PfSense with Gigabyte GA-J1900N-D3V

Skar78 · Mar 10, 2014, 4:20 AM

Hi,

Just when my Alix 2D13 bundle is on the (long long) way to me i stumble upon this little gem:

Gigabyte GA-J1900N-D3V

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4918#sp

Its listed for like 79,- € and well it has dual nic (although not intel) and i am just wondering if that would not have been a nice alternative to the alix bundle.

Anybody already tried that?

midacts · Mar 10, 2014, 11:21 PM

That's the board that I am looking at getting. Probably put a quad port Intel PT card in it.

http://www.amazon.com/1000PT-4PORT-1000BTX-Pcie-Profile/dp/B000OZC98C/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1394493619&sr=8-2&keywords=Intel+pt+NIC+quad

I am really interested to hear if anyone's gotten this motherboard working with pfSense and what kind of performance they are getting out of it. Power consumption, highest transfer speed. VPN speed. Way it runs like with packages like snort, etc

Skar78 · Mar 11, 2014, 4:33 PM

Well i for sure will now try out the alix solution first.

midacts · Mar 11, 2014, 4:34 PM

:<

I was hoping to get some feedback on the Gigabyte board ;P

speculatrix · Mar 12, 2014, 10:14 AM

I too have been looking at the Gigabyte board; it should offer quite good performance particular for the electricity use. I contacted Gigabyte to ask about availability and they said by the end of the month.

so far I found one place in the UK offering pre-order: www. scan. co. uk for £65 + tax
in Europe, www. alternate. .co uk. have it for £75 + tax

The board I looked at before was the AsRock IMB150 with twin gigE NICS, a lot more money, from impulse.co.uk for £148 with Celeron J1900, £154 with the N2920. There's a Supermicro board too at similar pricing.

there are more baytrail-D motherboards discussed at SilentPCreview:
http://silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=66777
with some people posting results.

–edit--
p.s. when I get the board I will try booting pfSense on it and report back.

midacts · Mar 12, 2014, 10:22 AM

Awesome! That will be great. I am really interested in seeing how this motherboard can perform with pfSense. Especially things like max thoroughput and its performance with packages.

For me, it's either this motherboard, or a i3-4330 Haswell build-but that boards power consumption scares me.

speculatrix · Mar 25, 2014, 5:08 PM

I've not found any reasonably priced boards which take haswells and have twin NICs; although there are Celeron and Pentium Haswells with sub 20W power, they're only available embedded in things like Intel's NUC or Gigabyte BRIX, and the odd netbook.

chris23 · Mar 25, 2014, 6:20 PM

I was also looking at this board.

But, does anyone have an idea as to how it might compare against this: GA-C1037UN-EU

http://uk.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4747#sp

Reason I ask is that on the passmark website, this board on single thread jobs is nearly twice as fast.

So which would be a better pfsense config…?

Thanks
Chris

sickbro · Apr 13, 2014, 9:43 PM

Just picked up one of the Gigabyte 1900N-DV3 boards. I can't say I'd recommend it. The bios is ships with (F1) is complete turd. Booting from USB is almost impossible, in fact using a usb keyboard only works about 1 in 3 boots. For me, I would have to clear the cmos after it stopped working in order for it to work again. Updating the Bios to F2, is painful. You have to turn off UEFI booting completely and turn on Legacy only. This is based on the times you are able to get into the bios. about half the time on the F1 bios it would just goto a black screen and hang.

After I finally got F2 working, USB got a bit better, but that's about it. I still get random black screens trying to enter the bios. It randomly won't boot from usb devices. In addition to all this, that heatsink is hot as hell. I haven't had a chance to take the temperature yet, but too hot to touch. This is with the top of the case completely off right now, so it's venting right out of the case. I imagine I'll have to add a fan.

I couldn't get pfsense to install on this system, it would kernal panic every boot. I figured it might be related to the usb, so I installed pfsense to a hard drive on another pc, then moved it back to this. It booted, and everything was good, except it wasn't. I couldn't get DHCP on the WAN link to get an IP from the modem regardless of how I set it up. I resorted to a reboot, thinking it might fix some problems, and now I'm back at square 1 with a kernal panic on every boot. Obviously this is an issue for a different thread, so I won't go into it here, but needless to say, it's been a rough ride.

Here's a thread about the horrors of updating the bios on Gigabytes site. http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php/topic,14333.0.html

I've also seen a few other threads on freenas, and open media vault forums about weird boot issues, and stability problems. My advice, stay away at least until a new, more stable bios revision arrives.

toshinmac · Apr 14, 2014, 9:17 AM

Hi,

i can confirm these problems with this Motherboard.

The installation of pfSense as a virtual machine on CentOS 6.5 with KVM also fails with the same problem.
The error messages are different, once ACPI, even USB.
With a USB keyboard sometimes I can not get into BIOS.
The same with USB boot (Memory Stick, external drive etc.). Sometimes it works, sometimes not.

A completely immature product is sold by Gigabyte.
How about quality assurance or/and control?

Does anyone have any ideas?
Thanks a lot in advance!
Cheers

sickbro · Apr 14, 2014, 5:45 PM

I managed to get mine working after a lot of messing with it. First thing is you have to be on the F1 bios. The F2 bios fixes a lot of USB issues, but causes a lot of other issues. In my case I had to install it on another computer and just physically move the drive over to the pfsense box. Booting from data seems a lot less buggy, but I still have reboots that are not successful and just boot to a black screen.

If you already upgraded to the F2 bios, in order to downgrade there's some magic voodoo to the power/reset buttons. I found a post on another forum that worked. Hold power button, let it turn on, then off, then back on. Then hold the reset button let it power cycle a few more times, then let go. This will then invoke the backup bios, which will still be F1 and copy it to the main bios. It took me a few tries to get this to work, so just keep trying, it'll work eventually.

After all these issues, I'm not problem free. The issue I was having earlier with not getting a dhcp address on wan is only resolved by a full reboot. No idea why a simple release and renew doesn't work. My direct console still doesn't work well. If I try and do anything but a standard boot, it just freezes. I think this may go back to the USB issues of the F1 bios. I've also heard rumors that it won't boot without a monitor attached. Haven't tried this myself yet.

The web GUI seems to be great though. Other than not being able to release and renew the dhcp on the wan connection, everything is flawless.

This is my first pfsense box, so I can't tell you much about how good it runs pfsense yet other than that it works.

chris23 · Apr 14, 2014, 10:17 PM

sorry to hear you guys having trouble with this board.

A bit off topic sorry,

But I thought while the topic was active I'd just say that I decided to go for the GA-C1037UN-EU board.

Which is a dual core celeron, but nearly twice as fast at single thread jobs as the GA-J1900N-D3V board (as shown on the passmark website or somewhere I was looking). Which for my application, I decided might suit better.

Anyway I can report that for me this board "GA-C1037UN-EU" works just fine. Easy install, no issues.

CPU reports 65C in a fanless case. In my rather warm house.
Chris

speculatrix · Apr 15, 2014, 1:26 PM

@chris23
that's very interesting, thanks.

the GA-J1900N-D3V has just become available in the UK from Lambdatek, and I was considering going ahead with my order (to use it to run Linux, but would have tested with pfSense) and now I'm reconsidering altogether.

speculatrix · Apr 17, 2014, 12:51 PM

I asked my contact at Gigabyte UK if there will be any more BIOS updates to fix some of these problems, I'll update here if I hear anything.

notar · Apr 17, 2014, 2:36 PM

@chris23:

CPU reports 65C in a fanless case. In my rather warm house.
Chris

Good morning
When you said 65C, is it in Fahrenheit or Celsius ? thanks (i am French)

jasonlitka · Apr 17, 2014, 3:01 PM

He meant 65C. For a fanless chip in a warm room that sounds about right.

notar · Apr 17, 2014, 4:49 PM

Thanks !

Kinjin · Apr 17, 2014, 9:37 PM

I just got this board and have it set up and booting. I get a kernel panic when trying to boot pfsense due to acpi, when I try booting with acpi disabled or in safe more it will get to "IPsec: Initialized Security Association Processing" and just hang, I'm not sure whats causing it or how to get past it. Any suggestions?

josefius · Apr 21, 2014, 7:06 PM

Unfortunately this board has a highly problematic bios and may not work at all for some… Quite unlike gigabyte I would say... I would look for something from supermicro if stabilty is the main concern. Which bios are you using f1 or f2??

Kinjin · Apr 22, 2014, 3:11 AM

Well after I got my board upgraded to F2 BIOS, I was able to install pfsense from a USB drive. It took my quite awhile to figure out how to get it to boot completely without giving me the error I posted about above or throwing an ACPI error. It seems the trick with my board is after evey boot from a power off state I have to go into BIOS and go to the options to Reset the default BIOS options and it works. Don't know why, I guess the BIOS is just buggy and immature. Other than that this board is working great. My temps hover around 38C.