Topton Jasper Lake Quad i225V Mini PC Report

[Becks0815]

Quick question.....

I can buy a N5105 from China with "warranty" or a used Asus Q370I-IM-A-R2 board with 2x Intel NICs and a I5-9500T for the same price

Passmark: Intel Core i5-9500T @ 2.20GHz vs Intel Celeron N5105 @ 2.00GHz [cpubenchmark.net] by PassMark Software (passmark N5105: 4100, 9500T: 8200)

Which one would you pick if you plan to build a proxmox server running at least opnsense as vm, plus whatever fits into it? I am tempted to buy the used Asus board. It is a industry level mini itx board (high build quality) and has 4 SATA ports, and I hope to run it at similar power consumption level like the N5105.

 

[DomFel]

Which one would you pick if you plan to build a proxmox server running at least opnsense as vm, plus whatever fits into it?

A bit comparing apple to oranges:
- CPU: low power vs high power
- 4 NICs vs 2 NICs
- 2x 1000gbe vs 4x 2500gbe
- Ready box vs itx board
If planning to use proxmox and opnsense, with the asus you'll need a usb ethernet adapter, 2 nics are not enough.

 

[TombaWaterHouse]

Which RAM and M.2 NVME brands do you guys recommend using with the N5105 Topton ?
I am looking for 2x16GB and ~250GB storage

 

[Becks0815]

If planning to use proxmox and opnsense, with the asus you'll need a usb ethernet adapter, 2 nics are not enough.

Haven't played with proxmox yet, but can't you share a single NIC and assign multiple IPs (and machines) to the same NIC? So I can't assign one NIC for WLAN and share the second one with opnsense and another VM? That would be bad

 

[Stovar]

Only issue so far is I can't seem to get DisplayPort video out. HDMI works fine. Only took a brief look at the BIOS options but there's no obvious option to enable DP, if someone knows please let me know.

Was planning on getting the same or similar version from cwwk also with 6 port i226 and display port + hdmi and 5105, bit odd the display port does not auto detect, is it possible you still need to install the intel gpu and chipset drivers and then enable the display port under the intel settings?

maybe these intel drivers may help here

I was considering using it purely as an openwrt router box and maybe getting the 4 port same version to use an desktop mini pc with windows 11 since all I do is surf/YT at best but would certainly need display port and hdmi to work so that is an concern.

 

[Oarman]

Haven't played with proxmox yet, but can't you share a single NIC and assign multiple IPs (and machines) to the same NIC? So I can't assign one NIC for WLAN and share the second one with opnsense and another VM? That would be bad

You certainly can run a dedicated WAN port (passed through or not) along with a single port for Proxmox admin combined with LAN-side xSense and any other VMs on the virtual bridge. You may have a performance hit and it does limit how fancy you can get with various firewall features but you may not care.

 

[Oarman]

Just an FYI my J6413 box is up to 21 days uptime on the Proxmox side and OPNSense VM with kernel Linux 6.1.0-1-pve #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC PVE 6.1.0-1 . Zero crashes / hangs / stability issues at all.

I don't think I applied microcode updates. C-states enabled but not advanced C-states? in BIOS. I switched the Proxmox scaling governor from performance to powersave a few days ago. Power-related settings / tuning in the VM are whatever OPNSense defaults to, I haven't touched anything. I'm not even on CWWK's most recent BIOS rev. So I don't know what the stability secret sauce is.

 

[tusk9541]

Was planning on getting the same or similar version from cwwk also with 6 port i226 and display port + hdmi and 5105, bit odd the display port does not auto detect, is it possible you still need to install the intel gpu and chipset drivers and then enable the display port under the intel settings?

maybe these intel drivers may help here

I was considering using it purely as an openwrt router box and maybe getting the 4 port same version to use an desktop mini pc with windows 11 since all I do is surf/YT at best but would certainly need display port and hdmi to work so that is an concern.

I got it to work, for some reason it didn't work with 2 DP-HDMI cables and one adapter I use with other computers but connecting it to a DP monitor worked.

 

[DomFel]

For people having freezes in Proxmox + pfsense/opnsense, I have found where the issue was.

If you are passing VirtIO linux bridges to pfsense/opnsense, enable the bridge-stp in /etc/network/interfaces for all ports, including the management one, and set tso and gso off (install ethtoool before doing that).

Edit: using edge kernel 6.0.15, with pve-6.1 the system is unstable.

Example:

iface vmbr0 inet static
        address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/24
        gateway xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
        bridge-ports enp2s0
        bridge-stp on
        bridge-fd 0
        pre-up ethtool -K enp2s0 tso off gso off
        post-up ethtool -K vmbr0 tso off gso off

 

[Becks0815]

You certainly can run a dedicated WAN port (passed through or not) along with a single port for Proxmox admin combined with LAN-side xSense and any other VMs on the virtual bridge. You may have a performance hit and it does limit how fancy you can get with various firewall features but you may not care.

Hi,
I could live with this, but I went through the whole (1ll 113 pages) thread here and also looked into some other web pages and videos. The i5-9500T makes no sense for a low power system. The CPU has a much higher passmark rating, but to achieve this it has to draw much more power than e.g. the N5105. The 9500T has tdp of 35W, so it will peak at even higher levels while running in turbo mode and then potentially draw 40W or more.

My current J3160 runs at 50-100% CPU usage on a 200MBit symmetrical inet connection at 7-8W (measured on the 12V line), don't wanna replace it with a machine doing the same job drawing 15W or more.

It's a shame that we don't have statistics like "passmark points per Watt" for CPUs to pick the one with the required speed while keeping an eye on how much energy is required to achieve that.

 

[DomFel]

It's a shame that we don't have statistics like "passmark points per Watt" for CPUs to pick the one with the required speed while keeping an eye on how much energy is required to achieve that.

You mean dividing passmark points / TDP?
Simple math really.

On a side note: it would make MAYBE more sense dividing single/multi core performance in a specific test by TDP. PassMark is a very generic number, not exactly related to just performance but also price, availability, YoM.

 

[ServeTheHummus]

Passmark of 2800 (N100) is not good : PassMark - Intel N100 - Price performance comparison - the N5105 is rated with 4100, and especially in encryption (N100: 1600 MB/sec, N5105: 3100 MB/sec) and data compression the N100 is really weak. Let's wait for some more tests, but at the moment this thing is even beaten by a J4125 and all at least I hope is that they lower price of the N5105 while moving to the new cpu generation.

After two samples, N100's CPU mark is 3220, meaning that the second sample was much higher. At least it looks like the second run wasn't worse than N5100.

 

[ServeTheHummus]

You mean dividing passmark points / TDP?
Simple math really.

On a side note: it would make MAYBE more sense dividing single/multi core performance in a specific test by TDP. PassMark is a very generic number, not exactly related to just performance but also price, availability, YoM.

You'd also need to measure the power consumption during that specific test. TDP is not the number you'd want to use for that.

 

[Becks0815]

After two samples, N100's CPU mark is 3220, meaning that the second sample was much higher. At least it looks like the second run wasn't worse than N5100.

If I am not wrong the first rating was at around 2800, so the second one was around 3600.

Now take this value, divide it by the tdp (6W) and compare it with the N5105 (4100, 10W). As a rough estimate the N100 would be a better option if the absolute cpu power is enough to run whatever you plan to do.

 

[EasyRhino]

So it seems that within an OS everything is fine, in UEFI CPU temp is either wrong, or goes through the roof for some unknown reason.

So based off the n5105 model, the CPU isn't doing any power saving like p states or c states when it's sitting in the bios. the CPU is running full bore. My bios had a boot option for the boot cpu mode, something like "max turbo" and "max base clock" and maybe a "max battery mode". But that only applies while you're in the bios itself. once you boot to a OS, the OS takes over.

ryzen model is likely similar

Only issue so far is I can't seem to get DisplayPort video out. HDMI works fine. Only took a brief look at the BIOS options but there's no obvious option to enable DP, if someone knows please let me know.

so yeah that may just be a defective port, my displayport worked without any special effort. edit I see you got it to work when not using a DP-HDMI adapter.

also, I got the 'cheap' case on mine as well, and it's fine. Still has holes in bottom for a 40mm fan if I want it, and the cooling is fine. Plus the sides are more square so I can put it on it's side if needed.

 

[BoomBangCrash]

If I am not wrong the first rating was at around 2800, so the second one was around 3600.

Now take this value, divide it by the tdp (6W) and compare it with the N5105 (4100, 10W). As a rough estimate the N100 would be a better option if the absolute cpu power is enough to run whatever you plan to do.

It may go higher still. The cores in the N100 were designed to replace the N5105 with higher performance. Intel themselves say they are about the same as a Skylake era CPU clock for clock (which carried forward right up to 10th gen core).

Zero reason a pure CPU workload on the N100 can't be faster than on the N5105 AND be at 6w average vs 10w. GPU and uncore will affect that, but for most of the workloads here, they are CPU focussed.

I'll wait and see. I want a new bare-metal i226 firewall box (no chance i'll virtualise that). If the vendors manage to get the idle power down to 5w or so, i'll get one for Proxmox too. I'm currently running an HP 840 Gen 6 for that - 4 core/8 thread i5-8365u (4.1GHz boost) + 64GB + 2TB SSD, idles around 3w at the wall with Proxmox and 3 VMs running. Oh, and being vpro i've got web browser KVM too. [for those interested, about £200/$200 on ebay for the laptop ex the RAM etc, but just a single LAN of couse].

 

[EasyRhino]

For people having freezes in Proxmox + pfsense/opnsense, I have found where the issue was...

this is interesting. how often was it freezing before, and how long as it ran for after making those changes?

 

[tusk9541]

so yeah that may just be a defective port, my displayport worked without any special effort. edit I see you got it to work when not using a DP-HDMI adapter.

Yeah I was recently made aware that support for passive DP-HDMI adapters is required at the port, and it's an optional feature. The DP port just has the ability to output using the TMDS signalling of HDMI. It just so happens that the vast majority of devices have this feature enabled. It's the first time I've encountered one that doesn't, but it's not big deal for me on this unit.

 

[fl0w]

Hi,
I bought this model : https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004337724982.html
Intel VT-d is enabled (despite showing it's "Unsupported" in BIOS), but Proxmox 7.3-3 keeps showing that IOMMU needs to be enabled. Any idea how to solve this issue? I'd like to passthrough 3 of the 4 I225V NICs.
Edit: finally got it working by :
- Enabling non-free repository in /etc/apt/sources.list
- Installing intel-microcode
- Adding pve-edge kernel repository:

curl -1sLf 'https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/pve-edge/kernel/gpg.8EC01CCF309B98E7.key' | gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/pve-edge-kernel.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/pve-edge-kernel.gpg] https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/pve-edge/kernel/deb/debian bullseye main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-edge-kernel.list

- Installing pve-kernel-6.0.15-edge
- Adding "intel_iommu=on iommu=pt" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub
- Updating grub with update-grub

 

[ghostface]

I am on a very similar setup as you are (Intel Celeron N5105 machine with 4*Intel i226-V 2.5G NICs, proxmox, 6.1.0-1-pve kernel, pfsense 2.6.0) but somehow, I am facing slow network speeds on my pfsense vm (in use as my firewall):

- When I run iperf3 from a VM to Proxmox host, things are fast as expected (around 2.98 Gbits/sec)
- When I run iperf3 from a VM/Proxmox host/wired computer towards the internet, I constantly get 105 Mbits/sec (ISP supports 1 Gbit/s)
- When I run iperf3 from a wired computer to Proxmox host, I get around 941 Mbits/sec

For pfsense, I used virtIO bridges due to pci pass-through somehow is not working properly. Disable "Hardware Checksum Offloading" did not help.

Any suggestions?

UPDATE: I switched to OPNsense and experienced the same issue (I did get a max speed of 105 Mbit/s on my WAN interface) for my N5105 unit with 4 x 226-v (https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005004627244223.html). First, I thought that something might be wrong with the negotiation of the speed between the ISP provided modem (UPC) and the box but turned out, that the following tunables (System: Settings: Tunables) did the trick:

vm.pmap.pti = 0
hw.ibrs_disable = 1
net.isr.maxthreads= 1
net.inet.rss.enabled=1
hw.pci.honor_msi_blacklist="0"

In addition, I installed the os-qemu-guest-agent plugin and enabled it with the following tunable:

virtio_console_load=YES

I did not yet test but do highly assume that this would also solve my issue I had on pfSense.

What is weird however:

When I run iperf3 on the opnSense VM against any server on the internet, I get 105 Mbit/s max.



When I run https://www.speedtest.net/ from a connected device or a docker container, I get full speed:



Do you know why?