Topton Jasper Lake Quad i225V Mini PC Report

[ReturnedSword]

I can live with the QS part - but still feel like it is somewhat fraudulent for them not to disclose this part.

Running the SOC hot is OK too. I wouldn’t worry about hitting 80c on it regularly with the 105c Tcase. No issue there.

But the SoDIMMs running that hot are a problem. They will drop bits and possibly fail.

The NVMe running that hot is an issue too, though you can mitigate this by using a low-scale drive that doesn’t get as hot. It is still a concern.

For those who got the “newer” case bottom plate a 40mm quite fan makes this box quite usable. Though if you bought it as a “silent” fan less system - or for industrial use where fans raise other issues - then it is not suitable for purpose as advertised.

In the end I decided to keep mine. Running with a small fan, located in a hot garage, doing its intended job quite nicely.

Just the same - I won’t be doing business with Topton in the future nor will a recommend others do either.

You should at least escalate to AliExpress to try to get a partial refund if you’re going to keep your unit. It was clearly not what was advertised. Though the entire process is akin to pulling hen’s teeth; quite infuriating.

 

[xShARkx]

I can live with the QS part - but still feel like it is somewhat fraudulent for them not to disclose this part.

Running the SOC hot is OK too. I wouldn’t worry about hitting 80c on it regularly with the 105c Tcase. No issue there.

But the SoDIMMs running that hot are a problem. They will drop bits and possibly fail.

The NVMe running that hot is an issue too, though you can mitigate this by using a low-scale drive that doesn’t get as hot. It is still a concern.

For those who got the “newer” case bottom plate a 40mm quite fan makes this box quite usable. Though if you bought it as a “silent” fan less system - or for industrial use where fans raise other issues - then it is not suitable for purpose as advertised.

In the end I decided to keep mine. Running with a small fan, located in a hot garage, doing its intended job quite nicely.

Just the same - I won’t be doing business with Topton in the future nor will a recommend others do either.

Yeah, i agree! As long as the cpu is not an ES, the thermals(all components) can be worked on tbh and there are several ways to do it if needed ofc.

You talked about using fans and it not being silent, i think that if you use a good quality fan like noctua and such, it will be pretty "silent".

 

[xShARkx]

The SoC isn't the problem, it's the ram and SSD. The i5-1135G7 system I ordered heated the SSD to 85+, well past its operating range.

What kind of ssd are\were you using? High performance?

Yes, in industrial embedded deployments, high quality solid state capacitors, better VRM/power delivery IC, and a method to sink the heat into the chassis to try to keep as much heat away from the drives and RAM are a huge must. In addition, industrial embedded systems tend to use industrial SATA drives/modules or eMMC rather than NVMe drives, as well as industrial spec memory modules. Not that any of that would help in the abysmal thermal design of these Jasper Lake/Tiger Lake firewall appliances. Aside from lower production volume, the aforementioned are the main cost drivers and reason for cost premium. Just because a SoC is an embedded one doesn’t mean that the platform was designed for embedded situations.

The situation we have here is just another example of Chinese companies making something look passable, yet once a closer look is taken the innards fall flat. Fake “carbon fiber” and fake plastic “passive cooling fins” on some other mini PC offerings drive this point home. I really hate it when Qotom and Protectli are mentioned as they don’t make their own designs. They just rebrand as well, and charge a big premium for “testing,” which I don’t believe for a second. Granted there are ODMs that are more conservative in design, such as Yangling (Protectli ODM). This may end up “better.”

So overall knowing all the downsides, do the pros outweigh the bad for that price point? Or, the real question may be “can I tolerate the shortcomings for the price?”

Good points indeed.

But my take here is that we can have "3" main issues so far:

1 - Your x86 router\mini pc can come with an ES CPU
2 - Thermals
3 - Cheap and possibly inefficient and\or unreliable Power Supply

The first one is a big one! What i mean by that, is that getting an ES CPU while expecting to receive a retail one is a really bad thing since its not stated anywhere on the sales page that is an ES CPU, so the router\minipc should be returned without a question... In other words, its a situation that the person who bought can't easily fix it or work on it by themselves.

The second one can be worked on using several ways, so to me it can be fixed with some DiY if needed! Which is something that does not seem to be the case for everyone(by the reports on this thread), because not everyone is trying to use high performance NVME SSD's and such, in a passive cooled system and we know for a fact that high performance NVME SSD's will generate a lot of heat.

The third one can also be fixed easily by buying a good Power Supply.

I don't know how is it for you guys in the countries where you live? But here where i live(Brazil), i can buy these systems and pay only the price being charged on Aliexpress, in other words, in my country there is a really high chance that it will pass customs and it will be free of import taxes! So paying 200 bucks with free shipping for a V3 system is really cheap

So for me, the specs + the really cheap price + the ability of DiY to fixe some, if not all of the "possible" issues = pros outweigh the bad.

Also lets keep in mind that the thermals issue happens even with respectable and specialized manufactures! As for an example, i had thermal issues with an Asus RT-AC86U which i used from 2017 to 2020 as my home network router with asus-merlin and a lot of community scripts installed... My Asus had terrible thermals, with the cpu running always above 70°C(i was having thermal throttling issues in summer, which made my buy some fans for it) which was a common complain from every owner of that model and more recently, i saw reports of ppl complaining about the RB5009 from mikrotik being "too" hot.

 

[ReturnedSword]

What kind of ssd are\were you using? High performance?


Good points indeed.

But my take here is that we can have "3" main issues so far:

1 - Your x86 router\mini pc can come with an ES CPU
2 - Thermals
3 - Cheap and possibly inefficient and\or unreliable Power Supply

The first one is a big one! What i mean by that, is that getting an ES CPU while expecting to receive a retail one is a really bad thing since its not stated anywhere on the sales page that is an ES CPU, so the router\minipc should be returned without a question... In other words, its a situation that the person who bought can't easily fix it or work on it by themselves.

The second one can be worked on using several ways, so to me it can be fixed with some DiY if needed! Which is something that does not seem to be the case for everyone(by the reports on this thread), because not everyone is trying to use high performance NVME SSD's and such, in a passive cooled system and we know for a fact that high performance NVME SSD's will generate a lot of heat.

The third one can also be fixed easily by buying a good Power Supply.

I don't know how is it for you guys in the countries where you live? But here where i live(Brazil), i can buy these systems and pay only the price being charged on Aliexpress, in other words, in my country there is a really high chance that it will pass customs and it will be free of import taxes! So paying 200 bucks with free shipping for a V3 system is really cheap

So for me, the specs + the really cheap price + the ability of DiY to fixe some, if not all of the "possible" issues = pros outweigh the bad.

Also lets keep in mind that the thermals issue happens even with respectable and specialized manufactures! As for an example, i had thermal issues with an Asus RT-AC86U which i used from 2017 to 2020 as my home network router with asus-merlin and a lot of community scripts installed... My Asus had terrible thermals, with the cpu running always above 70°C(i was having thermal throttling issues in summer, which made my buy some fans for it) which was a common complain from every owner of that model and more recently, i saw reports of ppl complaining about the RB5009 from mikrotik being "too" hot.

Condolences for living in Brazil. It's a beautiful country to visit (I've been there a few times), but from what I've heard from friends living there it's pretty difficult in the DIY hardware scene whether for gaming or homelab to source parts.

As for the Topton units, honestly if they put a little more effort into the BIOS, designing a better chassis, and not trying to pass off ES/QS CPUs as "retail", I would have no problem saying the units are an absolute steal price-wise. I would even dare say that a better designed chassis would warrant a well-deserved $25-50 price increase. It's easy enough to throw something together and hope customers won't check or test the unit's stated capabilities, and another to just not give a damn.

Case in point: Zotac and ECS's Jasper Lake NUC-clones where Zotac charges a premium for a "passive" unit but gave no thought to adding vents so the unit can actually breathe, and ECS has its cheaper Liva but re-used a chassis from an actively cooled Gemini Lake unit and decided that slapping a bigger heatsink will do the job where the existing vents don't make sense since the chassis was designed for an actively cooled system. Zotac and ECS are solid "tier-2" ODMs that should know better, so even in the tier-2 space there are glaring issues. The Intel Jasper Lake NUC is near perfect though, aside from not having a great I/O port spread.

 

[Lance Longreen]

Does anyone have any update on the latency with a N5105 or N6005 vs let's say an i3 dual core (skylake, that I use currently) if these new Atoms have perceived greater latency than a more regular core i3 or core i5 in an ITX board, or if there is no latency difference.

My unit is arriving these days and the latency is much more important to me than just only looking at total throughput.

Would really appreciate if someone has some info or experience in this matter and could share it here !

 

[AinT83]

I have one of the v3 N5105 units and am seeing a strange behavior that the system will not boot without a monitor attached to one of the outputs. I’m using an HDMI dummy plug at the minute as a workaround but seeing high idle temps which I suspect is because the iGPU is being kept active all the time due to the dummy. In a regular system I’d attribute this to “halt on boot error xxx” but I don’t see that exposed anywhere in the BIOS. Anyone else seeing similar issue or have an idea for what setting in the bios could disable it?

Going to answer myself on this one. It was to do with the console in PFsense expecting a display to be present. Changing primary console to serial in advanced settings and also adding the tunable console="nullconsole" has me booting again without the HDMI dummy plug.

 

[AinT83]

A data point for the performance of the N5105 v3 version (with the usb-c) running PFsense. With P1 at 10W and P2 at 15W the box is sitting idle at ~50 degrees now. I'm able to push Open VPN traffic through it at ~850Mbps which causes the temp to go up to about 70 degrees where it seems to reach a stable state after about 4 minutes of transfer (downloading a large file via FTP from a remote site). This is with pfblockerNG-Devel running, 3x Vlans and about 20 firewall rules in place.

Overall very happy with the performance for this price point.

 

[xShARkx]

Condolences for living in Brazil. It's a beautiful country to visit (I've been there a few times), but from what I've heard from friends living there it's pretty difficult in the DIY hardware scene whether for gaming or homelab to source parts.

As for the Topton units, honestly if they put a little more effort into the BIOS, designing a better chassis, and not trying to pass off ES/QS CPUs as "retail", I would have no problem saying the units are an absolute steal price-wise. I would even dare say that a better designed chassis would warrant a well-deserved $25-50 price increase. It's easy enough to throw something together and hope customers won't check or test the unit's stated capabilities, and another to just not give a damn.

Case in point: Zotac and ECS's Jasper Lake NUC-clones where Zotac charges a premium for a "passive" unit but gave no thought to adding vents so the unit can actually breathe, and ECS has its cheaper Liva but re-used a chassis from an actively cooled Gemini Lake unit and decided that slapping a bigger heatsink will do the job where the existing vents don't make sense since the chassis was designed for an actively cooled system. Zotac and ECS are solid "tier-2" ODMs that should know better, so even in the tier-2 space there are glaring issues. The Intel Jasper Lake NUC is near perfect though, aside from not having a great I/O port spread.

Well tbh i don't see it being that difficult, it is expensive for sure! But we even have companies just like protectli over here like this one -> https://www.idtecnologia.com.br/ <- they are reselling these chinese systems just like protectli is doing.

And like i said, we here are able to import stuff without paying import taxes.

Also there is a new v3 model, which is 26 bucks cheaper and is using the same chassis as the v2 with the blue tech motherboard which has vents on the sides as well besides the ones one the bottom:

New chassis v3:

168.62US $ 41% OFF|Fanless Mini PC 4 Intel i225 2.5Gb LAN TPM2.0 Switch Celeron N5105 Soft Router Server ESXI Rugged pfSense Firewall Appliance|Mini PC| - AliExpress

Price = US $168.62

Old chassis v3:

194.31US $ 37% OFF|2.5g Soft Mini Router Celeron N5105 Quad Core 2*ddr4 Nvme Ssd 4 Intel I225 Nics Hdmi2.0 Dp Type-c Pfsense Firewall Router Pc - Barebone & Mini Pc - AliExpress

Price = US $194.31

 

[Snk B]

Well tbh i don't see it being that difficult, it is expensive but we even have companies just like protectli over here like this one -> https://www.idtecnologia.com.br/ <- they are reselling these chinese systems just like protectli is doing.

And like i said, we here are able to import stuff without paying import taxes.

Also there is a new v3 model, which is 26 bucks cheaper and is using the same chassis as the v2 from blue tech which has vents on the sides as well besides the ones one the bottom:

New chassis v3 -> 168.62US $ 41% OFF|Fanless Mini PC 4 Intel i225 2.5Gb LAN TPM2.0 Switch Celeron N5105 Soft Router Server ESXI Rugged pfSense Firewall Appliance|Mini PC| - AliExpress = US $168.62
Old chassis v3 -> https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004326534253.html = US $194.31

I think this new V3 chassis should not have a good heat dissipation, as well as the old version.
The new chassis is nice because it's smaller, but it's not as effective passively.
Too bad we don't have tests of this new chassis.

 

[xShARkx]

I think this new V3 chassis should not have a good heat dissipation, as well as the old version.
The new chassis is nice because it's smaller, but it's not as effective passively.
Too bad we don't have tests of this new chassis.

We would need someone to test it and compare them @Patrick

Since this new chassis have "big" vents on both sides which the old v3 does not have, so these vents allows air to flow from one side of the chassis to the other, in other words, "there will be" air moving over the whole mother board! Maybe we can even install small fans on those, if needed?

 

[Spectrum Nostalgia]

Got my M2 SSD and memory installed after opening up the chassis earlier. Ordered a replacement power brick @LucidityCrash - so hopefully I will have that in time for the weekend for some pfSense installing!

Will see how the temps go but there's obviously room for a 40mm fan and there's a PWM header on board, so it might be rude not to. Something like Noctua goodness ought to fit - don't think there's any chance of getting a greater than 10mm deep fan in there....

 

[SSMI]

Well mine showed up today. Its a 6 port N5105 from Topton. I was worried at first because the cardboard box was a bit damp. Things are looking okay so far.

Just started checking it over. HWINFO says it is a production unit. CPU mark was a bit higher than I expected.

About 30 minutes ago I started the Prime95 blend. CPU so far shows max 69 degrees. Boy is the case almost hot to the touch. I'll check on it here or there but let it run for a day to make sure it is all good. I don't expect it will ever really be loaded like this for that long of a time.

After a full day I may pull the board and re-paste everything. We will see how it goes.

 

[rwojo]

Okay this isn't good, got a 6 port N6005 unit from Topton, plopped my NVMe 970 EVO Plus and two sticks of 16GB Samsung RAM in... and it booted up just fine. Was a bit warm, but temps were still in the 80s.

I then proceeded to Memtest86 and walked away, came back to a unit with the power LED on, no activity, cold to the touch, completely frozen and will not boot up. Tried a different power adapter, etc. Nada...

Unit is 100% dead. Did it overheat!? This is crazy, opening a dispute right now.

UPDATE: Hmm, I left it unplugged (was already cold) for 5 minutes, and it booted up next time. I'm very suspicious of this obviously, going to do more tests. Have a fan coming to also see if that helps.

UPDATE 2: And now it is dead again, even while cool and a 40mm fan installed, and a desk fan on the unit. I was booting a USB to see if I can run CPU-Z, and while in Windows PE looking at the network it just shut down by itself, black screen. Ethernet shows lights, but no green power light. Plugging in the power adapter flashes the green, but it doesn't stay on. Ethernet always shows links. Unit will not boot. UGH!

 

[SSMI]

Well, I chickened out after seeing @rwojo's experience. Mine seemed to have leveled off and showed a max of 74 degrees. That is right on the edge of what I am comfortable with. If it had been in the 60s I would have let it run. I stopped it at under 3 hours. It should never be loaded 100% for so long though.

As a precaution and to increase life I am thinking of adding a fan. My case has the holes for mounting a 40 mm fan. Right now I have that blocked with a sata SSD. I'm think of switching to an NVME so I can add the fan. I'm having trouble finding one that is small and cheap. Does anyone have an amazon prime recommendation? I'm hoping for under $30. I'm just going to be running pfsense so I don't need a bunch of space.

 

[rwojo]

I think there's some damage as the unit will get stuck off/crashed even if cool, and won't come back alive unless I leave it unplugged for minutes (let's say ~5m).

I have a much better PSU on there as well, so it isn't that. Also tried to remove the 2nd DIMM and keep the NVMe out of there (just booting off USB).

I'm going to open a dispute.

 

[yxman]

Update: i hotfixed the smaller n5105 box with a noctua fan.

 

[xShARkx]

Update: i hotfixed the smaller n5105 box with an noctua fan.

How is the air flow? Is the air exhausting through the vents on the sides properly?

 

[dtw]

you want a proper power supply (MEAN WELL GST60A12-P1J or Mean Well GSM36E12-P1J) also you need a 2.1mm to 2.5mm plug, and some bios tuning and DR memory. power consumption is great on both boxes, idle under *nix ~3.9W (see attached vid).

I got a MW-JSL2.5G-4L myself but am seeing 7.5W idle (using a Mean Well GST90A12-P1M); could you elaborate on the tuning that you did in your BIOS? I set the following:

Advanced -> Power & Performance -> CPU

• Boot performance mode = Max non-turbo performance
• View/Configure Turbo Options
  • Energy Efficient P-state = enabled
  • Power Limit 1 override = disabled
  • Power Limit 2 override = enabled
  • Power Limit 2 = 20000 (= 20W)
• CPU VR Settings
  • PSYS PMax Power = 176
  • Acoustic Noise Mitigation = enabled
  • Slow Slew Rate for Vccln Domain = fast/16
• C states = enabled

 

[yxman]

@xShARkx its fine, yes its working as intended. Room Temp. ~27°C, NVMe dropped from 46°C to 32°C, CPU Temp dropped from 52° idle to 37°C... i used the ultra low noise adapter.

I'll monitor the box the next few days.

@dtw

Which os? I resetted the bios to defaults, didn't event touch the PL or CPU VR settings. Enabled Cstates, and the most important thing, ASPM for the PCIE Lanes (ASPM = AUTO (disabled by default)) and Link State Power Mgmt.

 

[xShARkx]

@xShARkx its fine, yes its working as intended. Room Temp. ~27°C, NVMe dropped from 46°C to 32°C, CPU Temp dropped from 52° idle to 37°C... i used the ultra low noise adapter.

I'll monitor the box the next few days.

So, would you say that its better to have a case\chassis with those vents on the sides than a case\chassis without those vents on the side?

Like here with the same system, but with different case\chassis?

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/topton-jasper-lake-quad-i225v-mini-pc-report.36699/page-13#post-343103