X11SBA-LN4F vs A1SRi-2558F

robi

There are cases at supermicro offering front-located connection ports, fitting these motherboards. 8)

dreamslacker

There are cases at supermicro offering front-located connection ports, fitting these motherboards. 8)

Yes, I just didn't want them because it looks ugly in the rack. This would be part of a rack and stack showcase so it has to look nice. My Netshelter will be arriving in a day's time - Dell decided to expedit my order after screwing up.

On hindsight, I should have gone with the A1SRM-2758F and the SC510-203B. Would have had enough space to stick a sticker from the pfSense merchandise store on that chassis.

Derelict

Umm. I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

OLBaID

Just wanted to reply to the thread, got my RMA back and updated and have not had the issue for over 24 hours. wanted to share the notes so anyone that has a supermicro has some help if needed. Thanks again for the contacts and help in this thread.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/42296/SuperMicro%20RMA%20notes.PDF

And just to point to the solution that was most likely the issue:

https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/6296

guardian

@Engineer:

@guardian:

If I understand what I've read, the X11SBA-LN4F-O N3700 PCB 1.02
should make a decent pfSense platform – or am I missing something?

Clearly it's no A1SRi-2558F, but in Canada the difference between the
two boards is $141 CDN based on the best prices I could find today.
Unless broadband costs drop a lot, I can't see outgrowing it for 4 or 5
years (Minimum), and by that time I'll likely have a cap dry out and have
to replace whatever I buy anyway, so I might as well put the $141 toward
a case and memory, or am I missing something?

First, thanks for the update on PCB 1.02. No, I don't think you're missing a thing. Thing has been rock solid since the change (running 2.2.5). Very low power and excellent IPMI setup (in my opinion). More processing power than I need right now and hope it lasts for a long time. 10-11 watts for entire system @ wall with no fans:

SM board
Antec ITX-110 with 90W supply
2 x 4GB DDRL DDR3 modules
120GB Sandisk Plus SSD

Quite happy with mine as of right now. TWC is supposed to bumping speeds soon so I'll give it a whirl once that happens and report back.

Hi Engineer & All..

Just wondering if you have any updates, or have things still been working?

BTW: What throughput are you getting/What is your connection?

Engineer

@guardian:

@Engineer:

@guardian:

If I understand what I've read, the X11SBA-LN4F-O N3700 PCB 1.02
should make a decent pfSense platform – or am I missing something?

Clearly it's no A1SRi-2558F, but in Canada the difference between the
two boards is $141 CDN based on the best prices I could find today.
Unless broadband costs drop a lot, I can't see outgrowing it for 4 or 5
years (Minimum), and by that time I'll likely have a cap dry out and have
to replace whatever I buy anyway, so I might as well put the $141 toward
a case and memory, or am I missing something?

First, thanks for the update on PCB 1.02. No, I don't think you're missing a thing. Thing has been rock solid since the change (running 2.2.5). Very low power and excellent IPMI setup (in my opinion). More processing power than I need right now and hope it lasts for a long time. 10-11 watts for entire system @ wall with no fans:

SM board
Antec ITX-110 with 90W supply
2 x 4GB DDRL DDR3 modules
120GB Sandisk Plus SSD

Quite happy with mine as of right now. TWC is supposed to bumping speeds soon so I'll give it a whirl once that happens and report back.

Hi Engineer & All..

Just wondering if you have any updates, or have things still been working?

BTW: What throughput are you getting/What is your connection?

Been up 150+ days with no issues. My connection is only 60Mbps down / 5Mbps up. No issues at all. Max 9% CPU but that's with PowerD turned on, which was explained to me above to show a higher percentage because the CPU is running at a lower frequency. Once frequency jumps, the max CPU % should drop (which is why I a lower CPU % when PowerD is turned off).

guardian

I'm wondering if anyone is running this rig with anything faster?

I'm going to be going to Rogers 250/20… plan on doing a lot of filtering/running Snort or something similar... still have to figure that out....

I hope the X11SBA-LN4F will do the job.

guardian

Here are a couple of reviews that I though the community might appreciate seeing.

They provide some good overall info on the design.

SUPERMICRO X11SBA-LN4F REVIEW – SWEET!
http://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-x11sba-ln4f-review/

SUPERMICRO A1SRI-2758F REVIEW – HELLO RANGELEY
http://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-a1sri-2758f-review-rangeley/

enodeb

Just to give some more feedback: I've been running pfSense on the Supermicro board (rev. 1.02) for a few months now and it has been rock solid. It can easily handle the 150Mbps that I get from Comcast without breaking a sweat (including some Snort rules). Temperatures are usually in the 50-55 degree Celsius range (at Californian summer room temperatures ;)), using an Antec ISK110 case. I'm using two 4GB SO-DIMMs and an mSATA SSD on the board.

Love the 4 Intel NICs and the IPMI interface (tip: you can access the BIOS over SSH via SOL by logging into IPMI and running the commands "cd system1/sol1; start" in the SMASH CLI). I have not been able to redirect the pfSense serial console though, since SOL uses COM2 and pfSense seems to only support COM1 for console output.

Jailer

Where and when did you purchase your board?

enodeb

@Jailer:

Where and when did you purchase your board?

I bought it from Newegg, I think in February or March.

Engineer

My repaired board has been up 192 days with no issues now! :)

nomofica

@enodeb:

@Jailer:

Where and when did you purchase your board?

I bought it from Newegg, I think in February or March.

Did it work out-of-the-box for you? I'm currently looking at deploying this board in home lab/home office environment and was about to pull the trigger until I came across this thread. If I can avoid RMAing just to get it to work for pfSense I would be so happy.

mr2dave

@nomofica:

Did it work out-of-the-box for you? I'm currently looking at deploying this board in home lab/home office environment and was about to pull the trigger until I came across this thread. If I can avoid RMAing just to get it to work for pfSense I would be so happy.

If it helps; I bought an E200-9B from superbiiz.com last week. I received rev 1.02 hardware and haven't had any issues with it so far.

Hi

@mr2dave:

If it helps; I bought an E200-9B from superbiiz.com last week. I received rev 1.02 hardware and haven't had any issues with it so far.

I ordered this from a UK supplier which ordered it, I was told, from Supermicro as required. My revision was 1.01. I emailed Supermicro tech support and was told the board had been revised with the following:

1. Solve only 2 LAN show up to BIOS menu for LN4F SKU
2. Solve LAN EEPROM show up PXE-E05 error message issue
3. Add rework instruction

I think the first are likely a BIOS update only as the board came with the latest version, and the rework instruction is the fix applied.

You can check for this rework yourself on a version 1.01 of the board, it is pretty obvious once you have located the component which is U35, to see it has been changed and hand soldered, see the attached image taken from Newegg's detailed images of the board. My rework looked a bit neater but it was still obvious looking at the solder and comparing to other components it had been reworked.

Hope that helps anyone else purchasing one.

Regards

Phil

Board.jpg_thumb

jahonix

Holy crab, don't they have someone who can actually solder SMD devices?
If one of my guys would call such a job complete he'd have a hard time…

Hi

Just seen on the X11SBA-LN4F that despite having 1600 DDR3L memory, which is reported in the BIOS at 1600MHz, the memory is reported as actually running at 1066MHz, this is seen in the IPMI system hardware list and if doing a #dmidecode in pfSense shell and viewing the memory info.

Memory is Crucial CT51264BF160B 2 x 4GB. Everything is running good but it's a bit annoying if memory is clocked slower than it needs to be. Unfortunately there are no manual memory settings in the BIOS to force anything to run any differently. It could just be a reporting error from the board perhaps.

Anyone else seeing this.

Regards

Phil

Engineer

@Phil_D,

Mine is the same. I'm not going into BIOS right now to snoop (it's running OK and has a 250 day uptime, lol). Should it ever need a reboot, I'll investigate further.

Hi

@Engineer:

@Phil_D,

Mine is the same. I'm not going into BIOS right now to snoop (it's running OK and has a 250 day uptime, lol). Should it ever need a reboot, I'll investigate further.

Many thanks for checking. The BIOS will probably report 1600MHz as mine does, so that is either the operating speed and the reported 1066MHz is wrong, or the BIOS is just reporting what the memory is saying it will support and is clocked slower at 1066MHz.

I agree overall it probably doesn't make too much difference to performance, but annoying to not have it running at it's designed speed. I suspect Supermicro only support 1600MHz on it's tested memory, which for this board is limited to just one option which I couldn't find available to buy.

I will drop their tech support an email.

Regards

Phil

Hi

Supermicro support have said that only memory they have tested will run at 1600MHz on this board, it seems anything else defaults to 1066MHz with no way of overriding that in the BIOS. The number of tested memory SODIMMs that will run at 1600MHz is just one, and good luck sourcing it.

Regards

Phil