Good ITX board with limited availability

Started by Antaris, February 06, 2019, 09:06:06 PM

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February 06, 2019, 09:06:06 PM Last Edit: February 07, 2019, 12:15:31 AM by Antaris
From time to time i observe the net for a decent ITX 12V(or wider DC power tolerance) with proper components for a x86 router. I guess i find one in Intel:
https://solutionsdirectory.intel.com/solutions-directory/d3543-s-industrial-series-mini-itx-mainboard
and found it also in Fujitsu:
http://www.fujitsu.com/fts/products/computing/peripheral/mainboards/industrial-mainboards/d3543s.html

I am in Bulgaria, and here such boards are hard to find and order. Is anyone seen this board anywhere ot order single piece in Europe?
Proxmox enthusiast @home, bare metal @work.

Found it in german site if anyone is interested. Now negotiating shipping and price...

https://www.rutronik24.com/search-result/nojs:1337/qs:D3543-S/reset:0
Proxmox enthusiast @home, bare metal @work.

Or Asus P10S-I. A bit more money but you get more onboard LAN ports and more CPU power (and choice). Not quite so niche so not so difficult to purchase either.

February 28, 2019, 06:08:20 AM #3 Last Edit: February 28, 2019, 06:10:51 AM by daquirm
What about these for that matter, has anyone tested them? I think this is better than Asus as it has IPMI inbuilt without having to buy an extra module and with celeron G4900T it would be cheap and it would perform fairly well, while still having ECC memory:
X11SCL-iF https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/X11/X11SCL-iF.cfm
Personally I would buy this one, but I've seen no performance reports on that one:
A2SDi-2C-HLN4F https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/atom/A2SDi-2C-HLN4F.cfm
And Netgate seems to use these processors:
A2SDi-4C-HLN4F https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/atom/A2SDi-4C-HLN4F.cfm
I think it's possible to power it with a DC adapter only when buying P4 to jack adapter, so it will be very efficient...

The Fujitsu boards accepts 8-36V DC via DC barrel jack or via 4 pin socket.
There is other problem: one of the ethernets is Realtek :(
Proxmox enthusiast @home, bare metal @work.

Quote from: daquirm on February 28, 2019, 06:08:20 AM
What about these for that matter, has anyone tested them? I think this is better than Asus as it has IPMI inbuilt without having to buy an extra module and with celeron G4900T it would be cheap and it would perform fairly well, while still having ECC memory:
X11SCL-iF https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/X11/X11SCL-iF.cfm
That SuperMicro board looks awesome.

Yeah with i3-8100 it should idle bellow 30 Watts I think, based on this review: https://www.servethehome.com/intel-core-i3-8100-benchmarks-and-review-low-cost-server-processor/3/
I think this is price/performance killer, but I will go for the Celeron G4900T and ECC Ram. As my connection is about 40Mbps only and I use currently very old Xeon CPU E3-1220L V2 with Suricata, OpenVPN client and server, shaping and about 30 clients my CPU usage was never above 15%. So I hope I could manage up to 100mbps openVPN session with celeron.

Will drop Fujitsu boars for now. All are with one Relatek LAN.
Found another budget solution:
https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/X11/X11SBA-LN4F.cfm

Any known problems with Braswell CPUs?
Proxmox enthusiast @home, bare metal @work.

March 03, 2019, 06:17:56 AM #8 Last Edit: March 03, 2019, 06:39:30 AM by daquirm
It's a really outdated board with non ECC RAM ddr3 ram, for the sake of stability a would rather buy something, with ecc. This costs the same money and should run faster:
https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/atom/A2SDi-2C-HLN4F.cfm
C3338 has only 2 cores, but based on benchmarks it's faster than C2558, which I would expect to be similar as N3710 which have 4 cores.
https://www.servethehome.com/intel-atom-c3338-benchmarks-why-denverton-is-so-sweet/

The strange is that in some the charts of the review in STH figures N3700 which is always sits better than C3338.
And N3710 is even faster...
I am a bit confused...
Proxmox enthusiast @home, bare metal @work.

March 03, 2019, 05:55:12 PM #10 Last Edit: March 03, 2019, 06:32:58 PM by daquirm
You're right It probably performs marginally better, but lacks ECC...I would exchange stability for couple percent of performance for sure. I had non ECC build with celeron G1610T in the past and I had to hard restart it once a week, with ECC and Xeon the issues stopped...this experience taught me to use server grade HW for firewalls...even Cisco and Netgate uses C series Atoms in their networking products.

March 03, 2019, 06:18:47 PM #11 Last Edit: March 03, 2019, 06:35:58 PM by daquirm
According to this benchmark, the c2558 and n3710 are similar, but the later is worse...so it depends on workload, but the g4900t should be 30% better:
https://m.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php
For OpenVPN single core performance is more important than multi thread performance. According to their documentation, you can count 20Hz for every Mbps in single direction with AES-NI enabled. So Celeron should give about 145Mbps down, atom N max 125Mbps and C should give about 110Mbps performance maximum. These numbers are very acceptable for me, as anything beyond 100Mbps is beyond my reach, where I live. Even when I had 100Mbps connection it was so fast, that I didn't really cared when downgrading to 60Mbps in the past.


OVPN performace is important, but it's not all when it comes to netmap enabled IPS/Sensei build. For a total of 8GB memory ECC is not viable as in ZFS ARC cache in Proxmox. So for a price/performacne, N3710 is far better for me as a baremetal full-blown OPNsense router. Especially with the prices of LPDDR3/ECC DDR4...
Proxmox enthusiast @home, bare metal @work.

March 03, 2019, 09:31:01 PM #13 Last Edit: March 03, 2019, 09:35:01 PM by daquirm
Many people think that ECC makes sense for handling critical data within a datastorage only. But they forget that operating systems run on RAM too, so whenever there's ram error your system might crash and for me that resiliency against crashes is very important. In fact I do use ramdisk in Pfsense and ZFS-mirror for dual USB boot media. Because what I add extra for ram, I save on storage. Backing up the config once a 24 hours isn't a huge load on that flash sticks.
Almost ideal complete build, just add ram and whatever storage.
https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/Mini-ITX/SYS-E200-9A.cfm

Agreed those are nice machines, not cheap though. At least for what they retail for here (Sweden), you can get a SuperMicro board + much more powerful CPU in a non-SuperMicro case for less than this Atom-based barebone.