DEC3920 Quick Review

[dirtyfreebooter]

Picked up a DEC3920 from OPNsense Shop. US customs held it for 7+ days, after two docusign attempts with Fedex international customer service, they finally released it.

The hardware itself is very well made. Almost a work of art. There is fan noise, though its minor, not like a 1U Dell / Supermicro. You can hear the fan noise go up and down. AMD V3C18 CPU, comes with hyperthreads disabled.

Not sure how much more lab testing I will do before it replaces my Protectli VP2440. I only have 1 Gbps fiber, upgrading to 2 Gbps, so kept the testing simple to WAN on 2.5g interface and LAN on 10g. I didn't have a chance to setup and test wireguard, but since the VP2440 with N150 can handle ~2Gbps wireguard, this should have no problem with my use case.

Pleasantly surprised this thing idles less than the Protectli VP2440 (which is 12w with Coreboot 0.9.1-rc3 with ASPM enabled). Out of the box without having to mess with any settings or tuneables.

Memory

1x 16gb DDR5 Micron Technology CT16G56C46U5.C8H
Speed: 5600 MT/s

NVMe

Transcend TS256GMTE712A 256gb
NVMe PCIe Gen 4 x4
NAND Flash Type,112-layer 3D NAND (TLC)
Sequential Read Speed "Up to 3,800 MB/s"
Sequential Write Speed "Up to 3,200 MB/s"
Random Read / Write "Up to 350,000 IOPS / Up to 330,000 IOPS"
Endurance "Up to 4,000 TBW (Terabytes Written) / 1.84 DWPD"
MTBF "3,000,000 hours"

Network

igc i226-V nics ship with v2.25 firmware

Power and iperf tests

All power measured at wall outlet of 110v using PN2000 power meter.

reboot - 57.64s

idle - wan igc1, lan igc0 (first boot) - 8.78w
iperf upload   - 18.75w - 2.35 Gbit/s
iperf download - 18.60w - 2.35 Gbit/s

idle - zenarmor, wan igc0, lan ax0 - 9.92w
iperf upload   - 21.53w - 2.35 Gbit/s
iperf download - 22.04w - 2.35 Gbit/s

Zenarmor with SQLite database with default policy with more than 50% policy blocks turned on. adds about 1w to idle. ~5w to routing 2.5g.

Photos

[OPNenthu]

This chassis design really is beautiful.

US customs held it for 7+ days, after two docusign attempts with Fedex international customer service, they finally released it.

Maybe they were trying to figure out if it's a prohibited item under the new policy :P

https://protectli.com/news/statement-fcc-covered-list-update-to-ban-foreign-routers-in-the-us/

Not sure how much more lab testing I will do before it replaces my Protectli VP2440. I only have 1 Gbps fiber, upgrading to 2 Gbps, so kept the testing simple to WAN on 2.5g interface and LAN on 10g. I didn't have a chance to setup and test wireguard, but since the VP2440 with N150 can handle ~2Gbps wireguard, this should have no problem with my use case.

I'm just curious: if the VP2440 already does 2Gbps on WAN, where did it fall short?  Is it just ZenArmor, or did you see bottlenecks in VLAN routing as well?

Pleasantly surprised this thing idles less than the Protectli VP2440 (which is 12w with Coreboot 0.9.1-rc3 with ASPM enabled).

I wish coreboot had an option to disable the iGPU as that could be contributing a little to the power draw.

[dirtyfreebooter]

the vp2440 i think is pretty great. x710 is rock solid. the fanless design of the vp2440 is also well engineered.

i always wanted to support this project more. i do pay for business license for example.  i always wanted to get some opnsense hardware but frankly the previous gen cpus were kinda lame. especially with zenarmor.

i just really appreciate this project and want it to stay around and prosper.