Re: the USB port at 35:10, it could be that rather than do proper calculations and account for how having multiple connectors in the chain might affect the signal integrity of the port, putting them into the hub means the signal gets 'conditioned' again when it leaves the USB hub. I.e. they won't have any loss in integrity from going through multiple connectors, cables, traces, etc.
Thanks, glad you like it! While investigating the chips the thought did cross my mind of "do people actually care or should I just show very clear close up shots of the chips to let people read part numbers" so glad to know it's actually appreciated!
Weird decision 11:54 to put the VGA at the back, without any USB. It requires the user to pull USB-cable through a rack, which can be a huge pain in the rear.
Very good point - being on the back didn't really bother me too much, but I hadn't considered the lack of rear USB. Think for this I'll be setting it up to use the serial console - especially since it'll be installed in a wall cabinet with no rear access.
it just depends on the manufacturer of the chip, some manufacturers will likely have their own architecture although some might use ARM or another standard architecture. Another term for these chips are Super I/O, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_I/O @@jonathanmarshall3974
My guess is they use GL3523, to provide more power to the USB ports at the front. These USB hub chips often have multiple ports, and can be configured via firmware, I2C or pin jumpers to configure each port as upstream or downstream, and isolate them. But my guess is that the ports on the CPU board itself cannot really provide few Amperes for each of these ports, or support anything other than 5V. So my guess is they use the GL3523 in 1-1+1-1 config, and source current directly from the PSU and some regulator on that add on board, instead of drawing power from the CPU board (which has super tiny power cables).
Great article. Got one of these units and made a few mods of my own First off the PSU, Chucked out the FlexATX PSU that it came with and wired up a 65 watt open frame PSU, was very easy to do. Just got a IEC power connector to go in where the old PSU one was, wired it up to the open frame unit and bingo, i also added in a hardwire switch to be able to cut the 240v going into the PSU so I can cut the power in the event of a PC hard lockup, like you suggested. I also moved the soft power switch from the back to the front of the case, makes it easier when its in a rack to be able to turn the power off. With the open frame PSU i get a max of 22 watts from the system at the wall plug, so quite happy. In Pfsense i had the same issue you did with bridging with the Mellanox ConnectX4, so that got thrown out and replaced with and Intel OCP card, quite easy to swap out and worked a treat.
Wi-Fi client native is useful in colo and datacenters, you can sometimes use the site's wifi as out of band connection. Although many datacenters have stopped us from doing it...
11:00 As someone who has worked in datacenters for over 15 years, this is 100% true. Old LCD displays with VGA only and MAYBE DVI. The VGA cable will have a few broken pins as well. We really hate colocation clients who bring in servers that have DP/HDMI only. Then it's find the adapter that will work. For a time as well, Dell was shipping servers with mini DP only. They quickly went back to VGA. I don't think VGA will ever go away because of us in datacenters.
Can definitely relate to your point on broken pins! I remember opening a config file in Vim using a crash cart and couldn't for the life of me work out why none of the values were set. Turns out that Vim's syntax highlighting was colouring the values red and the VGA cable had a broken red pin!
Also worked a lot with colo/datacenters here in northern Europe, most actually have HDMI capable displays, that aren't broken, but we always kept the special connectors/cables in our rack cabinets, not really much of an issue, for the few people that would need it.
Hi ,there ,in the next version,we will have one HDMI in the front, one VGA in the rear, totalof two slots for display.We keep the VGA there as some of the uses still need it
Great video! I actually bought one of these as well and took delivery a few days ago. Its a great little device that I'm using to run pfsense in front of the rest of my Ubiquiti based network. One thing to note, the Mellanox card is in a PCIE 3.0 x4 slot so its maximum bandwidth is 32 gbps. So it's not actually possible to get the max speed out of the dual 25gb SFP28 ports at the same time. That being said, I still went for the 25gb version over the 10gb version. I figured for $50, why not get as much bandwidth as possible out of it. Additionally, I'm unlikely to be fully saturing both ports at once anytime soon. Hopefully a future version is able to allocate more PCIE lanes to it and get the full bandwidth though.
@@matldn2697 yes, except for the COM port. I see the three 2.5 gb Ethernet ports and the two sfp28 ports. I'm currently using one of the ethernet ports for WAN and one of the sfp28 ports for LAN.
Whoh. Nice. My current 25Gbps router is 2U with ASrock Rack mobo, Ryzen and custom PCIe cards (Intel and Broadcom mostly), all running Linux Debian / Vyos. 1U would be really nice. 2x 25Gbps is nice. A bit limiting for something more than firewall, NAT or things like that. Would be nice to have extra PCIe slot for some more ports, for maybe bigger router. If VGA port was on front, that would be perfect. But I can work with serial. Price is great, but it is a little bit of hotpotch design.
Considering getting this and swapping the PSU for the HDPlex 250W GaN passive PSU. It looks like it would be pretty easy to do and I guess would fix the power efficiency and help resolve the noise too. It would be a for a small rack in an office so the noise is a concern and worth the added expense.
Just found your video. This was exactly the review and teardown I was looking for. :) Really appreciate how thorough this is. I'm guessing an hour long published video involved multiple hours of raw video and editing. :) I'm looking at upgrading my OPNSense box, which is currently a Dell Optiplex 5040 SFF with an i5-6500 with a single 2.5 Gbps connection to the WAN and a single 10 Gbps downlink to the core switch. As the owner of a slightly over-amped home network, one thing I'm not entirely sure about at this point is what I'd need to be doing to need an N300 vs. an N100 in, say, OPNSense to actually *need* the N300? Which PSU did you eventually decide to go with? The smart power switch is really neat, but as I was watching you use it, two things occurred to me: (1) what happens if you accidentally flip the switch back to ON when you've just switched it to OFF and its still going through the shutdown process? (2) The current revision has what looks like a momentary power button on the front, near the GOWIN logo. I'm assuming that's now the soft power button, and the rear switch handles hard power on/off? Has that been confirmed anywhere? Re: The odd issue with BSD and the Conntect-X4, were you able to test with a second X4 or an X2? I'm very unlikely to ever use that configuration, but I'm curious how that turned out. On the performance test, what is "a single threaded NAT download?" When is this likely to happen in pfSense? Is it something that would be mitigated by having a downstream 10 Gbps core switch to keep the firewall from having to do as much heavy lifting? Awesome video. Thanks again!
Another small thing, aren't the SFP ports marked as SFP+ which tops out at 10Gb/s? If they are 25 Gb/s ports then they should be marked as something else? Obviously it's because they can just fit a different internal NIC for different versions of the product, so just an observation.
Yeah, the labelling should technically read "SFP28" for the 25GbE model and "SFP+" for thr 10GbE model. That said, I don't really blame them since labelling them "correctly" would require a complete batch of new cases for the, probably relatively low volume 25GbE version of the machine. I suppose it's at least better than other firewall appliances such as this I've seen with ports labelled "SPF" and "FSP"
Are they? I keep hearing how they are not, and definitely not powerful enough to saturate all the ports, along with having to read WHICH features work over cpu or not....I hear too many have problems, and opt to spend 5x as much for the stability.
I'm not aware of any issues and they've been very well reviewed, I think they just focus more on selling through external marketplaces rather than their own website. I find that most Chinese manufacturers of this type of kit have very basic/outdated websites
I've just been on their website and you're right, all product links lead to 404's, it does not fill you with confidence in the company. Plus the only reason that Cameroon reviewed this device is because he got it as a freebie !!!
You've now commented 3 times on this video about it being a review sample - I always carry out due diligence when agreeing to review samples. In this case, yes, the website is poor, however they have a proven track record of delivering products and I have seen no complaints that would make me concerned. Similarly, a flashy website doesn't mean that a company is trustworthy!
Hi all, does anyone (Cameron?) know if: 1) they have any plans for a fanless version? 2) the PSU can be (safely) replaced with a 12v power brick, fitted internally, to eliminate cables and a fan? 3) there is (or will be) a way to replace the two high speed LAN ports with another two 2.5gb ports? I really don't need more than 2.5g. That would be my perfect SOHO router.
You're unlikely to find many rackmount machines that are fanless - a regular case isn't going to dissipate much heat passively and rackmount equipment is generally designed to run in relatively hot environments where reliability is more important than being silent. Given your requirements, you're probably better off picking up some sort of Mini PC type device with 2.5GbE - many of these are fanless and have cases that essentially act as heatsinks to cool the internals. Of course you lose the rackmount form factor, but there's nothing stopping you putting it on a rack shelf.
@camerongray1515 I'm confused...Gowin appears to already have a fanless rack mount version of a similar product (if you ignore the psu fan). Hence I was wondering if they'd also do one of this model. ruclips.net/video/aY0Okb6eI-E/видео.htmlsi=lLSVdEs121OggPLT
Interesting, I hadn't seen the fanless version there before! Those machines seem to essentially be a more polished version of the one I demonstrated here. The machine I have was originally sold as part of a preorder system and was shipped out to buyers and reviewers around the same time. They then seem to have, rather than release the same model for retail sale, use the feedback on this model to release the improved version shown in the STH video for retail sale. That said, I'm not convinced with the passive version - sure it'll be fine on a bench or if it's in a cool rack with a tonne of space around it, but expecting the heatsink to vent through the top of a piece of rackmount kit is a very strange decision since rackmount kit should be expected to be mounted right up against other devices, I suspect you might end up running into issues if you were to shove the fanless version into a warm rack with another device mounted directly above it.
It looks on disassembly that the main cpu board has some extra unconnected ports near the hdmi connector. What are they? Additional usb or hdmi or something else?
Are you referring to the white connector next to the HDMI connector? That connects over to the USB/LED/PSU board - I suspect it carries the LED and power switch signals.
@@camerongray1515it might be a bad angle. Say at 10:15 you see all the blue usb and hdmi lead connecting to the board. In between them is a gap and what appears to be another connector on the board which contains no cable. It might be an illusion due to the angle
Ahh, that one, that's a USB-C connector that would be exposed on the outside of the R86S version of this. Suppose you could probably use it to add an internal USB device of some sort!
To have the VGA, on the back, and USB on the front.. is a bummer.. to have one connected to a KWM, you want VGA and USB on the same side.. on the back.. BUT is you use a trolly setup you want the to on the front..
VGA, Power, switch etc. -> everything should ALWAYS be at the front on such network rack-devices...The front of such a device is usually mounted at the back og a rack if it is mixed with servers. Impossible to acces the back when mountet between long devices. If possible the airflæow also shold be from back to to front if it is ment to be used in datacenters with cold/hot zones. I'm talkning by many years of experience here 🙂
Thanks. I was hoping you used 1500 since a lot of people would use a device like this for routing their internet connection, so data for NAT performance with 1500 MTU is the most useful thing to benchmark. :)
i'm actually making something simular as my router. i have a usb 4g card and no cabled network where i am renting so i will need to connect my servers over wifi somehow
It entirely comes down to your own requirements - For me, I need something that can fit into a shallow, wall mounted cabinet that only takes up 1U of space. Building anything in a 1U case is an absolute nightmare - even a standard I/O shield is too tall so you end up needing to buy specific parts designed for a 1U case and by that point, you may as well just buy a prebuilt server.
Any particular reason why I shouldn't be using a neat rackmount machine and instead should build a PC and "make room" which would mean precariously balancing a machine in a cupboard instead of neatly mounting it in a centralised rack that contains all my network hardware? You're more than welcome to build whatever you want, but some people, myself included, would rather use rackmount appliances. "Make room" is easy to say, however you don't know my requirements - I have a small wall mounted comms rack to hold switches, patch panel terminating all my network runs and my router. This rack can only fit short depth machines and a deeper cabinet would protrude too far into the cupboard which is also required for storage. Or in small offices, you often also have a relatively short depth cabinet sitting on show with nowhere else a deeper machine could be installed.
@@camerongray1515 build a 4u rack box if you have to - be kind to yourself - you can do so much better than this machine and for less cost - compare openwrt to opnsense or pfsense (opnsense has better licensing)
I never said that it's impossible, I just said that it's relatively tricky to build in a 1U case (having done it before). I'm very fussy when it comes to building machines so I don't want to be dremeling down I/O shields to fit a 1U case so I'd need to focus on server boards which have 1U I/O shields available which are all pretty expensive. Then for coolers, you're either needing to exclusively use boards with soldered CPUs which tend to have small coolers, or you're needing to find a suitable 1U cooler which tend to not be the quietest things in the world. I'm not saying there are no suitable cases anywhere in the world, but it's certainly not particularly easy to find one that is shallow enough to fit in my comms cabinet with front I/O including a front expansion slot. If you want to build your own machine, feel free, if you want to buy a NUC and stick it on a shelf, be my guest, if you want to run your router in a VM then that's fine too. Hell, if you don't care about this sort of thing and just want to use your ISP's router, then that's cool. I'm purely presenting this as one option for people who want this sort of thing. It's up to the viewer to decide whether they want to buy it or not! Not everyone wants to build their own machines and would rather just pick something prebuilt up and use that and for many, paying a bit extra for that convenience is worth it to them. I have other videos where I've built servers from parts and another many years ago where I repurposed an old enterprise appliance to run VyOS as a firewall - in fact, in that video you even briefly see my old firewall which was, guess what, a 1U self build with an ITX board in a rackmount case with a PCIe NIC! I'm not in any way against building servers, I just like looking at all of the different options on the market. And yes, I know OPNSense exists, I'm literally using it as my main firewall right now (although, to be totally honest, I've found a few bugs that make me not want to use it anywhere mission critical), In this video I tested PFSense and OpenWRT purely so I could test performance under both BSD and Linux based OSs and also so I could have a play around with OpenWRT for my own interest.
Listening to feedback from reddit is not always a good idea, the choices just seem weird and all over the place, most would probably buy these for homelabs, where HDMI would be a preference, no sane business would use rack equipment in a datacenter for anything even remotely serious without proper service/support agreements, which this doesn't have (which is fine, it's for a different market), if you really need to use it at a colo dc, then you could just make sure to have an HDMI to vga adapter in your rack cabinet for the very few that needs them, even most network vendors are moving to just having a USB interface for the console ports on the front, not the old RJ45 type. (Seems beyond stupid to go from a laptop with a USB port, to a USB DB9 serial adapter, to a DB9->RJ45 cable, to an RJ45 interface, going to a USB adaptor -> USB to the device).
I see your point, although equally, if someone has a homelab setup, it's not unreasonable that most of their servers will be VGA and therefore they'll have a VGA monitor handy. I suppose what could have been nice would be to include a separate "HDMI to HDMI" PCB that could be swapped in place of the VGA one for those users who want HDMI. As for business use - it really depends on the business, sure large enterprises are going to stick to stuff under corporate support contracts, but it's not the only way, nor is that always the case with smaller businesses. With something like a firewall, I'd rather have a pair of devices in an HA failover configuration and not worry too much about a support contract, lower cost devices like this can be ideal for that sort of thing. A USB console port is definitely a "nice to have" although this would then mean the port could only be used as a console whereas the port on this machine could be used as a general purpose serial port - say for example to access a serial console on another device. While I admit that I still use a USB > DB9 > RJ45 adapter chain, you can now get very inexpensive USB to RJ45 console cables that aren't really any more bother to carry around than a USB cable. Some of my switches have USB consoles but they use Mini USB, so even though they're USB, I still need to consciously carry a suitable cable for them now that all my other USB devices are USB-C.
This is straight up too expensive. at it's core, it's just a small form factor motherboard pc with a (albeit pretty nice for low power) alder lake i3 n305, some memory, and an 8x pcie 3.0 card... you could easily put something like this together for yourself with a 1u or 2u rack case and a standard embedded matx/itx board and a used connectx-4 for close to half the asking price. Further, there are other 10g firewall appliances that you can pick up for way cheaper on alixepress than this and with those you can just slap a different pcie card in there if you needed the 25gb functionality. is this good? yeah, probably, but it's just too expensive. and if you DON'T absolutely need the rack mount setup, you can pick up a used dell optiplex with something like an i7-8700, it'll come with at least 8gb of ram and at least a 250gb sata ssd and you can just drop the 2+ port 10g or 25g nic of your choice in the slot and go to town with something like pfsense.
That is not bad for the price at all. Firewalls are all about the software now anyway as long as you have the switching performance you need. The VGA on the back is a bit stupid. Yes for a network device why would you need it as you have a console cable , but still , silly.
Thank you for the commentsI.n the next version,we will have one HDMI in the front, and one VGA in the rear, total of two slots for display.We keep the VGA there as some of the users still need it
It's still not fully launched so those pages should become available when it's available for general sale, but the pricing information I have says $535 USD for the 10GbE version and $585 USD for the 25GbE version
Hot glue on USB connectors is a bad idea (not all electronics can handle the heat). It's better to ziptie the cables in place and use an adhesive ziptie anchor or punch out a spot in the chassis for it to secure to.
It's not pretty inside, I'll give you that, although I can see why they've done it this way - They are already producing a suitable motherboard for their R86S-N device so by using that for this, relatively low volume, 1U device will allow them to keep costs lower. If they were to build this with a completely custom motherboard, it would likely be significantly more expensive. The only downside of this is that cables need to be used to connect various parts together and to break out the I/O which is never going to look particularly pretty in a 1U case without custom length cables, which would also increase the price. A lot of the "mess" comes from the unused PSU cables. It would definitely look a lot neater if the PSU only had the cables it needed however this would again require a more expensive custom part versus a standard off the shelf PSU. Besides, once the case is closed it looks fine and works well which is really what matters IMO.
It's a review sample which I was completely up front about. I simply can't justify buying every single device I look at as it would likely cost me more to purchase than I'd earn back from the video. I'm always completely up front with companies that while I don't charge them money for a review, I also will not give them any control over the contents of the video. I also only accept review samples for products that I feel people would be interested in seeing a video of. I receive offers of products on a weekly basis that while I'd find them interesting myself, there is no way I'd be able to produce an interesting video on them so I don't accept them.
It does look strange for sure, but it's a side effect of using an existing board in a rackmount case - I imagine producing a custom board for this one machine would be far too expensive compared to using their existing R86S boards. That said, the interconnects aren't really an issue IMO - the network interfaces are still on the main boards and the USB extension cables aren't really any different to a regular PC where the front USB ports will be connected to the header using a cable.etc.
Oh no! 25Gbit upgrades to your whole network incoming! 🤣
We are also developing the 40Gbit
Re: the USB port at 35:10, it could be that rather than do proper calculations and account for how having multiple connectors in the chain might affect the signal integrity of the port, putting them into the hub means the signal gets 'conditioned' again when it leaves the USB hub. I.e. they won't have any loss in integrity from going through multiple connectors, cables, traces, etc.
I got your point ,thank you.We will put this point in the next version of new design.
Great content as usual. I really appreciate that you do chip ID in your videos. Most other home lab channels do not.
Thanks, glad you like it! While investigating the chips the thought did cross my mind of "do people actually care or should I just show very clear close up shots of the chips to let people read part numbers" so glad to know it's actually appreciated!
@@camerongray1515 I also appreciate it! Have you looked at the newer models, like GW-FN-1UR2?
Weird decision 11:54 to put the VGA at the back, without any USB. It requires the user to pull USB-cable through a rack, which can be a huge pain in the rear.
Very good point - being on the back didn't really bother me too much, but I hadn't considered the lack of rear USB. Think for this I'll be setting it up to use the serial console - especially since it'll be installed in a wall cabinet with no rear access.
The n305 CPU is slightly faster than a i5-6600 so it's no slouch.
That AX201 is perfect for passthrough to a VM for client access.
Can't agree more!
The ITE chip is commonly called the Embedded Controller (EC), handles bringing up of the machine, typically handles keyboard/touchpad on laptops, etc
What is the compute logic in these based on? Arm? The documentation is very hard to understand.
It is X86 with Intel Alder Lake i3-N305 CPU@@jonathanmarshall3974
it just depends on the manufacturer of the chip, some manufacturers will likely have their own architecture although some might use ARM or another standard architecture. Another term for these chips are Super I/O, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_I/O @@jonathanmarshall3974
My guess is they use GL3523, to provide more power to the USB ports at the front. These USB hub chips often have multiple ports, and can be configured via firmware, I2C or pin jumpers to configure each port as upstream or downstream, and isolate them. But my guess is that the ports on the CPU board itself cannot really provide few Amperes for each of these ports, or support anything other than 5V. So my guess is they use the GL3523 in 1-1+1-1 config, and source current directly from the PSU and some regulator on that add on board, instead of drawing power from the CPU board (which has super tiny power cables).
Great article. Got one of these units and made a few mods of my own
First off the PSU, Chucked out the FlexATX PSU that it came with and wired up a 65 watt open frame PSU, was very easy to do. Just got a IEC power connector to go in where the old PSU one was, wired it up to the open frame unit and bingo, i also added in a hardwire switch to be able to cut the 240v going into the PSU so I can cut the power in the event of a PC hard lockup, like you suggested. I also moved the soft power switch from the back to the front of the case, makes it easier when its in a rack to be able to turn the power off. With the open frame PSU i get a max of 22 watts from the system at the wall plug, so quite happy.
In Pfsense i had the same issue you did with bridging with the Mellanox ConnectX4, so that got thrown out and replaced with and Intel OCP card, quite easy to swap out and worked a treat.
The reason they had to go with a closed psu is because of the thumbscrews. If they where normal screws it would be allowed to use a open frame psu.
We will use new chassis and new PSU in the next version.
Wi-Fi client native is useful in colo and datacenters, you can sometimes use the site's wifi as out of band connection. Although many datacenters have stopped us from doing it...
We have changed the onboard Wi-Fi to M.2 Wi-Fi in the next version.
11:00 As someone who has worked in datacenters for over 15 years, this is 100% true. Old LCD displays with VGA only and MAYBE DVI. The VGA cable will have a few broken pins as well. We really hate colocation clients who bring in servers that have DP/HDMI only. Then it's find the adapter that will work. For a time as well, Dell was shipping servers with mini DP only. They quickly went back to VGA.
I don't think VGA will ever go away because of us in datacenters.
Can definitely relate to your point on broken pins! I remember opening a config file in Vim using a crash cart and couldn't for the life of me work out why none of the values were set. Turns out that Vim's syntax highlighting was colouring the values red and the VGA cable had a broken red pin!
Also worked a lot with colo/datacenters here in northern Europe, most actually have HDMI capable displays, that aren't broken, but we always kept the special connectors/cables in our rack cabinets, not really much of an issue, for the few people that would need it.
Hi ,there ,in the next version,we will have one HDMI in the front, one VGA in the rear, totalof two slots for display.We keep the VGA there as some of the uses still need it
Great video! I actually bought one of these as well and took delivery a few days ago. Its a great little device that I'm using to run pfsense in front of the rest of my Ubiquiti based network.
One thing to note, the Mellanox card is in a PCIE 3.0 x4 slot so its maximum bandwidth is 32 gbps. So it's not actually possible to get the max speed out of the dual 25gb SFP28 ports at the same time.
That being said, I still went for the 25gb version over the 10gb version. I figured for $50, why not get as much bandwidth as possible out of it. Additionally, I'm unlikely to be fully saturing both ports at once anytime soon. Hopefully a future version is able to allocate more PCIE lanes to it and get the full bandwidth though.
So are all Ethernet ports recognised in pfsense 2.7 CE?
@@matldn2697 yes, except for the COM port. I see the three 2.5 gb Ethernet ports and the two sfp28 ports. I'm currently using one of the ethernet ports for WAN and one of the sfp28 ports for LAN.
The next version will come with COM and POE ,HDMI port in the front@@paene_
The Mellanox NICs are definitely refurbished or second hand. The one they use in the 10Gbps version is EOL and isn't sold new any more.
Seems like a nice firewall.
Whoh. Nice. My current 25Gbps router is 2U with ASrock Rack mobo, Ryzen and custom PCIe cards (Intel and Broadcom mostly), all running Linux Debian / Vyos. 1U would be really nice. 2x 25Gbps is nice. A bit limiting for something more than firewall, NAT or things like that. Would be nice to have extra PCIe slot for some more ports, for maybe bigger router. If VGA port was on front, that would be perfect. But I can work with serial.
Price is great, but it is a little bit of hotpotch design.
The thing is, it's a freebie and Cameroon loves a freebie !!!
@@travisash8180yes, but does Cameron?
In the next version,we have have one HDMI in the front, one VGA in the rear,totally two slots for display.
Im really looking forward to this and I hope they launch fully soon at the listed prices.
Please wait until 20th,Oct,we will launch a new upgraded version
@@gowinfanless buying a new house and launching a new RUclips would love to use this.
They just released the data sheet for a brand new model earlier today. A lot of good improvements over this one.
Considering getting this and swapping the PSU for the HDPlex 250W GaN passive PSU. It looks like it would be pretty easy to do and I guess would fix the power efficiency and help resolve the noise too. It would be a for a small rack in an office so the noise is a concern and worth the added expense.
Just found your video. This was exactly the review and teardown I was looking for. :) Really appreciate how thorough this is. I'm guessing an hour long published video involved multiple hours of raw video and editing. :)
I'm looking at upgrading my OPNSense box, which is currently a Dell Optiplex 5040 SFF with an i5-6500 with a single 2.5 Gbps connection to the WAN and a single 10 Gbps downlink to the core switch. As the owner of a slightly over-amped home network, one thing I'm not entirely sure about at this point is what I'd need to be doing to need an N300 vs. an N100 in, say, OPNSense to actually *need* the N300?
Which PSU did you eventually decide to go with?
The smart power switch is really neat, but as I was watching you use it, two things occurred to me:
(1) what happens if you accidentally flip the switch back to ON when you've just switched it to OFF and its still going through the shutdown process?
(2) The current revision has what looks like a momentary power button on the front, near the GOWIN logo. I'm assuming that's now the soft power button, and the rear switch handles hard power on/off? Has that been confirmed anywhere?
Re: The odd issue with BSD and the Conntect-X4, were you able to test with a second X4 or an X2? I'm very unlikely to ever use that configuration, but I'm curious how that turned out.
On the performance test, what is "a single threaded NAT download?" When is this likely to happen in pfSense? Is it something that would be mitigated by having a downstream 10 Gbps core switch to keep the firewall from having to do as much heavy lifting?
Awesome video. Thanks again!
This is a great video with a great breakdown. Did you test the COM port?
Another small thing, aren't the SFP ports marked as SFP+ which tops out at 10Gb/s? If they are 25 Gb/s ports then they should be marked as something else? Obviously it's because they can just fit a different internal NIC for different versions of the product, so just an observation.
Yeah, the labelling should technically read "SFP28" for the 25GbE model and "SFP+" for thr 10GbE model. That said, I don't really blame them since labelling them "correctly" would require a complete batch of new cases for the, probably relatively low volume 25GbE version of the machine. I suppose it's at least better than other firewall appliances such as this I've seen with ports labelled "SPF" and "FSP"
@@camerongray1515 SPF? ☀️😄😄
@@andrewboothman6363 The rating on bottles of sun screen.
Does it have hardware offloading?
We will launch the upgrade version GW-BS-1UR2 on 20th,Oct,by Reddit and official website
I'd enjoy reviewing one if you wanted to provide one. I have an email address in my videos descriptions
Good effort to make a review for a free piece of gear. Only expectations are to have a cheaper device which isn't going this way.
Will the connectx4 allow you to use 2*10gbs in it or 2.5/5gb
Have you tried Mikrotik 100gbe and 10gbe layer 3 managed switches? They are really inexpensive and powerful.
Are they? I keep hearing how they are not, and definitely not powerful enough to saturate all the ports, along with having to read WHICH features work over cpu or not....I hear too many have problems, and opt to spend 5x as much for the stability.
Their website seems pretty shoddy. All the product links lead to a 404… Are they a reputable company?
I'm not aware of any issues and they've been very well reviewed, I think they just focus more on selling through external marketplaces rather than their own website. I find that most Chinese manufacturers of this type of kit have very basic/outdated websites
@@camerongray1515 thanks Cameron 👍
I've just been on their website and you're right, all product links lead to 404's, it does not fill you with confidence in the company.
Plus the only reason that Cameroon reviewed this device is because he got it as a freebie !!!
You've now commented 3 times on this video about it being a review sample - I always carry out due diligence when agreeing to review samples. In this case, yes, the website is poor, however they have a proven track record of delivering products and I have seen no complaints that would make me concerned. Similarly, a flashy website doesn't mean that a company is trustworthy!
@@travisash8180dude we’ve heard you, the product was provided for free. Guess what, he said that at the start of the video. Yawn! You can go home
Hi all, does anyone (Cameron?) know if:
1) they have any plans for a fanless version?
2) the PSU can be (safely) replaced with a 12v power brick, fitted internally, to eliminate cables and a fan?
3) there is (or will be) a way to replace the two high speed LAN ports with another two 2.5gb ports? I really don't need more than 2.5g.
That would be my perfect SOHO router.
You're unlikely to find many rackmount machines that are fanless - a regular case isn't going to dissipate much heat passively and rackmount equipment is generally designed to run in relatively hot environments where reliability is more important than being silent. Given your requirements, you're probably better off picking up some sort of Mini PC type device with 2.5GbE - many of these are fanless and have cases that essentially act as heatsinks to cool the internals. Of course you lose the rackmount form factor, but there's nothing stopping you putting it on a rack shelf.
@camerongray1515
I'm confused...Gowin appears to already have a fanless rack mount version of a similar product (if you ignore the psu fan). Hence I was wondering if they'd also do one of this model.
ruclips.net/video/aY0Okb6eI-E/видео.htmlsi=lLSVdEs121OggPLT
Interesting, I hadn't seen the fanless version there before! Those machines seem to essentially be a more polished version of the one I demonstrated here. The machine I have was originally sold as part of a preorder system and was shipped out to buyers and reviewers around the same time. They then seem to have, rather than release the same model for retail sale, use the feedback on this model to release the improved version shown in the STH video for retail sale. That said, I'm not convinced with the passive version - sure it'll be fine on a bench or if it's in a cool rack with a tonne of space around it, but expecting the heatsink to vent through the top of a piece of rackmount kit is a very strange decision since rackmount kit should be expected to be mounted right up against other devices, I suspect you might end up running into issues if you were to shove the fanless version into a warm rack with another device mounted directly above it.
It looks on disassembly that the main cpu board has some extra unconnected ports near the hdmi connector. What are they? Additional usb or hdmi or something else?
Are you referring to the white connector next to the HDMI connector? That connects over to the USB/LED/PSU board - I suspect it carries the LED and power switch signals.
@@camerongray1515it might be a bad angle. Say at 10:15 you see all the blue usb and hdmi lead connecting to the board. In between them is a gap and what appears to be another connector on the board which contains no cable. It might be an illusion due to the angle
Ahh, that one, that's a USB-C connector that would be exposed on the outside of the R86S version of this. Suppose you could probably use it to add an internal USB device of some sort!
To have the VGA, on the back, and USB on the front.. is a bummer.. to have one connected to a KWM, you want VGA and USB on the same side.. on the back.. BUT is you use a trolly setup you want the to on the front..
VGA, Power, switch etc. -> everything should ALWAYS be at the front on such network rack-devices...The front of such a device is usually mounted at the back og a rack if it is mixed with servers. Impossible to acces the back when mountet between long devices. If possible the airflæow also shold be from back to to front if it is ment to be used in datacenters with cold/hot zones. I'm talkning by many years of experience here 🙂
For your performance testing, were you using an MTU of 1500 or 9000?
Just 1500 for now, haven't had a chance to do more full in depth performance tests yet
Thanks. I was hoping you used 1500 since a lot of people would use a device like this for routing their internet connection, so data for NAT performance with 1500 MTU is the most useful thing to benchmark. :)
i'm actually making something simular as my router. i have a usb 4g card and no cabled network where i am renting so i will need to connect my servers over wifi somehow
The many little tiny Fans will clog up and stop spinning ... nice Device anyways for that price.
We plan to use 4pin PWM fans in the next version.
Looks like a diy project.
seems interesting...
it makes me just want to build a opnsense machine from parts honestly - even if it costs more
It entirely comes down to your own requirements - For me, I need something that can fit into a shallow, wall mounted cabinet that only takes up 1U of space. Building anything in a 1U case is an absolute nightmare - even a standard I/O shield is too tall so you end up needing to buy specific parts designed for a 1U case and by that point, you may as well just buy a prebuilt server.
@@camerongray1515 make room
Any particular reason why I shouldn't be using a neat rackmount machine and instead should build a PC and "make room" which would mean precariously balancing a machine in a cupboard instead of neatly mounting it in a centralised rack that contains all my network hardware? You're more than welcome to build whatever you want, but some people, myself included, would rather use rackmount appliances. "Make room" is easy to say, however you don't know my requirements - I have a small wall mounted comms rack to hold switches, patch panel terminating all my network runs and my router. This rack can only fit short depth machines and a deeper cabinet would protrude too far into the cupboard which is also required for storage. Or in small offices, you often also have a relatively short depth cabinet sitting on show with nowhere else a deeper machine could be installed.
@@camerongray1515 build a 4u rack box if you have to - be kind to yourself - you can do so much better than this machine and for less cost - compare openwrt to opnsense or pfsense (opnsense has better licensing)
I never said that it's impossible, I just said that it's relatively tricky to build in a 1U case (having done it before). I'm very fussy when it comes to building machines so I don't want to be dremeling down I/O shields to fit a 1U case so I'd need to focus on server boards which have 1U I/O shields available which are all pretty expensive. Then for coolers, you're either needing to exclusively use boards with soldered CPUs which tend to have small coolers, or you're needing to find a suitable 1U cooler which tend to not be the quietest things in the world. I'm not saying there are no suitable cases anywhere in the world, but it's certainly not particularly easy to find one that is shallow enough to fit in my comms cabinet with front I/O including a front expansion slot.
If you want to build your own machine, feel free, if you want to buy a NUC and stick it on a shelf, be my guest, if you want to run your router in a VM then that's fine too. Hell, if you don't care about this sort of thing and just want to use your ISP's router, then that's cool. I'm purely presenting this as one option for people who want this sort of thing. It's up to the viewer to decide whether they want to buy it or not! Not everyone wants to build their own machines and would rather just pick something prebuilt up and use that and for many, paying a bit extra for that convenience is worth it to them.
I have other videos where I've built servers from parts and another many years ago where I repurposed an old enterprise appliance to run VyOS as a firewall - in fact, in that video you even briefly see my old firewall which was, guess what, a 1U self build with an ITX board in a rackmount case with a PCIe NIC! I'm not in any way against building servers, I just like looking at all of the different options on the market.
And yes, I know OPNSense exists, I'm literally using it as my main firewall right now (although, to be totally honest, I've found a few bugs that make me not want to use it anywhere mission critical), In this video I tested PFSense and OpenWRT purely so I could test performance under both BSD and Linux based OSs and also so I could have a play around with OpenWRT for my own interest.
Listening to feedback from reddit is not always a good idea, the choices just seem weird and all over the place, most would probably buy these for homelabs, where HDMI would be a preference, no sane business would use rack equipment in a datacenter for anything even remotely serious without proper service/support agreements, which this doesn't have (which is fine, it's for a different market), if you really need to use it at a colo dc, then you could just make sure to have an HDMI to vga adapter in your rack cabinet for the very few that needs them, even most network vendors are moving to just having a USB interface for the console ports on the front, not the old RJ45 type. (Seems beyond stupid to go from a laptop with a USB port, to a USB DB9 serial adapter, to a DB9->RJ45 cable, to an RJ45 interface, going to a USB adaptor -> USB to the device).
I see your point, although equally, if someone has a homelab setup, it's not unreasonable that most of their servers will be VGA and therefore they'll have a VGA monitor handy. I suppose what could have been nice would be to include a separate "HDMI to HDMI" PCB that could be swapped in place of the VGA one for those users who want HDMI. As for business use - it really depends on the business, sure large enterprises are going to stick to stuff under corporate support contracts, but it's not the only way, nor is that always the case with smaller businesses. With something like a firewall, I'd rather have a pair of devices in an HA failover configuration and not worry too much about a support contract, lower cost devices like this can be ideal for that sort of thing. A USB console port is definitely a "nice to have" although this would then mean the port could only be used as a console whereas the port on this machine could be used as a general purpose serial port - say for example to access a serial console on another device. While I admit that I still use a USB > DB9 > RJ45 adapter chain, you can now get very inexpensive USB to RJ45 console cables that aren't really any more bother to carry around than a USB cable. Some of my switches have USB consoles but they use Mini USB, so even though they're USB, I still need to consciously carry a suitable cable for them now that all my other USB devices are USB-C.
Its interesting how much space is empty in this chassis. 🤯
This is straight up too expensive. at it's core, it's just a small form factor motherboard pc with a (albeit pretty nice for low power) alder lake i3 n305, some memory, and an 8x pcie 3.0 card... you could easily put something like this together for yourself with a 1u or 2u rack case and a standard embedded matx/itx board and a used connectx-4 for close to half the asking price. Further, there are other 10g firewall appliances that you can pick up for way cheaper on alixepress than this and with those you can just slap a different pcie card in there if you needed the 25gb functionality. is this good? yeah, probably, but it's just too expensive. and if you DON'T absolutely need the rack mount setup, you can pick up a used dell optiplex with something like an i7-8700, it'll come with at least 8gb of ram and at least a 250gb sata ssd and you can just drop the 2+ port 10g or 25g nic of your choice in the slot and go to town with something like pfsense.
So they took a desktop mini pc, slapped it in a 1u chassis and added a 300 dollar premium to it haha.
Nice device
That is not bad for the price at all. Firewalls are all about the software now anyway as long as you have the switching performance you need.
The VGA on the back is a bit stupid. Yes for a network device why would you need it as you have a console cable , but still , silly.
Thank you for the commentsI.n the next version,we will have one HDMI in the front, and one VGA in the rear, total of two slots for display.We keep the VGA there as some of the users still need it
Price ? All the product links lead to a 404 !!!
It's still not fully launched so those pages should become available when it's available for general sale, but the pricing information I have says $535 USD for the 10GbE version and $585 USD for the 25GbE version
Hi Cameron,you are giht,we paln t launch it on 20th,Oct@@camerongray1515
Hot glue on USB connectors is a bad idea (not all electronics can handle the heat). It's better to ziptie the cables in place and use an adhesive ziptie anchor or punch out a spot in the chassis for it to secure to.
it will be improved in the next version!
That is messy device... for that price that should a lot cleaner, looks like somebody opened their drawer and assemble that device for fun...
It's not pretty inside, I'll give you that, although I can see why they've done it this way - They are already producing a suitable motherboard for their R86S-N device so by using that for this, relatively low volume, 1U device will allow them to keep costs lower. If they were to build this with a completely custom motherboard, it would likely be significantly more expensive. The only downside of this is that cables need to be used to connect various parts together and to break out the I/O which is never going to look particularly pretty in a 1U case without custom length cables, which would also increase the price. A lot of the "mess" comes from the unused PSU cables. It would definitely look a lot neater if the PSU only had the cables it needed however this would again require a more expensive custom part versus a standard off the shelf PSU. Besides, once the case is closed it looks fine and works well which is really what matters IMO.
It's a freebie !!!
Cameroon loves a freebie !!!
It's a review sample which I was completely up front about. I simply can't justify buying every single device I look at as it would likely cost me more to purchase than I'd earn back from the video. I'm always completely up front with companies that while I don't charge them money for a review, I also will not give them any control over the contents of the video. I also only accept review samples for products that I feel people would be interested in seeing a video of. I receive offers of products on a weekly basis that while I'd find them interesting myself, there is no way I'd be able to produce an interesting video on them so I don't accept them.
I happy with my UniFi for now
I just see far too many interconnects.
It does look strange for sure, but it's a side effect of using an existing board in a rackmount case - I imagine producing a custom board for this one machine would be far too expensive compared to using their existing R86S boards. That said, the interconnects aren't really an issue IMO - the network interfaces are still on the main boards and the USB extension cables aren't really any different to a regular PC where the front USB ports will be connected to the header using a cable.etc.