It is crazy how this thing is a lot more powerful than the UDM Pro Max while costing half the price. It infuriates me that businesses still put 1999 Gigabit Ethernet on higher end gear. Our wired connections are now bottlenecking our wifi 7 connections. 2.5Gbps should be the bare minimum on any networking gear going forward.
You are forgetting that you are not buying only the hardware with the UDM. You are also buying the Software and the UX. That also cost money to develop. Yes, i find my UDM Pro SE lacking in Some Points as only 2.5GBit RJ45 LAN Port, would have loved 10 Gbit, so have to fallback to SFP+, 1 Sata drive only. But that was never the point of the machine. I'm more than happy with its capabilities and the price is more than just. Also my greatest complain the lack of snat /dnat just got resolved.
I bought the fan less unit a few months ago and was thinking of getting a second one and literally stumbled across this one a few weeks ago and have had it for about a week now. The fan less one will now be my Truenas Scale test box with 4 drives using a 8087-to-SATA cable and a 4-bay enclosure. The 1U is my new pfsense box (fan less unit was the pfsense box, but all I had to do was backup from old and restore to the 1U and it worked without issues). Thank you for the recommendations.
Same here, got mine in February. Have had issues with the SFP+ ports with DAC cables, could only get it working with fiber. Not sure if it is an issue with proxmox or not.
@@superb3113 Opnsense. It's alright but I find the configuration to be unintuitive. Sometimes the rules don't apply the way that I feel like they should.
cute little system but with a fan on the BOTTOM they need their head examined. it's a rack mount unit so there is no way to get any air INTO the system when mounted. fan should be on the back. Also would really love to see a Xeon D series here for a firewall appliance (C3758R is just to slow for application inspection) and they need to fix ECC support.
...and no forced airflow inside the case. Can't imagine those 10G cages are going to cool properly at all with 2 or more 10GBase-T and no forced airflow. Seems like flipping the board upside down and some side to side airflow would be a much better design. [front to back better but side to side is fine for this low thermal load]
I assume this box is powerful enough to do 2.5G IDS/IPS + firewall on one port at full line rate and support 10G on the LAN. Not powerful enough for 10G or multiple 2.5G on the WAN side most likely but broadband at that speed is hard to find in the US. Would make a nice front end for an internal Ubiquiti network running a virtualized controller. One of the posts on this video mentions what working ECC sticks they used.
@@magnawavezoneor they could have added a big-a$$ heatsink in the back like mikrotik did, considering it has such low depth. Would've added costs but made it silent
I had to add a fan to the "fanless" version because it was very unstable otherwise. I DIYed a connector for the spare SATA power port and connected that to a fan speed controller and then on to a 140mm fan screwed into the heatsink fins. I 3d printed a new bottom cover with vent holes and have it standing on the side. Instead of 60C+ CPU temps I now see 40-45C and it hasn't crashed since. But with that and 32gb ECC memory and 2x2TB NVMes it runs Proxmox (after some NIC driver patching) fine with a virtualized router VM and some containers for services. Also added a 2.5" SATA drive for Proxmox backups and screwed that into the 3d printed bottom cover.
@@mikel2700 It was somewhere on the ServeTheHome forum. I can't post links here but search for qotom-denverton-fanless-system-with-4-sfp and you should find the thread. I installed it as a DKMS module so that it stays even during kernel upgrades.
That's a little disappointing. More disappointing is that means their fanless isn't necessarily fanless, and evne ther rackmount, fan model isn't because that vent will just blow straight into the top of whatever is racked up underneath it. Guess it's time to get out some metal bits then a jigsaw before getting started with it.
It's just a shame they don't do a slightly larger version that would allow a 3.5" drive. I could whack my 20TB drive in it and run it as a mini server with all my media , CCTV, etc, then cluster it.
Love the potential of this tiny appliance. In my personal use case I am thinking to deploy it with Proxmox and a virtual appliance running Opensense with passthru interfaces. The Opensense will be in bridge mode acting as IPS between my Mikrotik core switch and my Mikrotik edge router. I also want couple VMs or LXCs to run AdGuard Home and also to have pre wired and pre configured Netinstall-cli in ubuntu. That allows me to remotely recover any of the Mikrotik devices if needed
Exactly what I thought! If it were properly set up as a BMC I'd be buying these by the dozen, without that it's an interesting machine but not anything I have a use for.
The one thing that stood out to me looking at this - it looks like you could in theory put 2 of these motherboards side by side in the same enclosure by using external power. That would be perfect for my needs as I currently have 4 old USFF hypervisors in a 2U space in my rack; being able to upgrade them to something rack-mounted and having 2 machines in 1U with this short depth would be very cool (storage for the cluster is on my NAS so I just need compute nodes).
Of course a later CPU might be nice, but the one piece missing is a real BMC. To put these anywhere, an out of band management interface would make this so competitive!
@@mbaltrusitis of course an external solution is possible, but not nearly as clean of an install :) Plus the cost of an external solution is higher than the parts cost of a BMC.
That SFF8087 port would make this unit pair nicely with ye olde HP microservers and allow them to be used as 4 bay SATA expansion boxes, bypassing their elderly motherboards.
That reminded me that I have one old N40L here, but just quickly brainstorming about that idea, how would you just let that thing run without the MB in it? Didn't come up with a quick idea right now.
how ironic, I was just looking at this system as I wanted the qotom unit with 4 10GBIT ports that you reviewed in Feb but in a 1U case. I am probably going to pick one up this week :)
well thanks for finding out for me that I can't run to a SAS expander. would have loved that feature to make a small NAS box that connects to a large disk array.
The fan in the bottom basically makes this a 2U; not a 1U. Maybe if it were in the front or side, but you're not going to be able to stack this unit and still have airflow. Edit: I guess, you could place it above your patch panel, which isn't very ideal, but at least you aren't wasting a blank. Also, it might make sense to mount upside down, and then you could place it below the patch panel. I guess, that's OK as a router/firewall, but not a VM host, and especially not a HA cluster.
I love how much I/O this thing has. It's approaching my ideal for a "perfect homelab Proxmox/Ceph cluster box" -- enough cores and RAM to support OSDs, boot from SATA and have two NVMes for OSDs, plenty of at least 10G networking for Ceph inter-host and client traffic. Not taking advantage of the AST2400 as a BMC sucks, though, as does PCI Gen 3 x2 for the NVMes. For $100 more the Minisforum MS-01 still holds the crown for this I think.
I have fallen in love with this machine. I just got one a few weeks ago and I'll be using it as my router with OPNsense in a VM. PCIe passthrough of the NICs just works, But, you can't passthrough the Intel Quick Assist to a VM, so if you want to use that it will have to be used from the bare metal OS. I got a mini rack to put this and a Mikrotik CRS310-8G+2S switch in. Even though the 2 NVMe slots are only Gen3x2, I like that I can put two drives in for some redundancy.
These look to be pretty awesome but damn - I wish there was some type of distributor here in the US. On both Amazon and Aliexpress, you're looking at $40 - $50 for shipping.
Saw it and added to cart 1-2 weeks before the video dropped. 3 weeks later when I was going to order- sold out. You are now partially the reason for my sadness and need to send me your unit as compensation 🙂
It's the same motherboard as the fanless one, I bought the fanless couple weeks before its own review and when they released the 1U unit, I asked them if I could buy the case/PSU combo, which they did sell me, I just had to move the motherboard over to the other case ! Haven't soldered the leads of the PSU though, still using the barrel plug unit...
@@dohmarau For home use, even a 12*5U chip is great (as long as you're not on an OS that has issues with E Cores) -- Protectli uses them. But for people who want Supermicro-features-but-cheaper, no.
@@gowinfanless That was my conclusion too! 15w TDP standard, 28w peak, can be scaled down to 9w in BIOS, comes with 20 pcie lanes instead of 9... i hope your next 1 RU device has the 165u
I *just* bought myself a new router, if I had known about this I might have spent a little more and grabbed it instead. Heck I might get one anyway just because Qotom actually followed up with a rackmount version.
So, for anyone wanting to get these units, I received a 1U unit and the SFF unit. Neither of them will even post. Tried different memory and NVMe. These are Chinese units and have ZERO online documentation except for the hardware specs. In looking closely at the chipsets, they appear to be gray market. Spend just a little more and get something with actual documentation and support.
It's been a minute since I ran a stand alone firewall and the main reason I stopped was the second I enabled any level of deep inspection the power wasn't there to sustain a 1GB+ Internet connection. Essentially everything in the lab (and house) slowed to a crawl once I started inspecting using something like snort (yes that was what was around at the time). It was frustrating, gaming through it was miserable from the latency that was especially bad if someone else was home watching Netflix or something. What I guess I really want to know is have these processors and the opensource IDS/DPI tools come far enough along that modern high speed home fiber can run at speed with the full set of security features enabled. If it is just a stateful firewall that doesn't do much other than maybe remove the need for a secondary on network NAS.
Hi and thnx for the nice introduction video to this probably awesome product. Next time in such videos I'd appreciate info about the fan specs so that we could consider a replacement for Noctua maybe.
Why is there no unit with proper back to front cooling. Who mounts a switch that the fan blows down in a rack ? Switches get mounted in the back of the rack so you can run cables. So air needs to flow front to back.
It is really surprising that Atom has a built-in X553 NIC for the SFP+! I was doing napkin math and wondering how 4x PCIe 3.0 (~30Gbps) is going to work with 40Gbps there.
that aside, the Unifi SFP+ DACs are in no way working for me. There's no error, the LEDs in front of the SFP+ port light up, but Unifi won't recognize it as being there, nor will `ifconfig` show anything aside from "no carrier"...
Look neat. Having a dual power source function would be cool feature to add. Even better would be PoE power support. I am surprised they didn't make the chassis out of extruded aluminum.
I wonder if you could cram all that hardware into a 2u but half width device. That'd make a good fanned version for people who don't have a rack (easier to fit on a bookshelf or whatever) or put in a coupler to still mount two of them in a full width 2u space. Also maybe a bigger (and user replaceable) fan.
Oh man I kinda want one of these to replace my Edgerouter 4 box. It's been on my list to find a solid (while energy and cost) efficient platform to replace it with to get into Opnsense but haven't found anything yet. This may be the box I pickup to replace my aging hardware.
They have a bug in the hw-design on the motherboard for the sim-card slot. According to the spec a pin is supposed to be pulled to ground when no sim is present and left unconnected when sim is present. It does it the other way around. I had to remove a surface mounted component to get the 4g-modem to understand that there actually were a sim-card installed.
@@DavidPritt-xh7qq I can't show since it is in operation at the moment. But if you take a picture of the motherboard showing the SIM card slot and the pci-e connector underneath the m2-ssd-slots, then I can point it out.
Hey guys!! @ServeTheHome Tank you for this review!! I wonder what do you think about the C3808 variant: 12 cores: 2.0Ghz, 12MB cache (instead of C3758R: 8 cores: 2.4Ghz, 16B cache)? Thank you.
Only thing that doesn't make sense is the location of th fan intake for a server rack. Stack a bunch of gear on top of it's self and you don't have any flow.
That would be really interesting. I think it actually would. The 12V plug is on the motherboard itself, and it would just run parallel with the MeanWell PSU that is also plugged into the motherboard aswell. Current will flow through the path of least resistance. The voltages should not vary too much because that would wear out the PSUs
Make this with an N100 at the same cost and I'd put them in inventory rotation. It would beat many of the all SSD NAS appliances coming out at ridiculous prices.
This trades the iGPU of the N100 for more physical cores (for vCPUS), QAT acceleration, 4x 10GbE, and more PCIe/ SATA I/O. Adding quad SFP+ to the N100 would mean you are not putting many drives on there
So, after digging up my 20 year old VGA monitor and OLD VGA cable I have yet to wake this thing up. Gee no POST test, no documentation and the VGA doesn't work. Looking up serial wiring for the console port. I hear this uses Intel AMT... which Ethernet port? Nice machine. Great solid build. I am using it to weight down some papers right now.
For comparison, the Cisco Firepower FPR-1010 device runs on a 4 core Atom C3558 with 8Gb DDR4, 200Gb SATA SSD, and 8+1 1Gbps NICs (4x X553, 1x I211), so this device is more than capable to be a robust, enterprise grade firewall. Not for a datacenter, though, but for remote offices it can withstand a lot of abuse.
First time HomeLab builder here. Just ordered my first piece based on your recommendation from another video (MINISFORUM Mini PC MS-01-S1390 Barebone with Intel Core i9-13900H with 96 gb memory; the barebone is just barely over $650.00 on Amazon atm!). So thank you for that excellent video. I do want to get a dedicated single box for IDS/Firewall. I'm thinking Suricata and OPNsense. I think this box would work well for that? My question is this...why would you want a noisy mount rack over a silent fanless version if they are the same otherwise? I'm assuming the fanless one is appropriately engineered and does not overheat. Why does the benefit of the internal power source of the rack mount override the silent running of the silent version? I'm also assuming the fanless version has no power issues. Thank you very much for your help and time. I appreciate you!
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Indeed. I would love to see a video of what you think is a best buy and also a reasonable top end hardware for a Plex server (which would also be a NAS with maybe TrueNAS). I need to build one and run it for my home. Thanks!
I need 4 usb ports, plus 2 would be nice, but I could remote with only 4 usb ports. It needs to run linux with 4 sound cards from masters communicatuons, 4x of their DRA50M.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo This reply makes no sense to me. Thee top of the one below it has no holes and there are no stand offs, so the bottom on or off changes nothing.
Given it is an Intel NIC the assumption is that that x553 is going to complain about third party optics that aren't Intel coded? Unfortunately I just ordered a WAS-100 stick to bypass ATT Fiber's modem and it was coded to my current NIC and not an Intel one. Need to see if that is changeable post shipment and this would be perfect to replace my current higher power PFSense box.
Wishlist: - Bays! If it wants to be a TrueNAS host and comes with a SATA connector anyway, make the enclosure bigger, use 2Us and give me 4, 8 oder even 12 hot-swap bays. - ECC Memory: again, if it wants to be used as NAS, it's probably going to be ZFS, so it should allow me to use ECC Memory (without issues ;-)) - IPMI (or does it have something similar I missed?) With these changes, shut up and take my money :D
I prefer the CPU be an AMD Zen 3 😃 and RJ-45 that are multi-gigabyte (10, 5, 2.5, 1, 0.1 and 0.01Ghz). I suppose I have a long wait if ever 😆 Those "Mean Well" power supplies from Taiwan are very well designed and built (along with comprehensive documentation online). I've seen them used in mission critical VSAT satellite modems.
Years ago I moved to an Edgerouter because of the excellent throughput when using hardware offload, but I guess this would probably be fine as a 1Gbps software router?
What app are you using to monitor the statistics of the unit?
5 месяцев назад+2
I'm using the non rack-mount version and unfortunatly I don't achieve 10gbps over SMB. I have a fast enough NVMe installed and as OS I'm using OpenMediaVault which is based on Debian. Maybe this is related to the bug you mention in the video at the end.
samba needs a lot of single core performance [at least to saturate 10G for a single client]. I'd guess the cpu is lightly insufficient being an gen older e-core.
4 месяца назад
@@magnawavezone Yeah, that sounds reasonable. If I remember correctly, I also did an iperf3 test and could achieve 10 gig on one side, but the other side was only about 4-5 gig.
Agreed, the better option would be to make a larger heatpipe heatsink then blow air through the chassis. But that is a costly custom part for a sub $300 unit.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo I would argue it defeats the point of asking for a rack design if you can't actually place something above or below it.. Same goes for that "Passive" one you reviewed a while back.
Top or bottom mount fan on a rack mount device is a huge red flag, and it's concerning you gloss over it. Worse you show them rack mounted with the top unit having the fan blocked by the lower unit.
I have one of these, and.... the only display output is vga. Know what I definitely don't have kicking around really anymore? VGA. So I tried putting an ssd with an opnsense install in it and.... didn't seem to work. So I'm guessing I need to mess with the bios, but.... QOTOM, can we please get displayport and/or a BMC/IPMI? I tried getting hooked up with a serial console and I get... something resembling the BIOS, but nothing I could actually interact with.
I should add, the fan input on the bottom is... definitely an interesting take, I guess. Would be nice if the airflow was front to back or similar so it doesn't suffocate when racked with other gear.
Totally agree. The challenge they have is that there is no iGPU since it is a chip designed for firewall and storage. So the ASPEED add is for servers where VGA is 95%+ of the installed base.
The Minisforum MS-01 is a lot more powerful but why? If you are just going to use it as a firewall appliance, it is way too much overkill and just a complete waste. That device will cost over a thousand dollars once you add in memory and a hard drive. Why pay for a Ferrari if you are only going to drive it to the grocery store and back?
What I'd like to see is a drive cage inside the box to support the 1 or 2 3.5inch drivers, so why make the user makeshift a way to make it fit? Give us a inexpensive solution that works nicely.
The fan-less model has mounting points for 2½" drives. But the on-board voltage regulators might be too limited, and the lack of active cooling is a problem when you start sticking additional power-hungry devices into this computer.
just a longer case would be needed and a 'proper' cooling design to have the fans in the back so they're not blocked when the unit is mounted. But yes two in 1U would be nice for a small redundant build.
Ethernet ports have a problem of 225 and 226 with dhcp. In virtual machines, the DHCP package client does not work properly over the bridge for virtual machines, but the client does not physically connected. I have a problem on MS-01 to make it a firewall, etc.
Turns out that you can only use 2400Mhz memory max speed. Also, if you use 32GB modules, you have to pull the BIOS battery before inserting them. That's what kept me from POSTing.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo I have yet to get any of the SFP+ ports to work. They just will not sync. My host is Ubuntu 24.04 and everything points to current support for Intel i225 and i226. The 2.5gig ports work fine though.
I mean... I still use a (not checkpoint anymore :P ) 1u with a G1820 as ASN router. Especially as I can't effort more then 1x 1G ports of carriers in the datacenter. But if they would offer me a free/same price 10g port uplink/IPX, that's a mashine that I would think about ^^
Is there a rack mounted option for a NAS that has an SFF8087 connector or do I have to sit a NAS box on top of this appliance like a heathen? I want a pretty rack enclosure.
Im looking for a SSD/NVME NAS with 25GB SFP connections. The NAS needs to have a high level of redundancy/backup for critical data. It should be about 20TB in size. Wondering where I can find some sort of comparison tool or utility which will help me locate something like this?
You asked what I wanted to see. I want to see a real NIC SPF+ 4 port NIC like the intel 700 series that just works of out the box with proxmox etc. Even after the latest upgrade to proxmox 8.8 the intel 553 nic still doesn't work properly out the box. I still have to recompile 5.20.3 and fix compilation errors to get the 553 NIC working!!!
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Intel has released driver 5.20.9 which at least compiles and installs. However I can only get gigabit speeds from it and not 10 Gbps
I would buy this in a HEARTBEAT, but Proxmox 8.x has a broken ixgbe driver in the 6.x kernel series! If they had used something other than the X553 10GbE SFP+ ports, this would be an instant sale. I already bought the previous desktop version and it works great, but I have to keep the Proxmox kernel at 5.15 - otherwise no 10Gig-E!!
It is crazy how this thing is a lot more powerful than the UDM Pro Max while costing half the price. It infuriates me that businesses still put 1999 Gigabit Ethernet on higher end gear. Our wired connections are now bottlenecking our wifi 7 connections. 2.5Gbps should be the bare minimum on any networking gear going forward.
to be fair, 1999 gigabit was most likely fibre and a full-length syskonnect adapter.
Vendors always doin the bare minimum they think people will accept.
You are forgetting that you are not buying only the hardware with the UDM. You are also buying the Software and the UX. That also cost money to develop. Yes, i find my UDM Pro SE lacking in Some Points as only 2.5GBit RJ45 LAN Port, would have loved 10 Gbit, so have to fallback to SFP+, 1 Sata drive only. But that was never the point of the machine. I'm more than happy with its capabilities and the price is more than just. Also my greatest complain the lack of snat /dnat just got resolved.
but you can get RGB switches from them, they are clearly better right
@@Alan.livingston But,will people really accept it?
This is exactly what I’ve been looking for at work. Time to buy a dozen.
"I'll buy the whole stock"
It's definitely an ideal rack Top Layer Device, but I have to wonder how they're managing it at under $400.
@@KiraSlith Because there wont be any FW updates and vulnerabilities wont be closed?
@@Kapsi87 Question, how often do we actually see hardware-level vulnerabilities? Just maintain your firewall software, smh.
@@KiraSlith This was rather a question because I want to buy cheap China stuff aswell :)
This is the first time that I actually beat STH to finding and buying a product LOL. But yeah this one works great.
Yea, a bit slow on this one. It was tested a few months ago and this video was actually recorded in May pre-baby STH.
I bought the fan less unit a few months ago and was thinking of getting a second one and literally stumbled across this one a few weeks ago and have had it for about a week now. The fan less one will now be my Truenas Scale test box with 4 drives using a 8087-to-SATA cable and a 4-bay enclosure. The 1U is my new pfsense box (fan less unit was the pfsense box, but all I had to do was backup from old and restore to the 1U and it worked without issues). Thank you for the recommendations.
Link please? Looking to replace my protectli proxmox host
Same here, got mine in February. Have had issues with the SFP+ ports with DAC cables, could only get it working with fiber. Not sure if it is an issue with proxmox or not.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo congrats!
I got one of these a few months ago. It's been a great little box as a firewall.
What firewall software did you go with?
@@superb3113 Opnsense. It's alright but I find the configuration to be unintuitive. Sometimes the rules don't apply the way that I feel like they should.
cute little system but with a fan on the BOTTOM they need their head examined. it's a rack mount unit so there is no way to get any air INTO the system when mounted. fan should be on the back. Also would really love to see a Xeon D series here for a firewall appliance (C3758R is just to slow for application inspection) and they need to fix ECC support.
I too am concerned there was nothing said about if having the fan on the bottom caused issues which I'm expecting it would
...and no forced airflow inside the case. Can't imagine those 10G cages are going to cool properly at all with 2 or more 10GBase-T and no forced airflow. Seems like flipping the board upside down and some side to side airflow would be a much better design. [front to back better but side to side is fine for this low thermal load]
@@magnawavezone The 10G ports are SFP+ so cooling assumes fiber not 10G-BaseT.
I assume this box is powerful enough to do 2.5G IDS/IPS + firewall on one port at full line rate and support 10G on the LAN. Not powerful enough for 10G or multiple 2.5G on the WAN side most likely but broadband at that speed is hard to find in the US. Would make a nice front end for an internal Ubiquiti network running a virtualized controller.
One of the posts on this video mentions what working ECC sticks they used.
@@magnawavezoneor they could have added a big-a$$ heatsink in the back like mikrotik did, considering it has such low depth. Would've added costs but made it silent
I had to add a fan to the "fanless" version because it was very unstable otherwise. I DIYed a connector for the spare SATA power port and connected that to a fan speed controller and then on to a 140mm fan screwed into the heatsink fins. I 3d printed a new bottom cover with vent holes and have it standing on the side. Instead of 60C+ CPU temps I now see 40-45C and it hasn't crashed since.
But with that and 32gb ECC memory and 2x2TB NVMes it runs Proxmox (after some NIC driver patching) fine with a virtualized router VM and some containers for services.
Also added a 2.5" SATA drive for Proxmox backups and screwed that into the 3d printed bottom cover.
So 'fanless' is FAKE...
Nice setup!
did you follow a post for patching?
There is a fan connector on the board. Why didn't you connect to that one instead?
@@mikel2700 It was somewhere on the ServeTheHome forum. I can't post links here but search for qotom-denverton-fanless-system-with-4-sfp and you should find the thread. I installed it as a DKMS module so that it stays even during kernel upgrades.
That's a little disappointing. More disappointing is that means their fanless isn't necessarily fanless, and evne ther rackmount, fan model isn't because that vent will just blow straight into the top of whatever is racked up underneath it. Guess it's time to get out some metal bits then a jigsaw before getting started with it.
It's just a shame they don't do a slightly larger version that would allow a 3.5" drive. I could whack my 20TB drive in it and run it as a mini server with all my media , CCTV, etc, then cluster it.
Love the potential of this tiny appliance. In my personal use case I am thinking to deploy it with Proxmox and a virtual appliance running Opensense with passthru interfaces. The Opensense will be in bridge mode acting as IPS between my Mikrotik core switch and my Mikrotik edge router. I also want couple VMs or LXCs to run AdGuard Home and also to have pre wired and pre configured Netinstall-cli in ubuntu. That allows me to remotely recover any of the Mikrotik devices if needed
Really dig the new Key Lessons Learned section. That MBA is really paying off! 😊
I got really excited when I saw the AST2400 chip onboard but too bad they dont use it as BMC. Its more useful then a console port.
Exactly what I thought! If it were properly set up as a BMC I'd be buying these by the dozen, without that it's an interesting machine but not anything I have a use for.
Excellent product! Hope they will produce a N100/N200/N300/N305 version of this, that would meet all my performance needs!
We have made the 1U with Intel N100 and i3-N305 which be reviewed before
@@gowinfanless Excellent! I will go check those out. Thank you.
@@gowinfanlesslooks great. If only you ditched the 2 1 gig ports and made all 4 2.5g.
@@gowinfanless do you have a link? The n100 and i3-n305 don’t have QAT … how does that affect things?
The one thing that stood out to me looking at this - it looks like you could in theory put 2 of these motherboards side by side in the same enclosure by using external power. That would be perfect for my needs as I currently have 4 old USFF hypervisors in a 2U space in my rack; being able to upgrade them to something rack-mounted and having 2 machines in 1U with this short depth would be very cool (storage for the cluster is on my NAS so I just need compute nodes).
Of course a later CPU might be nice, but the one piece missing is a real BMC. To put these anywhere, an out of band management interface would make this so competitive!
would a PiKVM plug that feature gap for you?
@@mbaltrusitis of course an external solution is possible, but not nearly as clean of an install :) Plus the cost of an external solution is higher than the parts cost of a BMC.
That SFF8087 port would make this unit pair nicely with ye olde HP microservers and allow them to be used as 4 bay SATA expansion boxes, bypassing their elderly motherboards.
That reminded me that I have one old N40L here, but just quickly brainstorming about that idea, how would you just let that thing run without the MB in it? Didn't come up with a quick idea right now.
I like this unit. Looks like aa good Christmas gift for me.
how ironic, I was just looking at this system as I wanted the qotom unit with 4 10GBIT ports that you reviewed in Feb but in a 1U case. I am probably going to pick one up this week :)
i cant seem to get the sfp+ to work in 10gb in proxmox. just a warning since I did actually buy the qotom.
We really need more modern processors with these.
well thanks for finding out for me that I can't run to a SAS expander. would have loved that feature to make a small NAS box that connects to a large disk array.
The fan in the bottom basically makes this a 2U; not a 1U. Maybe if it were in the front or side, but you're not going to be able to stack this unit and still have airflow.
Edit: I guess, you could place it above your patch panel, which isn't very ideal, but at least you aren't wasting a blank. Also, it might make sense to mount upside down, and then you could place it below the patch panel. I guess, that's OK as a router/firewall, but not a VM host, and especially not a HA cluster.
I love how much I/O this thing has. It's approaching my ideal for a "perfect homelab Proxmox/Ceph cluster box" -- enough cores and RAM to support OSDs, boot from SATA and have two NVMes for OSDs, plenty of at least 10G networking for Ceph inter-host and client traffic. Not taking advantage of the AST2400 as a BMC sucks, though, as does PCI Gen 3 x2 for the NVMes. For $100 more the Minisforum MS-01 still holds the crown for this I think.
Wow, I bought this 2 months ago, and now there's a video for it.
Yea. Baby STH came :-/
@@ServeTheHomeVideoI get giddy every time I see a new upload from you.
I have fallen in love with this machine. I just got one a few weeks ago and I'll be using it as my router with OPNsense in a VM. PCIe passthrough of the NICs just works, But, you can't passthrough the Intel Quick Assist to a VM, so if you want to use that it will have to be used from the bare metal OS. I got a mini rack to put this and a Mikrotik CRS310-8G+2S switch in. Even though the 2 NVMe slots are only Gen3x2, I like that I can put two drives in for some redundancy.
Yea. It is not perfect, but for the price it is very good and it can do a lot.
These look to be pretty awesome but damn - I wish there was some type of distributor here in the US. On both Amazon and Aliexpress, you're looking at $40 - $50 for shipping.
Saw it and added to cart 1-2 weeks before the video dropped.
3 weeks later when I was going to order- sold out.
You are now partially the reason for my sadness and need to send me your unit as compensation 🙂
It's the same motherboard as the fanless one, I bought the fanless couple weeks before its own review and when they released the 1U unit, I asked them if I could buy the case/PSU combo, which they did sell me, I just had to move the motherboard over to the other case ! Haven't soldered the leads of the PSU though, still using the barrel plug unit...
The only thing it really needs is just a better cpu, with zenarmor you max it out pretty quickly
Problem is, while the successor C5*** chips had higher performance, they also had equally higher prices and TDPs.
@@concinnus intel pro 155u/165u would be great alternative. lower tdp than this atom plus more performance
@@dohmarau For home use, even a 12*5U chip is great (as long as you're not on an OS that has issues with E Cores) -- Protectli uses them. But for people who want Supermicro-features-but-cheaper, no.
@@dohmarau Better to use 165U which is faster and easy to make a 1U solution
@@gowinfanless That was my conclusion too! 15w TDP standard, 28w peak, can be scaled down to 9w in BIOS, comes with 20 pcie lanes instead of 9... i hope your next 1 RU device has the 165u
I want half a dozen of these, immediately.
Awesome review!!..thank you. I'm definitely getting the rack mounted version. 🙏😎
I *just* bought myself a new router, if I had known about this I might have spent a little more and grabbed it instead. Heck I might get one anyway just because Qotom actually followed up with a rackmount version.
So, for anyone wanting to get these units, I received a 1U unit and the SFF unit. Neither of them will even post. Tried different memory and NVMe. These are Chinese units and have ZERO online documentation except for the hardware specs. In looking closely at the chipsets, they appear to be gray market. Spend just a little more and get something with actual documentation and support.
It's been a minute since I ran a stand alone firewall and the main reason I stopped was the second I enabled any level of deep inspection the power wasn't there to sustain a 1GB+ Internet connection. Essentially everything in the lab (and house) slowed to a crawl once I started inspecting using something like snort (yes that was what was around at the time). It was frustrating, gaming through it was miserable from the latency that was especially bad if someone else was home watching Netflix or something. What I guess I really want to know is have these processors and the opensource IDS/DPI tools come far enough along that modern high speed home fiber can run at speed with the full set of security features enabled. If it is just a stateful firewall that doesn't do much other than maybe remove the need for a secondary on network NAS.
Hi and thnx for the nice introduction video to this probably awesome product. Next time in such videos I'd appreciate info about the fan specs so that we could consider a replacement for Noctua maybe.
Why is there no unit with proper back to front cooling. Who mounts a switch that the fan blows down in a rack ?
Switches get mounted in the back of the rack so you can run cables. So air needs to flow front to back.
It is really surprising that Atom has a built-in X553 NIC for the SFP+! I was doing napkin math and wondering how 4x PCIe 3.0 (~30Gbps) is going to work with 40Gbps there.
That is what these are designed for. We have reviewed the C5000/P5000 series with built in 25GbE.
that aside, the Unifi SFP+ DACs are in no way working for me. There's no error, the LEDs in front of the SFP+ port light up, but Unifi won't recognize it as being there, nor will `ifconfig` show anything aside from "no carrier"...
Look neat. Having a dual power source function would be cool feature to add. Even better would be PoE power support. I am surprised they didn't make the chassis out of extruded aluminum.
Plan to buy one. As far as I know it also supports ecc
I wonder if you could cram all that hardware into a 2u but half width device. That'd make a good fanned version for people who don't have a rack (easier to fit on a bookshelf or whatever) or put in a coupler to still mount two of them in a full width 2u space. Also maybe a bigger (and user replaceable) fan.
Oh man I kinda want one of these to replace my Edgerouter 4 box. It's been on my list to find a solid (while energy and cost) efficient platform to replace it with to get into Opnsense but haven't found anything yet. This may be the box I pickup to replace my aging hardware.
Just what I need! Thank you sir
They have a bug in the hw-design on the motherboard for the sim-card slot. According to the spec a pin is supposed to be pulled to ground when no sim is present and left unconnected when sim is present. It does it the other way around. I had to remove a surface mounted component to get the 4g-modem to understand that there actually were a sim-card installed.
Could you please publish the change you did as I too want to use the SIM in this device.
@@DavidPritt-xh7qq I can't show since it is in operation at the moment. But if you take a picture of the motherboard showing the SIM card slot and the pci-e connector underneath the m2-ssd-slots, then I can point it out.
I can take a picture, what is the best way to send it to you?
@@DavidPritt-xh7qq I have a gmail with the same username
The meanwell is super nice, but I'd gut it and 3d print a slot for a dell psu, it should be sweet.
Did you guys read my mind? I was literally on Amazon looking for something like this, with just enough ports for my needs and a decent value ($).
Hey guys!! @ServeTheHome
Tank you for this review!!
I wonder what do you think about the C3808 variant: 12 cores: 2.0Ghz, 12MB cache (instead of C3758R: 8 cores: 2.4Ghz, 16B cache)?
Thank you.
Still Denverton just lower clocks but more cores. It depends on where you think your bottleneck is.
This is something we can finally recommend!
wow the technology is finally here
I wish they'd put two of these in this 1U case. Would be nice to have hw failover in 1U space.
Colin, now that just makes too much sense. 💡
Only thing that doesn't make sense is the location of th fan intake for a server rack. Stack a bunch of gear on top of it's self and you don't have any flow.
Only unanswered question for me is can both power inputs be used simultaneously for redundant/ha power.
Would the 12VDC work as redundancy? Try to switch off the AC while the 12VDC is on.
That would be really interesting. I think it actually would. The 12V plug is on the motherboard itself, and it would just run parallel with the MeanWell PSU that is also plugged into the motherboard aswell. Current will flow through the path of least resistance. The voltages should not vary too much because that would wear out the PSUs
@@saltlakrids Just add diodes on both inputs to prevent backfeed
I wonder what the idle power usage would be of there units, ideally with a few 10g modules. ❤
You can get it to the 20-30W range. But then maxing the CPU will only add
My desktop version pulls ~33Watts with 2x 10Gbit and 4x 2.5Gbit ports populated (plus a fan on top running off the usb2 port)
Make this with an N100 at the same cost and I'd put them in inventory rotation. It would beat many of the all SSD NAS appliances coming out at ridiculous prices.
This trades the iGPU of the N100 for more physical cores (for vCPUS), QAT acceleration, 4x 10GbE, and more PCIe/ SATA I/O. Adding quad SFP+ to the N100 would mean you are not putting many drives on there
Would love to look into this more but it seems this and the fanless version are not available in Europe. Bummer. 😮
A bit of a challenge with EU regulations. Hoping there is a seller willing to jump through those hoops soon.
this is the first time sth shows something thats actually cheap for what you’re getting. a comparable solution would cost over $500
I mean we showed the fanless version of this at around the same price many months ago
There is similar 2nd-hand stuff on the market, dell vep 1445, 32g ecc, 1T msata, around $180
So, after digging up my 20 year old VGA monitor and OLD VGA cable I have yet to wake this thing up. Gee no POST test, no documentation and the VGA doesn't work. Looking up serial wiring for the console port. I hear this uses Intel AMT... which Ethernet port? Nice machine. Great solid build. I am using it to weight down some papers right now.
It can take 30-120 seconds to train the memory on first boot.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Thanks. Apparently my 20 yr old ACER VGA monitor is not working. I ordered a VGA to HDMI cable. Does this in fact have Intel AMT?
Is it me or is that box running 100% load flat on the desk at 13:36. How is that CPU breathing?
The pre-drilled holes would be nicer if they came with grommets for people that don't use them for antennas.
Whos bright idea was it to put a fan on the bottom of a rack mount chassis?
Not mine
For comparison, the Cisco Firepower FPR-1010 device runs on a 4 core Atom C3558 with 8Gb DDR4, 200Gb SATA SSD, and 8+1 1Gbps NICs (4x X553, 1x I211), so this device is more than capable to be a robust, enterprise grade firewall. Not for a datacenter, though, but for remote offices it can withstand a lot of abuse.
6:38 A ground connection for the chassis would be nice
Looks good
First time HomeLab builder here. Just ordered my first piece based on your recommendation from another video (MINISFORUM Mini PC MS-01-S1390 Barebone with Intel Core i9-13900H with 96 gb memory; the barebone is just barely over $650.00 on Amazon atm!). So thank you for that excellent video. I do want to get a dedicated single box for IDS/Firewall. I'm thinking Suricata and OPNsense. I think this box would work well for that? My question is this...why would you want a noisy mount rack over a silent fanless version if they are the same otherwise? I'm assuming the fanless one is appropriately engineered and does not overheat. Why does the benefit of the internal power source of the rack mount override the silent running of the silent version? I'm also assuming the fanless version has no power issues. Thank you very much for your help and time. I appreciate you!
Some folks just prefer rackmount for organizing machines. The MS-01 can run a virtualized firewall no problem and save you some money
Plex Transcoding would be my only concern. And the lack of cheap network rack depth SATA expansion bays.
Plex you would do on another machine, not this one.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo boo plus I am to invested in unifi ATM 😉
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Indeed. I would love to see a video of what you think is a best buy and also a reasonable top end hardware for a Plex server (which would also be a NAS with maybe TrueNAS). I need to build one and run it for my home. Thanks!
Okay, point us to the ECC option 🙌
In the listings they have a few compatible modules. Also, I believe you can ask them to upgrade when purchasing.
Nemix 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 2666Mhz ECC Ram is working fine in mine.
Im running 2 Kingston Server Premier 32 GB 3200MT/s DDR4 ECC CL22 SODIMM 2Rx8 Micron F - KSM32SED8/32MF in my fanless version
The fan facing down in a rack unit is a bit odd and may cause problems in a full rack.
I need 4 usb ports, plus 2 would be nice, but I could remote with only 4 usb ports.
It needs to run linux with 4 sound cards from masters communicatuons, 4x of their DRA50M.
Is this fan noise related to being ran sitting on a table with no gap for air to escape?
We ran the top one with the bottom off but present as well to validate.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo This reply makes no sense to me. Thee top of the one below it has no holes and there are no stand offs, so the bottom on or off changes nothing.
Here we go again! 🤓
Given it is an Intel NIC the assumption is that that x553 is going to complain about third party optics that aren't Intel coded? Unfortunately I just ordered a WAS-100 stick to bypass ATT Fiber's modem and it was coded to my current NIC and not an Intel one. Need to see if that is changeable post shipment and this would be perfect to replace my current higher power PFSense box.
Wishlist:
- Bays! If it wants to be a TrueNAS host and comes with a SATA connector anyway, make the enclosure bigger, use 2Us and give me 4, 8 oder even 12 hot-swap bays.
- ECC Memory: again, if it wants to be used as NAS, it's probably going to be ZFS, so it should allow me to use ECC Memory (without issues ;-))
- IPMI (or does it have something similar I missed?)
With these changes, shut up and take my money :D
Thanks!
Wow! Thanks Kirk!
God I've been looking for days for a machine like this to use as a router or switch. would be interesting to see bandwidth stats
I prefer the CPU be an AMD Zen 3 😃 and RJ-45 that are multi-gigabyte (10, 5, 2.5, 1, 0.1 and 0.01Ghz). I suppose I have a long wait if ever 😆 Those "Mean Well" power supplies from Taiwan are very well designed and built (along with comprehensive documentation online). I've seen them used in mission critical VSAT satellite modems.
Years ago I moved to an Edgerouter because of the excellent throughput when using hardware offload, but I guess this would probably be fine as a 1Gbps software router?
Just wish they had a dual power supply option for redundant power
What app are you using to monitor the statistics of the unit?
I'm using the non rack-mount version and unfortunatly I don't achieve 10gbps over SMB. I have a fast enough NVMe installed and as OS I'm using OpenMediaVault which is based on Debian. Maybe this is related to the bug you mention in the video at the end.
samba needs a lot of single core performance [at least to saturate 10G for a single client]. I'd guess the cpu is lightly insufficient being an gen older e-core.
@@magnawavezone Yeah, that sounds reasonable. If I remember correctly, I also did an iperf3 test and could achieve 10 gig on one side, but the other side was only about 4-5 gig.
Fan is in the wrong spot for a rack mount device.
Agreed, the better option would be to make a larger heatpipe heatsink then blow air through the chassis. But that is a costly custom part for a sub $300 unit.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo I would argue it defeats the point of asking for a rack design if you can't actually place something above or below it.. Same goes for that "Passive" one you reviewed a while back.
Top or bottom mount fan on a rack mount device is a huge red flag, and it's concerning you gloss over it. Worse you show them rack mounted with the top unit having the fan blocked by the lower unit.
do you cry when you grab a fork to eat hotel cereal instead of getting up from the table you picked to sit at to get yourself a spoon?
@@pizzaspidertf is wrong with you
@@whatever63644 not enough to give this any kind of real response
@@pizzaspider Tell us you're an idiot, without telling us.
cry more @ttww1590 😂😂😂
U can use sata drives on sas backplane but not vs
Not only the backplane matters, but also the controller
if you plug in both 12v and PSU, does it essentially act as redundant PSUs in that if one fails the other one keeps things going?
most likely
It'd be interesting to see real world Plex performance, how many streams can you get HD and 4K?
I have one of these, and.... the only display output is vga.
Know what I definitely don't have kicking around really anymore? VGA. So I tried putting an ssd with an opnsense install in it and.... didn't seem to work. So I'm guessing I need to mess with the bios, but.... QOTOM, can we please get displayport and/or a BMC/IPMI?
I tried getting hooked up with a serial console and I get... something resembling the BIOS, but nothing I could actually interact with.
I should add, the fan input on the bottom is... definitely an interesting take, I guess. Would be nice if the airflow was front to back or similar so it doesn't suffocate when racked with other gear.
Totally agree. The challenge they have is that there is no iGPU since it is a chip designed for firewall and storage. So the ASPEED add is for servers where VGA is 95%+ of the installed base.
NCA-1515A :)
Brand new on eBay with 16GB ecc ram, sata ssd, WiFi, lte and fully functioning IPMI
Just wish it had a PCIe x16 3.0 or 4.0 slot for 100Gbe, then it'd be perfect for a firewall.
Which SFP+ 10GB (copper) modules are compatible with this? And how is the power consumption with 4 of those installed?
Is this or the Minisforum MS-01 better for a 10gb router with OPNsense /pfSense?
The ms-01 is way way better this doesn't even come close.
The Minisforum MS-01 is a lot more powerful but why? If you are just going to use it as a firewall appliance, it is way too much overkill and just a complete waste. That device will cost over a thousand dollars once you add in memory and a hard drive. Why pay for a Ferrari if you are only going to drive it to the grocery store and back?
Anyone know a distributor in europe I can buy this from?
What I'd like to see is a drive cage inside the box to support the 1 or 2 3.5inch drivers, so why make the user makeshift a way to make it fit? Give us a inexpensive solution that works nicely.
The fan-less model has mounting points for 2½" drives. But the on-board voltage regulators might be too limited, and the lack of active cooling is a problem when you start sticking additional power-hungry devices into this computer.
Would be nice to have 2 of them in a 1U chassis (probably without the internal PSU)
just a longer case would be needed and a 'proper' cooling design to have the fans in the back so they're not blocked when the unit is mounted. But yes two in 1U would be nice for a small redundant build.
Anyone else notice that the power connector should have been located on the back panel, not the front?
Ethernet ports have a problem of 225 and 226 with dhcp. In virtual machines, the DHCP package client does not work properly over the bridge for virtual machines, but the client does not physically connected. I have a problem on MS-01 to make it a firewall, etc.
i wish there was a box like this that had a pcie slot for so i could add another network card
You have wild networking needs!
Turns out that you can only use 2400Mhz memory max speed. Also, if you use 32GB modules, you have to pull the BIOS battery before inserting them. That's what kept me from POSTing.
Good trick on the BIOS battery. DDR4-2400 is the max for the C3758R
@@ServeTheHomeVideo I have yet to get any of the SFP+ ports to work. They just will not sync. My host is Ubuntu 24.04 and everything points to current support for Intel i225 and i226. The 2.5gig ports work fine though.
I mean... I still use a (not checkpoint anymore :P ) 1u with a G1820 as ASN router. Especially as I can't effort more then 1x 1G ports of carriers in the datacenter. But if they would offer me a free/same price 10g port uplink/IPX, that's a mashine that I would think about ^^
Is there a rack mounted option for a NAS that has an SFF8087 connector or do I have to sit a NAS box on top of this appliance like a heathen? I want a pretty rack enclosure.
Im looking for a SSD/NVME NAS with 25GB SFP connections. The NAS needs to have a high level of redundancy/backup for critical data. It should be about 20TB in size. Wondering where I can find some sort of comparison tool or utility which will help me locate something like this?
Why on earth did they decide to put the power button on the back - it is an rack mounted box. And everyone find that coll..😅
You asked what I wanted to see. I want to see a real NIC SPF+ 4 port NIC like the intel 700 series that just works of out the box with proxmox etc. Even after the latest upgrade to proxmox 8.8 the intel 553 nic still doesn't work properly out the box. I still have to recompile 5.20.3 and fix compilation errors to get the 553 NIC working!!!
Put it in the video but I made a formal request to Intel and followed up but no response
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Intel has released driver 5.20.9 which at least compiles and installs. However I can only get gigabit speeds from it and not 10 Gbps
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Think you should have made it clear that the x533 will not work on Linux 6 kernels out the box, try testing with latest proxmox 8.
wait, where's the link to the potential intel driver "errata?" 🤔
I would buy this in a HEARTBEAT, but Proxmox 8.x has a broken ixgbe driver in the 6.x kernel series! If they had used something other than the X553 10GbE SFP+ ports, this would be an instant sale. I already bought the previous desktop version and it works great, but I have to keep the Proxmox kernel at 5.15 - otherwise no 10Gig-E!!
Seems @larsla (see commment above) did some driver patching and has it running in Proxmox 8.x !
I brought it up with Intel more than a month ago.