4 Mac Mini the optional 10GbE adapter (AQC113). Tests were executed with the bidirectional flag on the client: iperf3.exe -c <server_ip> --bidir. And server was just running iperf3 -s.

First is a bidirectional test with client and server on the same LAN:

-----------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on 5201 (test #2)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Accepted connection from 192.168.1.139, port 50338
[  5] local 192.168.1.134 port 5201 connected to 192.168.1.139 port 50339
[  8] local 192.168.1.134 port 5201 connected to 192.168.1.139 port 50340
[ ID][Role] Interval           Transfer     Bitrate
[  5][RX-S]   0.00-1.01   sec  1.08 GBytes  9.27 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   0.00-1.01   sec  1.01 GBytes  8.66 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]   1.01-2.00   sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   1.01-2.00   sec  1.10 GBytes  9.49 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]   2.00-3.00   sec  1.11 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   2.00-3.00   sec  1.11 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]   3.00-4.01   sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   3.00-4.01   sec  1.11 GBytes  9.49 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]   4.01-5.00   sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   4.01-5.00   sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]   5.00-6.00   sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   5.00-6.00   sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]   6.00-7.01   sec  1.11 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   6.00-7.01   sec  1.11 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]   7.01-8.00   sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   7.01-8.00   sec  1.10 GBytes  9.49 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]   8.00-9.01   sec  1.11 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   8.00-9.01   sec  1.11 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]   9.01-10.00  sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   9.01-10.00  sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]  10.00-10.01  sec  2.50 MBytes  8.93 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]  10.00-10.01  sec  2.12 MBytes  7.59 Gbits/sec                 
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID][Role] Interval           Transfer     Bitrate
[  5][RX-S]   0.00-10.01  sec  11.0 GBytes  9.46 Gbits/sec                  receiver
[  8][TX-S]   0.00-10.01  sec  11.0 GBytes  9.40 Gbits/sec                  sender

For the second test, I put the server on the WAN interface on a different subnet, so the router would be sitting between client and server:

-----------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on 5201 (test #3)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Accepted connection from 10.100.0.1, port 51585
[  5] local 10.100.0.2 port 5201 connected to 10.100.0.1 port 51586
[  8] local 10.100.0.2 port 5201 connected to 10.100.0.1 port 51587
[ ID][Role] Interval           Transfer     Bitrate
[  5][RX-S]   0.00-1.01   sec   980 MBytes  8.18 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   0.00-1.01   sec  1.09 GBytes  9.36 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]   1.01-2.00   sec  1.00 GBytes  8.63 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   1.01-2.00   sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]   2.00-3.01   sec  1.11 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   2.00-3.01   sec  1.11 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]   3.01-4.00   sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   3.01-4.00   sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]   4.00-5.00   sec  1.11 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   4.00-5.00   sec  1.11 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]   5.00-6.01   sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   5.00-6.01   sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]   6.01-7.00   sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   6.01-7.00   sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]   7.00-8.00   sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   7.00-8.00   sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]   8.00-9.00   sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   8.00-9.00   sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]   9.00-10.00  sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   9.00-10.00  sec  1.10 GBytes  9.48 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]  10.00-10.01  sec  13.8 MBytes  9.50 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]  10.00-10.01  sec  13.9 MBytes  9.59 Gbits/sec                 
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID][Role] Interval           Transfer     Bitrate
[  5][RX-S]   0.00-10.01  sec  10.8 GBytes  9.27 Gbits/sec                  receiver
[  8][TX-S]   0.00-10.01  sec  11.0 GBytes  9.47 Gbits/sec                  sender

This is my first time running iPerf, so it's possible I may be overlooking something here. But it looks like the router is managing bidirectional 10Gbps throughput?

 

[curl]

You could look into enabling software flow offloading.

One other note - the above tests were run with Software flow offloading enabled, which did indeed make a huge difference. When disabled the CPU load quickly spiked to 100% and transfer speeds took a bit of a hit:

-----------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on 5201 (test #3)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Accepted connection from 10.100.0.1, port 64740
[  5] local 10.100.0.2 port 5201 connected to 10.100.0.1 port 64741
[  8] local 10.100.0.2 port 5201 connected to 10.100.0.1 port 64742
[ ID][Role] Interval           Transfer     Bitrate
[  5][RX-S]   0.00-1.01   sec  1010 MBytes  8.43 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   0.00-1.01   sec  1010 MBytes  8.43 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]   1.01-2.01   sec  1.03 GBytes  8.89 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   1.01-2.01   sec  1.03 GBytes  8.89 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]   2.01-3.00   sec  1.03 GBytes  8.88 Gbits/sec                 
[  8][TX-S]   2.01-3.00   sec  1.03 GBytes  8.88 Gbits/sec                 
[  5][RX-S]   3.00-4.00   sec  1.03 GBytes  8.85 Gbits/sec                 
...

 

[blunden]

One other note - the above tests were run with Software flow offloading enabled, which did indeed make a huge difference. When disabled the CPU load quickly spiked to 100% and transfer speeds took a bit of a hit:

Yeah, it's a pretty great optimization since it saves a lot of needless processing.

 

[homeserver78]

Apparently the two Aquantia NICs are each connected at PCI-E 3.0 x2 (instead of x4) so they won't be able to reach 10 Gbps in both directions simultaneously

The throughput of PCIe 3.0 x2 is 1.969 GB/s according to Wikipedia. This is in both directions simultaneously since PCIe is full duplex (or rather "dual simplex" to be technically correct). So this should be ~50 % more than needed for full bandwidth in both directions simultaneously?

 

[blunden]

The throughput of PCIe 3.0 x2 is 1.969 GB/s according to Wikipedia. This is in both directions simultaneously since PCIe is full duplex (or rather "dual simplex" to be technically correct). So this should be ~50 % more than needed for full bandwidth in both directions simultaneously?

Hmm. I'm always unsure of whether the PCI-E bandwidth numbers are in each direction (i.e. total bandwidth double) or not. I thought it said in the datasheet that NIC in question is a PCI-E 3.0 x4 NIC, but I noticed that they also say this:

PCIe Gen4, Gen3 and Gen2 interface with x1/x2/x4 lane-widths delivering maximum flexibility

This link suggests that the 16 Gbit/s is indeed "simplex speed", which would suggest that you are right and I'm wrong. Seeing as I am considering buying one of these as a server, being wrong is a bonus.

@curl Thanks for testing this in practice!

 

[Some Dinosaur]

Hi,
I'd like to buy a router for my home and stumbled on this thread. I really like this appliance, but my absolute necessity is WiFi support. On the product page it says:

1 x M.2 for 4G/5G (B key, Type: 3042/3052)
Wi-Fi support via a Converter Card
(Option)

I didn't even know there are different types of M.2 slots to be honest. Do you know how I'm supposed to get WiFi card into this box?I need a converter from M.2 B key to ... what exactly? As far as I can see there's WiFi cards for Key A, Key E and Mini PCI-E. I'm lost.