Best SuperMicro motherboard at the moment?
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What's the best SuperMicro motherboard at the moment for a low-power consumption router?
I'm looking for something with AES-NI and possible Intel QuickAssist, 4-cores, and low power consumption.
I was looking at the SuperMicro X11SBA-LN4F but there is a thread on here about WatchDog timeout issues and the board also seems to be a bit old.
Is there something newer that is better? Maybe something based on the Intel C2558?
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How about the X11SAA https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/X11/X11SAA.cfm?
Newer low-power processor with AES-NI but no QuickAssist.Or you just wait for the Intel Denverton (C3000) line to come out later this year, which will have everything you want and more.
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Thanks! I was looking at that exact board (with the Pentium N4200) but it doesn't have Intel Quick Assist. I'm not sure how important that will be in the future, but since I'm not in a hurry I could wait a bit.
It looks like the SuperMicro already has one Denverton board (A2SDi-2C-HLN4F but it's the less powerful Intel C3338 which doesn't support Quick Assist and it's only 2 cores.
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Thanks! I was looking at that exact board (with the Pentium N4200) but it doesn't have Intel Quick Assist. I'm not sure how important that will be in the future
It won't be. You'd be wasting your time to still be waiting for something exciting to happen with quick assist.
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Have a look at this board:
MB: Supermicro A1SAM-2550F : http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Atom/X10/A1SAM-2550F.cfm
CPU: https://ark.intel.com/products/77982/Intel-Atom-Processor-C2550-2M-Cache-2_40-GHzits price has dropped since its launch. Now it's a micro ATX but you already have all what you need on the board (except RAM but it's DIMM not SO-DIMM like you find on thin mini-itx which means you'll save a lot of bucks) and if your firewall needs more networks you have 2 PCI-E slots for 2x Quad Intel NICs or 2x 10GB Intel NICs. The only drawback is that the CPU frequency is too average for some raw power hungry tasks. But for a simple firewall/router you should be fine even with tens or hundreds of users.
PROs:
- small form factor
- relatively cheap solution
- ECC memory DIMM
- IPMI
- Quad NICs
- Intel
AES New Instructions - PCI-E expansion
- Low consumption
- Enterprise class board (not some ASUS gamer board)
CONs:
- CPU might need a fan above it just to be sure
- Average CPU frequency
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QuickAssist is actually FINALLY coming soon. The official freeBSD driver has dropped and some tweets have gone out from the Netgate team about integration. Bad news is that it appears to be v1.6. So Rangely C27*8 processors are not likely to be compatible. So don't go to Rangeley, especially with the C2000 bug is my advice.
https://www.servethehome.com/quickassist-driver-freebsd-pfsupport-coming/
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I'm looking for something with AES-NI and possible Intel QuickAssist, 4-cores, and low power consumption.
I would look for a C2758 (produced later then 12/2016) now or for later this year for a Supermicro board with Intel Xeon
D-15x3N SoC that will be stronger and more power using.QuickAssist is actually FINALLY coming soon. The official freeBSD driver has dropped and some tweets have gone out from the Netgate team about integration. Bad news is that it appears to be v1.6. So Rangely C27*8 processors are not likely to be compatible. So don't go to Rangeley, especially with the C2000 bug is my advice.
The bug is solved and new boards made since 12/2016 are bug free.
Bad news is that it appears to be v1.6. So Rangely C27*8 processors are not likely to be compatible. So don't go to Rangeley,…
I personally think that will change at someday, because nearly the entire SG- series from Netgate is based on that SoCs.
SG-2220, 2440, 4860, 8860 and the XG-2758 too. Could be that I am wrong with this for sure, but I think there will be
changing something and it gets into the source code of pfSense.
