R86S Soft Routing Multi-net port, Intel mini host N5105 N6005 8GB/16GB/32GB 10 Gigabit fiber port 2.5G (U3 Black)

Product Information

R86S G-Series only– 2x 10GbE SFP+ cages through an NVIDIA-Mellanox ConnectX-3 dual 10GbE OCP NIC 2.0 card Select the “USB Key” option if you are using a USB flash drive. There is also a “USB Drive” option which may be used for external hard drives. It seems as though external USB hard drives are recognized separately from USB flash drives so you need to ensure you are selecting the correct option or you will not be able to boot from your USB drive. You will also notice the name of your USB drive so that can help you choose the proper device. If you wish to have the full 10 Gbps bandwidth on the SFP+ interfaces, you must set the MTU to 9000 on the interfaces as well as every device connected to the SFP+ interfaces. As you can see below, the R86S-U4 has no problems routing 10 Gbps across both interfaces! Basic routing does not require as much CPU as IDS/IPS/VPNs, etc. Let me be clear here. This is not a perfect box. There is a bit of fan noise, although it is not bad (you can hear in the video.) The memory is fixed. ConnectX-3 uses a lot of power, albeit with 10GbE capabilities. Still, having one of these boxes my thought was constantly that it was cool. Every time I used it, I thought it was cool and wanted to add another node or two. GoWin R86s Internal Three Components For more information about the OCP, I found this really interesting document from www.opencompute.org with a lot information.

R86S Soft Routing Multi-net port, Intel mini host N5105 N6005 R86S Soft Routing Multi-net port, Intel mini host N5105 N6005

If that NIC looks like it is a familiar form factor, it should. This is built around an OCP NIC 2.0 card. Our unit has a NVIDIA-Mellanox ConnectX-3 dual 10GbE OCP NIC 2.0 card. One can see that the chassis is just large enough to fit the OCP NIC. GoWin R86s Inside Showing NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX 3 EN OCP NIC 2.0 And PCIe Cables Here is the unit flipped and without the M.2 SSD. One can see a small fan. This fan is cooling the 10GbE NIC. GoWin R86s Inside M.2 Slot Empty All R86S models come equipped with eMMC and NVMe storage. You can also use microSD cards (via the TF slot) that may be useful if you are using the R86S as a low power desktop/server and you wish to flash microSD cards.One thing we noticed was what happened when we had this unit at idle and 100% load. At idle, temps were generally low. GoWin R86S Intel Core I3 N305 Proxmox VE Idle The R86S originally had 3 different series models: the “B”, “P”, and “G” series. Within each series there were various configurations to choose from. The “B” series is fanless, has the slowest CPU of all the models, and only has 2.5G interfaces. The “P” series has a faster CPU than the “B” series, a fan, and only has 2.5G interfaces. The “G” series has the same or faster CPU than the “P” series, 2 fans, and has both 2.5G and 10G interfaces. The higher end models of each series (except for the “B” series) includes WiFi 6 and Bluetooth.

R86S U Series GW-R86S U Series

If you are booting off your USB drive, you will see the default OPNsense menu below. It only shows for a few seconds and you do not need to enter any options to proceed. Pulling the top off, we can note that the motherboard is very integrated. This is not the platform if you want to swap components on. Our system has 16GB of memory in a dual channel DDR4-2933 configuration. There is also an 8GB option. There is a CNVi Intel AX201 WiFi 6 and Bluetooth NIC. There is even 128GB of onboard eMMC storage. GoWin R86s Internal CPU Side With Memory And Intel AX201 Adding NVMe storage is about the only thing you can upgrade on this system. You may be able to add a separate WiFi module in the “U1” and “U2” models like you can with the other R86S series without the 10G interfaces, but installing it may be more difficult because you do not have access to the WiFi module from the bottom because of the 10G interfaces are on the bottom. Instead, you would have to take more of it apart to install it. For this reason if you want WiFi, I recommend getting the “U3” or “U4” models so you do not have to install the module yourself if you do not feel comfortable installing it. To test WiFi performance, I used Ubuntu which recognizes the wireless hardware out of the box. I performed the same iperf3 test that I used for the wired interfaces. I was able to get about 450 Mbps on a WiFi 6 access point. Crucial makes higher end NVMe drives, but all I needed was a small capacity slower model). Because of using this slower NVMe drive, I am not able to demonstrate the full speed of the NVMe storage interface on the R86S-U4. I am sure it will also max out on the “U4” if I had a faster NVMe. I will try to update this benchmark in the future if I get a chance to test with a faster NVMe drive. Power Consumption

GoWin R86S Power Consumption

One change with the “U” series model is that the 2.5G interfaces use the Intel i226v chipset instead of the i225v chipset. I personally have not experienced issues with the i225v chipsets but there are users who will not even consider purchasing any hardware unless it is equipped with the i226v chipset because of the issues that plagued the earlier revisions of the i225v chipset. I believe the issue was mostly an issue if using cheap, poor quality network switches. I have also heard some users say even the i226v has some issues. For those who really want i226v interfaces, this change should be a welcome change. Hardware On the left side of the R86S-U4 like other R86S models, there is another USB 3.0 port, a TF (microSD) slot, the power button, and the power LED. Granted, in a virtualization machine or a network router/ firewall, running at 100% utilization for several minutes is not a realistic scenario, and at 70% load, we were fine. It just feels like this version of the R86S-N with the 25GbE adapter was not designed to run at 100% CPU load 24/7. GoWin R86S Pro Key Lessons Learned

R86S How to Install and Configure OPNsense on the Gowin R86S

Así, hasta ayer la pantalla de arranque de nuestro R86S era la que podéis ver arriba. Aunque en esta revisión nos centraremos en el comportamiento del R86S como miniPC funcionando en Windows ya tenemos claro que no queremos para nada disponer de dos Ubuntu en la máquina (ni dos Windows, por cierto). Por eso y para poder realizar pruebas de velocidad en los “discos” hemos formateado la eMMC borrando la versión más antigua de Ubuntu.You may want to set up your R86S router with OPNsense while the WAN is plugged into your primary router until you are ready to deploy it as your main router since that allows you to test the configuration without taking down your entire network. The R86S-U looks deeper than the R86S-P but that is just the camera angle. It has the same width and depth but a different height. Hardware Specifications

R86S Soft Routing Multi-net Port, Intel Mini Host N5105 N6005 R86S Soft Routing Multi-net Port, Intel Mini Host N5105 N6005

Para terminar de incluir cosas decidimos instalar la versión de Ubuntu 23.04 en el disco NVMe de 480 GB que ya hemos llenado. Of course, we have a video for this review. That video also has a special cameo from the iKoolCore R1‘s new R1 Pro version. You can find it here: If you were hoping for a silent, fanless mini-PC with high speed network interfaces, it unfortunately may be difficult for a manufacturer to design a fanless mini-PC with 10G SFP+ interfaces because they tend to generate a lot of heat. Antes de seguir adelante queremos organizar el arranque para que el miniPC se inicie en Windows 11, por ejemplo. Para ello necesitamos “tocar” la configuración del GRUB.The idle power consumption on the R86S-U4 is about 13-14W and that is with most of the network interfaces populated. Unplugging the SFP+ cables seemed to drop the wattage nearly 2W. During testing IPS/IDS performance, the wattage jumped to 25-26W at 50% CPU utilization. When I booted the system, the wattage surged to about 24-25W. Let confirm whether or not we can view the card, and provide the slot ID where the device is located. On the side of the system, we see the biggest upgrades. We get a micro USB COM port, a feature many want on firewall devices. We get two Type-A and one Type-C port, a HDMI port, and a TF card slot. R86s Pro USB And HDMI Side Si recuerdas en la primera parte de esta revisión comentábamos que el tamaño de las letras del GRUB era tan pequeño que no pudimos utilizar el Aurga Viewer. Pues bien modificando el valor del GRUB_GFXMODE de 640×480 a 800×600 el tamaño de la letra se vuelve visible