R86s Router

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Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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@Patrick Really looking forward to seeing your full review on this box. I'd love to see your impressions. I know you've got a lot in the queue right now but this thing is potentially really interesting.
It will be one of the next 3 videos. I had very bad food poisoning this last week. Just starting to feel normal again now. Your thoughts are very similar to mine.
 

UhClem

just another Bozo on the bus
Jun 26, 2012
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NH, USA
...
  • ... I'd love to see what happens if you try simultaneous 10g full duplex tests - at that point I think the PCIe 3.0 x4 interconnect to the Mellanox daughter card would limit you to something around 30gps net transfer speed rather than the 40ish that 2 10gbe full-duplex links would require.
That shouldn't be a limitation -- since PCIe is full duplex. PCIe gen3 x4 will do 3.2-3.6 GB/sec in each direction, concurrent. (And I suspect the ConnectX-3 has the muscle also. The CPU ???)
 
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Nov 13, 2022
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I am really interested in building a 2.5gbit+ (future proof, expecting 5gbit to be a thing in a year or so) home firewall.

Opensense bare metal support (hoping both the 2.5 and 10gig ports work natively), as I am not too interested in running proxmox on it but would if it still performed well.

Also OpenVPN / Wiregard tunnel throughput for routing traffic over a privacy VPN would also be interesting as that has significant CPU overhead.
 
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rfox

Member
Jun 10, 2022
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Germany
@Patrick Really looking forward to seeing your full review on this box. I'd love to see your impressions. I know you've got a lot in the queue right now but this thing is potentially really interesting.

Being impatient, of course, I went ahead and bought one. Initial impressions after playing with it for less than 24 hours:
  • I bought it on Ali from the Mii store. Used standard shipping and it arrived in 18 days (ordered Nov 11, arrived Nov 29). I don't think I've ever gotten anything through Ali any faster, even using DHL shipping options. No idea how that happened!

All that a rather long post to let you know how much I am looking forward to your full review.
I am also quite interested in this little guy ! Quick question - what country are located in ? Curious about the delivery times to Europe (more specifically, Germany) ?!? Looking forward to Patrick's review as well - can only watch so many Chinese videos with subtitles . . . . ;-)
 

PigLover

Moderator
Jan 26, 2011
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@Patrick - very nice review! Thank you.

Just a nit - you said at ~17:34 that you can't install Windows onto the eMMC. I wanted Windows for a few test tools to try it out and I didn't have any problem installing directly to the eMMC. The windows installer recognized it without requiring a driver and it loaded just fine.

Also wanted to point out that if you really want Proxmox installed on the eMMC it can be coaxed into allowing it. Not a supported config but it does work.

I know the limited CPU will never let it do a lot of work at 10Gbe, but I do hope you'll hand this box over to Rohit or Will for them to try out what it actually can do. I think their insights on capabilities with higher speed networking would be really interesting.
 
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Nov 13, 2022
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I see this device trunked to a switch on a 10gbit port DAC or Fiber being a big win to route between vLANs at greater than 1 Gbit speeds.
 

Ken Jacques

New Member
Jul 8, 2015
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If I understood the video correctly and I want to use it as firewall and do simple natting, then the cpu should not have an issue pushing 10g to my 10g switch?
 

etnica

New Member
Dec 7, 2022
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I wonder the same, if it would be able to NAT with a set of few firewall rules.
No IDP/IPS.

Have 10 gigabit connection at home, but no router which can handle it currently.
 

rfox

Member
Jun 10, 2022
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Germany
Great video review as usual!! :) Now I'm a bit on the fence - was going to get one (G2) but after hearing the issue with emmc - I'm not convinced at that price it's worth it! :rolleyes: I understand to save money they use emmc - but that makes the device less useful without using a nvme on top - because emmc is not considered reliable as boot device - that's why Proxmox doesn't officially support it - althought you can install debian first and then Promox on top - but the disk thrashing would make the emmc go south real quick! I might hold off a bit and see what other experiences are gathered around this device . . . still very cool for te price perfomance ratio! I could get the G2 model for €345 right now . . . very tempting!
 

rfox

Member
Jun 10, 2022
80
41
18
Germany
Great video review as usual!! :) Now I'm a bit on the fence - was going to get one (G2) but after hearing the issue with emmc - I'm not convinced at that price it's worth it! :rolleyes: I understand to save money they use emmc - but that makes the device less useful without using a nvme on top - because emmc is not considered reliable as boot device - that's why Proxmox doesn't officially support it - althought you can install debian first and then Promox on top - but the disk thrashing would make the emmc go south real quick! I might hold off a bit and see what other experiences are gathered around this device . . . still very cool for te price perfomance ratio! I could get the G2 model for €345 right now . . . very tempting!
Also - how does that affect longevity of the device - having emmc?? Can the emmc be replaced if necessary?? BAd enough the memory is non-replaceable or up-gradable :(
 
This will be the next video. Tomorrow is DPU day, so hoping Alex is done tonight so this video/article can go-live on Wednesday.
@Patrick thanks for the detailed review.

One clarification question: While the CPU cannot encrypt a full 10Gbps with IPSec, my combined OpenMPTCProuter (OMR) WAN uplinks will be no more than 2Gbps passing through the WAN SFP+ NIC. (The LAN SFP+ NIC will have to handle more traffic for intra-VLAN routing).
I have simple firewall rules and no IDS or anything else that transmutes traffic. Well, other than OMR.

Do you believe that this system can handle running OMR with 4-5 WAN uplinks that are let's say 2Gbps in total a) without an outer IPSec wrapper and b) with an outer IPSec wrapper?

Or is going the Quick Assist route the only viable path for what I am trying to get accomplished?

Big Thanks!
-- Lucky
 
Nov 13, 2022
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I highly suspect I can get away with the lower spec G2 version, but feeling really uneasy about what adding some DNS filtering or some client based OpenVPN or Wiregaurd tunnels will do to over all performance or what realistic throughput would be. The iPerf tests don't tell a complete story in the reviews as I believe that is just to the interface not routed or nated through the device.

Personally my goal is SFP+ with greater than 2.5Gbit throughout with a few of those features enabled. Price of the G2 is very tempting.
 
Nov 13, 2022
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Not sure if anyone noticed but it looks like GOWIN replied in the youtube comments stating that a U and T variant are also in the works.



@gowinfanless

@steelfalconx2000 We plan to invite Jeff to review another model of our GW-R86S series, that will be our U or T model which we still didn't launch!
 

rfox

Member
Jun 10, 2022
80
41
18
Germany
Not sure if anyone noticed but it looks like GOWIN replied in the youtube comments stating that a U and T variant are also in the works.


@gowinfanless
@steelfalconx2000 We plan to invite Jeff to review another model of our GW-R86S series, that will be our U or T model which we still didn't launch!
Oh great :oops: My luck :rolleyes: I just placed my order for a G2 - hope I don't regret it . . . Any word on the proposed specs on the U and T models ?!?