Barebone Intel N100 with 4 x I226

[vicking]

So, I have a barebone N100 Amazon box laying around which I want to use as a bare metal OPNsense box.
To do so I need to install ram and a SSD.

I saw the maximum supported ram speed of the n100 is DDR5 4800 MT/s so I was thinking of going for 8gb of that type of ram? But any other suggestions are welcome and I am not sure if it is worth over DDR4/3200

About the SSD I am not sure which slot to use.. it has a nvme port which supports a SSD but also a sata port for a 2.5” SSD and maybe a m2 slot..

Any recommendations are welcome!

[meyergru]

There is no choice for either DDR4 or DDR5 on theses boxes. While the N100 can support both, it is up to the manufacturer to decide which type to use, not you. You will have to find which one you need.

Speed-wise, OpnSense does not have high expectations for storage (unless you use it as a VM under Proxmox), so you are good to go with whatever you want. SSDs are directly mounted to the case and have better heat dissipation in those unventilated cases.

What I would go for is a specimen with high write endurance, as you will want ZFS instead of UFS - i.e. do not use a QLC variant and prefer "pro" types. High write endurance can also be achieved by overallocating, i.e. use a larger disk. The price difference for a 512 GByte or 1 TByte instead of a smaller disk is often negligible.

[vicking]

Thanks for your reply!
I see in your signature that you also use a n100 box with a 256gb nvme ssd.

About the heat, are you saying I can better use a 2,5” SSD which is mounted to the case?
Another question I have about it is “are there any worthy BIOS tweaks” to bring down the temperature and usage of this box?

[meyergru]

Yes, SATA SSDs will be lower in temperature.

And you can/should tweak the CPU TDP settings in the BIOS.

[vicking]

Thanks! Are there also some opnsense tweaks/tunables needed?

[meyergru]

I recommend installing the Intel CPU microcode plugin.

[vicking]

Yes, SATA SSDs will be lower in temperature.

And you can/should tweak the CPU TDP settings in the BIOS.

Do you have any directions or a guide for the BIOS settings? Thanks!

[vicking]

Oke, I am up and running with 16gb ram and a 256gb 2.5” SSD.
Running bare metal with ZenArmor, Shaper, Adblock, 1Gb up and down PPPoE including IPTV.

Eveything is working great, but I am a bit concerned about the temperature.
I applied new/better thermal paste, did some bios tweaks but OPNsens is reporting quite high temperatures running idle..

If I touch it, it also feels quite hot so the case is touching the CPU correctly I guess..

[meyergru]

That is not much for a passively cooled system at all.

If you limit PL1 to 10 Watts and PL2 to 15, you will most probably stay under 55°C even under massive load. Many manufacturers set 25 or even 35 Watts PL2, which may lead to temps > 75°C.

[vicking]

Nice!
Strange thing I noticed is that when I stress the system with a bufferbloat test for example I see the cores go to 2999Mhz (3ghz), but the boost to 3,4ghz is never reached.

Is this normal behavior or did I do something wrong in my bios config which turned off the boost?

[meyergru]

1. How would you know if a bufferbloat test actually does make the CPU boost to use full performance?
2. On the other hand, if you use a CPU stress test that actually does use all the performance, the frequency would be limited by the TDP power limits and also thermal limits.
3. This is especially true if you use all cores. If you look at the potential power draw of such a system, it can take 25 Watts CPU, 8 Watts NVME plus 4 Watts NICs plus 5 Watts Chipset/RAM, so you look at up to 50 Watts. A small, passively cooled case cannot dissipate that much power without going north of 60°C on the outside.

You would actually to raise the power limits to above the Intel-defined default TDP of 6 Watts and then use only one core to reach the maximum possible CPU core frequency.

My N100 reaches only ~2200 MHz when I stress all cores. The short spikes of higher frequency are usually undetected because they do not last long.

You can tune the TDP power limits, however you will find that you can gain ~5-10% max by using the highest values. On the other hand, this will raise your CPU temps by as much as 15-20°C. It is simply not worth it. These boxes are designed to draw small amounts of power. If you want more performance, you will want a step-up to a CPU that actually uses up to 50 Watts and needs active cooling. You would need such a CPU only if your network speeds exceed 2.5 GBps.

[vicking]

Hmm I am very curious about your BIOS settings now.

If I do a simple Speedtest (with shaper enabled) I can see all my cores go from around 800mhz to 2900mhz.
I checked this using HTOP with cpu frequency and temperature enabled..

A real stress test like prime or something I didn’t do yet, not sure if there is a bootable version or something to do that because I don’t run windows on this machine

[cookiemonster]

You could try ubench on freeBSD. It'll hammer the system thoough.

[Gianry]

Eveything is working great, but I am a bit concerned about the temperature.
I applied new/better thermal paste, did some bios tweaks but OPNsens is reporting quite high temperatures running idle..
 

Hi, I've checked my minipc temperature trough proxmox shell and the idle temperature is around 40° c

Could you explain me how to read the cpu temperature in opnsense gui ? I've not found it

thanks

[meyergru]

One can enable a temperature widget on the dashboard.

However:

1. At this time, it shows the temperature as too high, because it itself raises the momentary CPU temperatures during the dashboard updates.

2. You probably cannot use it, because your OpnSense is virtualized.