Router on Intel N100 – liutyi.info

Since Cisco SMB devices like RV320 are now end of life. And there are no good successors for this device. DYI routers on Intel N100 with 2.5 gbit ports and pfSense community edition might be an option to upgrade the router.

One HW example is Topton N100. That is a mini PC with Intel N100 + DDR5 single channel RAM + NVMe. It is fanless.

It is Intel N100 + 8GB DDR5 + 128GB NVMe + 4x2500Base-T

RAM Samsung 8GB 1Rx16 PC5-4800B-SCO-1010-XT

Chenese NVMe based on SM2263EN + SanDisk 05561 128GB

Running pfSense 2.7.2-RELEASE on 1gbit/s internet

OpenVPN speed example (AES-256-GCM-SHA386)

Since it is not router-specific hardware, other x86 operation systems might be in use. For its 6W TDP Intel N100 got not that bad performance. And include instructions set for 12th-generation Intel CPU.

Geekbench 6.2.2 for Linux results: 1240/3146, 3021

Some other Mini PC results in Geekbech 6 for comparison

	compute	single core	multi core
Intel NUC i5-4250u	4250	873	1716
Gigabyte BRIX i7-5500	2672	1037	2112
Topton N100 router	3021	1240	3146
Intel NUC i7-10710u	5331	1431	6164

Geekbench 6

Power consumption on DC port

Cisco RV320 idle power consumption ~4.5W and ASUS AXE7800 ~12W

	Off	Idle	peak load
Topton N100 router (12v)	1.4W	10W	up to 32W
Intel NUC i7-10710u (19v)	0.8W	11W	up to 92W

Mini PC power consumption

Power consumption is ~14-16W on GPU tests and ~18-27W on CPU tests (measured by Atorch UD18 on the DC port). Running Ubuntu Linux 22.04 server + Geekbench 6.2.2 CPU and GPU tests (monitor connected to HDMI port, USB flash (Movespeed FUN), Keyboard (Logitech G413 cord with backlights), 3 ethernet ports on 1gbit/s in use, background dhcpd, NAT)