CPU Temp stuck at 27.9C
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@stephenw10 Reset RRD did the trick, the other sensors now show up. Thanks!
@Stewart I got the N6005 Topton version, from Aliexpress.
Edit: your idle seems extraordinary high. For comparison mine is 45C idle right now, sitting in an attic under the roof on a sunny day (would expect atleast ~30C ambient currently) -
@modaeus I've replaced the thermal paste with AS Ceramique 2. On the adaptive profile the temps no longer immediately spike up to 105C but after an hour creep up to about 92C. Ambient is currently about 29C (AC problems). Previous tests were ambient 24C. Once I've done a full volley of tests I'll post back but temps are much better so far.
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@stewart said in CPU Temp stuck at 27.9C:
@modaeus I've replaced the thermal paste with AS Ceramique 2. On the adaptive profile the temps no longer immediately spike up to 105C but after an hour creep up to about 92C. Ambient is currently about 29C (AC problems). Previous tests were ambient 24C. Once I've done a full volley of tests I'll post back but temps are much better so far.
So, after 2 hours transferring at the full 2.37Gb/s it makes it all the way back up to 105C. So, new thermal paste helps a ton but it isn't enough. There just isn't enough material for it to be adequately cooled. Looking across all of the specs it appears that maybe the reason is that the N5095 is a 15W chip while the N5105 and n6005 are 10 watt chips. I think I'll be swapping this unit out for this one. It's a little more expensive but it's the n5105 and has 6 ports instead of 4.
Edit: I should add that with the new Ceramique2 TIM it now idles at around 50C in both Minimum and Adaptive. These numbers are with Suricata
Adaptive mode: It climbs up to 105C in Adaptive over the course of around 2 hours so there isn't enough metal to dissipate the heat. It just keeps absorbing more and more. At it's height it becomes very hot to touch. And once you take the load off it drops to around 75C pretty quickly but it takes a long time for the case to cool off without a fan. If you give it load before the case cools off, the temperature jumps pretty rapidly since the case can't hold any more heat. Makes it seem like it just isn't good enough to dissipate the amount of heat generated by a 15W processor. CPU sits at around 75% and speed pegs at 2.37Gb/s. The interface shows speed at 2.0Ghz. I don't know if it goes up to the 2.9Ghz the chip is capable of.
Minimum mode: Keeping track it appears that with Suricata fully loaded then it doesn't quite keep up with the 2.37Gb/s consistently. It will drop to around 2.2Gb/s from time to time. It pegs at 97%-99% continually but the temperature peaks at 62C. -
Reading all you have written I think the case was not enough build for the thermal dissipation of this kind of processor - nevertheless its in the limits of processor specs.
Using a low speed rotating Fan (if possible) could resolve the situation.
Maybe like this:
Below the machine is a 120x120x12mm @ 12V Fan. (can work also with 7V or 9V what make it more silent)My toughts,
fireodo -
@fireodo While we could add a fan we are looking for a solution that works out of the box and can be easily reproduced to each of our clients we install it in. Something like your setup just wouldn't work. There is a place for a small fan in the case, but the hope is that we could run the unit entirely without fans to eliminate all moving parts.
In addition, this particular switch is requiring us to send it back to China even though it was purchased through Amazon. That's a first for me.
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@stephenw10 hey sorry to jump into this - and this prob way off topic.. But looking at the monitor graphs of my temps on a sg4860.. I noticed it went up a few degrees while we were away for a long weekend, I had up the temp for the AC, so clearly makes sense the few degrees it went up.. Which is cool to see.
But wondering - on the widget you can set to show in F, but on the monitor graph only C.. Anyway to change that, or should I put in a feature request ;)
Sorry to go off topic - but it some what related I believe..
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SG-4860 24.03 | Lab VMs 2.7.2, 24.03 -
@johnpoz said in CPU Temp stuck at 27.9C:
But wondering - on the widget you can set to show in F, but on the monitor graph only C.. Anyway to change that, or should I put in a feature request ;)
Just switch to Metric , as us "Normal's"
The you don't even have to make a "request"/Bingo
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@bingo600 hahaha, this is true.. But I am old, and just too stuck in my ways ;) But yeah that is a valid point.. They did teach us metric back in elementary school, but it just never stuck..
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@johnpoz Yeah. Metric works for me for lengths (mm, m km, etc) but not temperatures.
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@stewart We just brought the unit to USPS (the required service) and it cost us $75 to ship it back. Ouch!
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@johnpoz said in CPU Temp stuck at 27.9C:
on the widget you can set to show in F, but on the monitor graph only C.. Anyway to change that, or should I put in a feature request
Yeah, feature request. Probably not that difficult.
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@stewart said in CPU Temp stuck at 27.9C:
So, after 2 hours transferring at the full 2.37Gb/s it makes it all the way back up to 105C. So, new thermal paste helps a ton but it isn't enough. There just isn't enough material for it to be adequately cooled. Looking across all of the specs it appears that maybe the reason is that the N5095 is a 15W chip while the N5105 and n6005 are 10 watt chips.
I had a similar Topton device delivered yesterday, and likewise had the temperature skyrocketing to 105C in a few minutes, and even the case was scorching hot.
Iāve found some references to the fact that as delivered the BIOS settings are rubbish - they tell it to use about 28W, not 10W, and thatās why the temps are so sky high. You need to change the PL1 and PL2 settings to something like 10W and 12W, or 8W and 10W respectively.
There may be other settings that need to be tweaked, mine was only delivered yesterday, so Iām working my way through it all.
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@stephenw10 said in CPU Temp stuck at 27.9C:
Yeah, feature request. Probably not that difficult.
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@vollans Good luck. We wound up sending it back but had to pay $75 to ship it back to China. Other than the heat it performed very well. Plenty of power for pfSense.
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Interesting. If their cooling solution is not capable of dissipating 28W they should not have the CPU set to that when there are lower options.
Kind of implies it wasn't tested..... -
The issue with cheap Chinese firewall appliances is that they all come with intel turbo boost technology enabled by default in bios. When CPU is boosting, its exceeding rated 10-15W or whatever rated TDP is. With 105C you are probably hitting around 25 watts or more and that is too much heat to dissipate for a small heat sink designed for 15W TDP max. Of course, disabling turbo boost will lower the temperatures, but it comes with a slight performance hit. For those speeds and plugins you use, you need appliance with much faster CPU.
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It's not the 'turbo' directly. You can set the rated TDP to configure how the CPU uses the available turbo. So when you down rate it you get fewer cores at lower frequencies for example.
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@stephenw10 said in CPU Temp stuck at 27.9C:
It's not the 'turbo' directly. You can set the rated TDP to configure how the CPU uses the available turbo.
That's what I think also. I have here a "Chinese Box" with i5 and turbo activated and even under heavy load she dont get over 46Ā° and these days the environment was really "hot" (around 28Ā° inside) - my conclusion is that there are boxes very bad designed and assembled but also boxes that work flawless ... seams to be slightly a matter of luck ...
what you get!
Just my 2 cents,
fireodo -
@stephenw10 said in CPU Temp stuck at 27.9C:
It's not the 'turbo' directly. You can set the rated TDP to configure how the CPU uses the available turbo. So when you down rate it you get fewer cores at lower frequencies for example.
Such bios options are nonexistent on cheap Chinese appliances. Turbo can be either disabled or enabled. Thats it. Nothing in between. Also, there is no option to control the number of active CPU cores even though CPU supports that function. All cores are always active. OS can only control their minimum/maximum clock. Nothing else. On top of all that, add poor and inconsistent build quality, lack of testing, bad grease, false advertising, and you get exactly what people are describing here.
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@nimrod said in CPU Temp stuck at 27.9C:
Such bios options are nonexistent on cheap Chinese appliances. Turbo can be either disabled or enabled. Thats it. Nothing in between.
But setting PL1 and PL2 affect how turbo works, and how much power is being used. Setting them at 10W/12W - which they really should have been at the factory - temps are now down to 40'sC with "max battery" set in BIOS or mid 50'sC with "max performance battery". I don't think I'm going to even look at "max performance" again, it's doing what I need.
Also, there is no option to control the number of active CPU cores even though CPU supports that function. All cores are always active. OS can only control their minimum/maximum clock. Nothing else.
I'm not sure that's correct. Looking at the stats of the CPU I am seeing cores entering a C3 state about 2.5-4% of the time, and C2 just over half the time, and different percentages for each core, which suggests to me that at some point only some cores are active, and some are turned off/asleep. It looks like to me that FreeBSD is quite capable of controlling the cores being used in them. Or am I missing something?
sysctl -a | grep cx_ hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest: C3 dev.cpu.3.cx_method: C1/mwait/hwc C2/mwait/hwc C3/mwait/hwc dev.cpu.3.cx_usage_counters: 6635543 9089424 639857 dev.cpu.3.cx_usage: 40.54% 55.54% 3.90% last 86us dev.cpu.3.cx_lowest: C3 dev.cpu.3.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/253 C3/3/1048 dev.cpu.2.cx_method: C1/mwait/hwc C2/mwait/hwc C3/mwait/hwc dev.cpu.2.cx_usage_counters: 6686765 9459109 509366 dev.cpu.2.cx_usage: 40.14% 56.79% 3.05% last 217us dev.cpu.2.cx_lowest: C3 dev.cpu.2.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/253 C3/3/1048 dev.cpu.1.cx_method: C1/mwait/hwc C2/mwait/hwc C3/mwait/hwc dev.cpu.1.cx_usage_counters: 6537977 9752835 432222 dev.cpu.1.cx_usage: 39.09% 58.31% 2.58% last 136us dev.cpu.1.cx_lowest: C3 dev.cpu.1.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/253 C3/3/1048 dev.cpu.0.cx_method: C1/mwait/hwc C2/mwait/hwc C3/mwait/hwc dev.cpu.0.cx_usage_counters: 13840130 18991881 2 dev.cpu.0.cx_usage: 42.15% 57.84% 0.00% last 173us dev.cpu.0.cx_lowest: C3 dev.cpu.0.cx_supported: C1/1/1 C2/2/253 C3/3/1048Is the device perfect? No, but the PCEngines device it replaced wasn't either, and for what I need will do the job. It's definitely a better router than anything I can buy from JB Hifi or MSY, especially for the price. The alternative was either a bulky PC set up as a router, which has serious husband acceptance problems, or spending a small fortune on a 1U/2U server case, power supply, etc, to rack mount a normal PC, which would cost a lot more than one of these little devices.
Unfortunately the pricing of Netgate appliances here and their availability makes their hardware unattractive, otherwise I'd jump at it. The Netgate 1100 is about the same price as these N5105 devices fully set up with 16GB of memory and a 128GB SSD. And I could keep 3 or 4 of the Topton-type devices as spares to cover off the price of a Netgate 4100. ;)
This weekend I'll add a $20 Noctua fan to it to play it safe, but I don't have any serious complaints. The biggest is that the defaults in the BIOS are seriously awful.
