Good ITX board with limited availability

[Antaris]

Denverton board will be good with 2+ 10 gigabit interfaces and with CPU with good QAT rate (8 core+). But according to high prices are too early for wide use.

[rungekutta]

I specced up 3 Mini-ITX builds for kicks.

Motherboard: SuperMicro X11SCL-IF (inc 2x Gb LAN ports)
Case: Fractal Design Node 304
CPU: Intel Core i3 8300 with stock cooler
PSU: Seasonic 450W PSU
RAM: 1x Samsung DDR4 2400MHz ECC 16GB
SSD: Intel 600p Series M.2 2280 SSD 128GB
LAN: HP Intel Ethernet I350-T2 2-Port 1Gb NIC
Parts available in Sweden for the sum total equiv of €883

Or

Barebone: SuperMicro E300-9A-4C 5500 (Intel Atom C3558)
(https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/Mini-ITX/SYS-E300-9A-4C.cfm)
RAM: 1x Samsung DDR4 2400MHz ECC 16GB
SSD: Intel 600p Series M.2 2280 SSD 128GB
Available in Sweden for €760


Or

Barebone: SuperMicro E300-9A-8C 7400 (Intel Atom C3758)
(https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/Mini-ITX/SYS-E300-9A-8C.cfm)
RAM: 1x Samsung DDR4 2400MHz ECC 16GB
SSD: Intel 600p Series M.2 2280 SSD 128GB
Available in Sweden for €940

So how do the CPUs compare?

According to https://www.cpubenchmark.net:
Intel Atom C3558 (4 cores): 2538, single thread 876
Intel Atom C3758 (8 cores): ??
Intel Core i3-8300 (4 cores): 8661, single thread 2167

So the custom build seems to deliver more bang for the buck and also flexibility (can stick a Xeon CPU in there in the future if needed/desired) but obviously not as neat a solution as the SuperMicro barebones. Also the SuperMicro boxes probably run very quiet if not completely silent.

[ruffy91]

This also seems like a sensible option for <1000€: https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/1U/5018/SYS-5018D-FN8T.cfm
Including 6xGBit + 2x10GBit SFP+

[ThuTex]

i am happily running my (home install) opnsense off of this board: https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-N3160TN-rev-10#ov

yes, its with realtek nics.
however i can use vlanning and get pretty much my full gigabit speed over the network, so i'm very happy with it.

[daquirm]

I feel like the barebones are overpriced...
In general I like the i3 idea for high performance firewall builds.
What about using just 8GB ram, 16GB seems to be just too much for most cases. I have 16 GB by my self and I use only 4GB and out of it about 2,5 GB for Ram disk only.
450W PSU and 67W TDP CPU makes no sense it will be so ineffective, tha what you save on HW, you’ll pay for electricity. Let’s asume your build will consume about 50W average, with 80% PSU efficiency, it will be 62Watts. With 60 Watt external brick and SoC your average consumption won’t be higher than 20W. That’s 42Watt difference, now calculate the electricity price for 5 years, that’s 42x 24x 365x 5/ 1000x 0,19 = 349 USD in my country. The question would be, how much extra performance will you get on purpose build SoC if you pay 349USD more why just not buy something like this for performance: https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/D/X10SDV-4C-TLN2F.cfm this should be about 6900 PassMark points, but much more efficient and and you could use this to power it https://www.logicsupply.com/cbl-pwrpd73/

[daquirm]

This Tyan serie is funny, no IPMI, so - extra 6W consumption, no redundant ports, nothing unuseful in the package:
TYAN S3227 (S32272NR-C538) made to be firewall: https://www.tyan.com/Motherboards_S3227_S32272NR-C538
Just too little ports imho..and installing it must be hassle for home user...

[rungekutta]

I feel like the barebones are overpriced...
In general I like the i3 idea for high performance firewall builds.
What about using just 8GB ram, 16GB seems to be just too much for most cases. I have 16 GB by my self and I use only 4GB and out of it about 2,5 GB for Ram disk only.
450W PSU and 67W TDP CPU makes no sense it will be so ineffective, tha what you save on HW, you’ll pay for electricity.

Yes completely agree, I did it pretty quickly and just picked the smallest SeaSonic on the list, wasn't even that cheap.. a smaller one and ideally more efficient too would be better of course. Agreed on the RAM also, probably too much overkill. I have 8GB in my current install, tbh 4GB would probably have been fine too.

Having said all that. In the comparison I used the same single 16GB RAM stick for all 3 options, so taking it down to 8GB would shave the same €90 or so off all of 3 alternatives.

why just not buy something like this for performance: https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/D/X10SDV-4C-TLN2F.cfm this should be about 6900 PassMark points, but much more efficient and and you could use this to power it https://www.logicsupply.com/cbl-pwrpd73/

That looks sweet! In this local market that m/board is priced approx €45 over the combination X11SCL-IF + i3 8th gen but as you say would run more efficient and maybe more quiet too.

[rungekutta]

why just not buy something like this for performance: https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/D/X10SDV-4C-TLN2F.cfm this should be about 6900 PassMark points, but much more efficient and and you could use this to power it https://www.logicsupply.com/cbl-pwrpd73/

That looks sweet! In this local market that m/board is priced approx €45 over the combination X11SCL-IF + i3 8th gen but as you say would run more efficient and maybe more quiet too.

By the way I see SuperMicro recommends this case for it:
https://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/1u/504/SC504-203B

That actually comes with a 200W Gold level PSU and doesn't seem stupidly expensive so that would probably be the best option..?

That motherboard + abovementioned case + 8GB RAM + SSD would be something like €850 here, with 8GB RAM instead of 16GB. Only 2 LAN ports though. At least in my config I would also need to add a PCI card with additional 2 NICs.

[Antaris]

i am happily running my (home install) opnsense off of this board: https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-N3160TN-rev-10#ov

yes, its with realtek nics.
however i can use vlanning and get pretty much my full gigabit speed over the network, so i'm very happy with it.

For non-industrial board with celeron and only 2 realtek interfaces, this board is very expensive.
For 50$ more
https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/X11/X11SBA-LN4F.cfm
is far more bang for the buck.

[daquirm]

That actually comes with a 200W Gold level PSU and doesn't seem stupidly expensive so that would probably be the best option..?

I’m not sure about it, it’s good for sure even for server build, but that would be overkill for a firewall. I run this xeon d1521 with picoPSU in my NAS/virtualisation lab and I use 90Watt external power supply for notebooks which should have about 87-90% power efficiency, I have it with 2-3 sata drives attached. So for firewall may be only 60Watt supply will do, with 90-120watt you’re 100% sure. The picoPSU isn’t even necessary, you need just the p4 to jack connector as this board is made to accept DC straight away. I got picoPSU left over from some past build, so I’ve used it, because in my country nobody sells P4 to DC jack conectors, so I would have to order it from Germany, which makes no sense for part which costs about 4 EUR...

[daquirm]

Check this ASUS P11C-I as well, I like the Supermicros better, but if you don’t need integrated IPMI or DC power supply, this might be nice as well: https://www.asus.com/us/Commercial-Servers-Workstations/P11C-I/

[rungekutta]

Check this ASUS P11C-I as well, I like the Supermicros better, but if you don’t need integrated IPMI or DC power supply, this might be nice as well: https://www.asus.com/us/Commercial-Servers-Workstations/P11C-I/

Nice. Yes, looks equivalent to https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/X11/X11SCL-IF.cfm but without IPMI as you say. It probably varies but where I am they are basically the same price, so for an i3 or Xeon D-2100 build I would probably still go SuperMicro.

[rungekutta]

Sorry, I mean E-2100 of course

[daquirm]

Exactly. But sometimes not having an IPMI is a good thing, because if your firewall goes down and you don’t have isolated management LAN (which I don’t at home)...than you won’t be probably able to access it anyway and it will eat you about 6Watt the whole time, just because it’s another ARM computer. So not having it will save you about 50 USD over 5 years (which I expect from a router)...not that I care too much, but this is actualy, why I like the Tyans...but I have no idea how to install them enter bios etc. as they have no hdmi/vga neither...may be some how over serial, but I’ve never done that...when taken into consideration all that the SG-1100 doesn’t seem as a bad deal after all...as it consumes as an IPMI and has about 100Mbps OpenVPN throughput...for home use you hardly need more as it enables you 2x live 4k streams and couple of users doing whatever...I’m afraid Suricata would kill it, but what about blocking any incoming traffic instead?

[qinohe]

Hi, I guess we're talking about a router used in the home domain. Depending on your needs anything would do. Here a supermicro d-410 with a HP-364T quad gigabit adapter, such you can probably buy on your well known marketplace for a few dollar. It runs IDS, a proxy for 'shitware', a VPN, not so fast, there's no AES-ni, etc.. Though for the common home hobbyist this could be more than enough to run a dozen servers and the same amount of clients without a glitch, okay, maybe if all clients run a heavy duty webapp and very high quality movie I could expect trouble... but when does that happen on the home front. You're probably fine with older or cheap hardware. really To give another example, I sometimes need an AP on my box, cheap 5dollar(new) usb mini wifi AP's do the job very well with the AP software from OPNsense, it has no problem providing at least three clients with high quality audio from the MPD server tunneled through SSH, until now it never failed me or breaks.
Then there is said in this thread you should consider using ecc because you may need to reboot because of problems.. and the root cause would be non-ecc! really?,  cmon don't make me laugh, boxes here run for ever without ecc, I run a debian server on an Upboard first edition which easily achieves an uptime of 150 days++(mostly rebooted due to kernel upgrades, the supermicro board(OPNsense) also has no trouble with this), ecc would maybe (very maybe) have an effect on self healing file-systems like ZFS though, if one bit more is destroyed in a million it's still not repairable. Oh and than IPMI, for your home server, why? do you run some datacenter at home? agreed nice toys which you use a few times, but you need it?, I think you don't, my 50 cents.

Greetings, mark