I went down a rabbit hole of running a trunk line style router for a while. It was a fun journey of seeing what underpowered and thrown away thin clients would run opnsense/pfsense. I was pretty blown away with how well everything worked.
Yeah basic router functions do not require that much power! Just look at the minimum specifications for pfSense/OPNsense. They are higher than a consumer grade router hardware that is tailored for one purpose (unlike general purpose computing devices), but they are still so low that you can run it on almost any relatively modern hardware in the last decade. That's why people joke that you can run pfSense/OPNsense on a potato. Of course, all of that changes once you start adding CPU intensives services such as VPNs and IDS/IPS. I was still using a low-powered mini PC from 2017 until about 2 years ago. It worked well even with IDS/IPS until I finally got 800 Mbps and later 1.2 gigabit download speeds (I have cable so I don't have symmetric gigabit, unfortunately). It would only handle up to 600 Mbps with IDS/IPS but not bad for an old system.
It is pretty sweet! There are a few tradeoffs vs the Pi 5: uses more power and runs a bit hotter (enabling C-states may help reduce power and heat when idling). But as a desktop, the X4 is so much smoother of an experience. I can watch a 4K video on RUclips without dropping frames. The Pi 5 struggled when I try to view videos full screen even 1080p videos. I was able to get about 3,500 MB/s read and about 2,100 MB/s wrote on the small NVMe module I was using so it has good storage performance. (You can likely get an NVMe module that has better write performance than the one I got but I was going for budget friendly and didn’t need a lot of storage for my needs). If you need the HAT support of the Pi ecosystem and power consumption, there are still situations where a Pi may be more suited.
I went down a rabbit hole of running a trunk line style router for a while. It was a fun journey of seeing what underpowered and thrown away thin clients would run opnsense/pfsense. I was pretty blown away with how well everything worked.
Yeah basic router functions do not require that much power! Just look at the minimum specifications for pfSense/OPNsense. They are higher than a consumer grade router hardware that is tailored for one purpose (unlike general purpose computing devices), but they are still so low that you can run it on almost any relatively modern hardware in the last decade. That's why people joke that you can run pfSense/OPNsense on a potato. Of course, all of that changes once you start adding CPU intensives services such as VPNs and IDS/IPS.
I was still using a low-powered mini PC from 2017 until about 2 years ago. It worked well even with IDS/IPS until I finally got 800 Mbps and later 1.2 gigabit download speeds (I have cable so I don't have symmetric gigabit, unfortunately). It would only handle up to 600 Mbps with IDS/IPS but not bad for an old system.
nice vid
Thanks!
This would would make an awesome travel router.
Yes since it’s so compact!
this is the best SBC on the market the price is amazing compared to a Raspberry Pi 5
It is pretty sweet! There are a few tradeoffs vs the Pi 5: uses more power and runs a bit hotter (enabling C-states may help reduce power and heat when idling).
But as a desktop, the X4 is so much smoother of an experience. I can watch a 4K video on RUclips without dropping frames. The Pi 5 struggled when I try to view videos full screen even 1080p videos.
I was able to get about 3,500 MB/s read and about 2,100 MB/s wrote on the small NVMe module I was using so it has good storage performance. (You can likely get an NVMe module that has better write performance than the one I got but I was going for budget friendly and didn’t need a lot of storage for my needs).
If you need the HAT support of the Pi ecosystem and power consumption, there are still situations where a Pi may be more suited.
SBC Router on a stick
Yeah even more router on a stick than having 2 interfaces where one is dedicated to the WAN and the other is for all LAN/VLAN networks.