CWWK / Topton N100 Mini Pc Router Experience

Soldato
Joined
30 Jul 2005
Posts
19,780
Location
Midlands
So, got a hold of one of these little devices that people getting excited about and thought id replace my Edgerouter 4 with this thing.
spec:
intel n100 quad core cpu
8gb ddr5 sodimm
64gb nvme (forsee brand from a steamdeck.)
4 x 2.5gb intel i226v lan ports.
used an old liteon 12v power adapter i had lying around which may be better quality than the supplied one.

so far iv been doing some stability testing with memtest and prime95 and temp testing to see how its cooling is.
its got decent heft to it due to the aluminium heatsink the case is made of.

ram module got to 75c during memtest so may need to improvise something here.
cpu in cpuz bench got to 72c in under 5 minutes. i then took it apart and repasted it with mx4 and now peak temp in cpuz was 60c after 1 hour run, power pull in cpuz is around 18w.
prime95 sfft makes the unit pull 24.5w from the wall (using wall plug meter) and peak temp went to 64c, in the pic i place a small hand fan on the case top (which IR gun said was around 54c) and then cpu temp while prime was still running slowly dropped down to 50c and the heatsink after some time didnt feel much above room temp.
idle power consumption at windows desktop via rdp is around 8w. with no display connected and no rdp session active its around 7.7w.
iv done no bios tweaking yet so will have a gander in there at some point.
so first impressions, this thing can do with a fan on it if its doing heavy processing. so iv 3d printed some fan holding clips and mounted a fan on it which when running from 5v power adapter cant even be heard unless ear is right up against it.
so far iv had windows server 2022 on it and done a lot of testing overnight and running few apps and network stuff and its had no issues. also iv not had the fan turned on since iv got some usb to molex fan adapters on order (run out of wall sockets to run my modified power adapters that have molex connector to run fans from),
whats impressive is the power ratings in hwinfo seems to be very close the what the wall plug meter shows. surprising.
not sure what direction im gonna go with this yet but looking to probably go with opnsense but still researching into other alternatives.

as of now i really like this device, its form factor is good.

anyone else have experience with these?



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These things have way more power and capability / flexibility than udm pro apparently.
Also if you decide not to go the router path or VM host they do have av1 decode acceleration so would make a killer media player.

The edgerouter 4 I got does a fantastic job other than VPN speed which I could do with more.
Hope a router os like *sense will be as stable and reliable.
Always good to have something to tinker and play with too. But when it comes to internet if it goes down the whole family will kick off
 
I was thinking about that wanting 10g ports for future want but then realised that the CPU wont handle 10g connection and best to wait till I actually have 10g internet which I suspect won't be for many years.
2.5g net is available now but out of my price range and it's not required since 1gig does the job and also none of my computers have 2.5gig Lan ports lol

So these n100 boxes should be top for 1 gig wan and handle 2.5g well.

As for reliability iv had mine running now for few days and no issues.
Heat will always be a issue with passive devices but if your up for some modding and tweaking it will be a fun time
 
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Iv got opnsense on it now. So far so good, need to get wire guard server going on it and test it out further.
Ram iv set to 4000 in an attempt to make it run cooler when memtest was running in it. Think it went from. 75c to 73c for ram temps going from 4800 to 4000.
 
Iv got some 2.5g Lan cards on order now. They use the realtek 8125 chip I think. Should be good to get some testing done.
Will hunt down a 2.5gb switch too at some point then see how the mini pc does with some benchmarks on throughput with different VPN configs
 
found a bigger nvme heatsink lying around too so swapped it over. replacement heatsink is fair bit heavier. temps seem to be the same on this drive, dont think it puts out enough heat to even need heatsink. there is no writes going on though since opnsense is set to do all logging etc to ram.

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Box has been solid, managed 12 days uptime till I ran some updates and had to reboot.
Currently took it out of its job to do bios updates and to see if I can lower idle power consumption.
Something called SA agent pulls almost 5w at idle so need to work out what that is.
 
Got mine down to around 8w running opnsense with occasional spikes depending on load. 2 NICs connected one at 2.5g and 12cm fan running from it's usb
Decent for what you get, almost the same as my edgerouter 4, the edgerouters spikes are much lower though but then again so is wire guard performance on it
 
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