AES-IN system for sub £100 that will support an OpenVPN 200mbps connection?
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J3355B w/ Intel NICs > N3450 w/ Realtek NICs
That zotac box is at a good price point for low bandwidthd out non OpenVPN serious though!
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Not sure if you've already purchased your new hardware but I thought I'd add my input for hardware recommendation. Trust me I've spent the last 3 weeks looking at a lot of possibilities. First I'll show what I'm currently running and then what I'm upgrading to and why.
I tried a few bits of hardware back in 2010 - a dual P3 server, a P4 Celeron system but eventually settled for and have had a Mini-ITX setup for the last 7 years consisting of:
Thermaltake Element Q ITX case with 220W PSU (I replaced PSU with a Pico PSU)
Point of View Atom 330 Mini ITX motherboard (I disconnected the fan)
2GB DDR2
Old 2.5" laptop hard drive
HP NC364T quad port gigabit NIC - added a few years ago to replace a single port NIC that I had in the 16x PCI-e slot.In those 7 years my ISP has upgraded my connection several times to where I'm at 200Mb/12Mb as well as me recently using a VPN service, I can certainly tell my silent little box is struggling with how much I'm hammering it. (I run a games server, Teamspeak server, etc)
I currently struggle to get over 60Mb/s Download when the VPN is connected, I get near enough the full 200Mb/s when it is not connected. I can see the CPU usage for the OpenVPN process (running top in the shell) is hovering around 80%+
Not wanting to spend too much on hardware and with the recent announcement that a CPU with AES-NI instructions will be required and I need one anyway as I use OpenVPN, I decided now is a good time for me to upgrade.
I'm keeping the case, PSU, hard drive and Quad port NIC. This immediately limited me to an ITX board with a minimum of a PCI-e 4x slot. So with that search criteria I have ordered the following, all second hand but that doesn't bother me as I've used second hand parts in my current build:
Portwell WADE-8320 motherboard, with heatsink (£45 delivered)
Intel Core i5 520m CPU (£8 delivered)
2GB DDR3 SO-DIMM (free as I had spare but less than £10)The reasons are price, performance and features. The motherboard comes with two Intel Gigabit NIC's onboard and has a 4x PCI-e slot. It supports 1st gen mobile i3,i5 and i7 CPU's which are all cheap nowadays. I recommend the i5 5xxm series as they are cheap, dual core hyper threaded and have AES-NI. It has a mini PCI-e slot on the reverse of the board if you wanted to add in a small SSD rather than use a normal drive via SATA.
Currently my Atom system draws 40W at the wall (30W for the motherboard/CPU/RAM and 10W for the HP NIC) this is due in part to the incredibly inefficient southbridge used on older Atoms boards, so although the CPU has a low TDP, the motherboard chipset negates any gains.
I'm confident that even though the i5 520m is rated at 35W TDP, the fact that the QM57 chipset used on the motherboard is only rated at 3.5W TDP, my new system won’t draw much more power than the Atom it’s replacing, especially as the Core i5 has better C states when idling.
Trust me, I looked at a LOT of options, including the later Atoms, Celerons, etc. Nothing beat the price/performance ratio of what I've mentioned above, in my opinion and use case scenario.
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40W for an Atom? yikes - that's atrocious.
TDP is heat dissipation, nothing to do with power draw - as your atom obviously proves.
As far as price performance, check out ebay.
My current system is a SFF i5-2400 i340t4 box drawing <40W and it cost me <$150, and that box performance is crazy overkill.
Since you already have a case, storage, RAM and a NIC - why don't you just buy a J3355B? That will draw way less power and is honestly pretty close in performance to the i5-520m - it almost certainly outclasses the 520m in OpenVPN throughput, it will also probably cost you less upfront.
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40W for an Atom? yikes - that's atrocious.
Yeah, they rushed it out the door to meet the schedule before a low power chipset was ready to go with the low power cpu. Nine years ago, though, it was the cheapest & easiest way to get passive cooling, dual cores, and 64 bit instructions.
Since you already have a case, storage, RAM and a NIC - why don't you just buy a J3355B? That will draw way less power and is honestly pretty close in performance to the i5-520m - it almost certainly outclasses the 520m in OpenVPN throughput, it will also probably cost you less upfront.
atom 330 was DDR2, need new ram.
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Yeah that's crazy! I use an old N450 in a netbook to run a Unifi controller on it (really should figure out VMware and virtualize all this stuff on my i5-2400) - it doesn't get great power consumption numbers but certainly not that bad.
User said they had 2GB DDR3 SO-DIMM on hand, if not though that stuff is super cheap on eBay. Ultimately, the idea of "upgrading" from one incredibly inefficient, anemic CPU to another inefficient but slightly-less anemic CPU makes no sense to me when there are cheap products out there like the Apollo Lake Celerons.
Trust me, I looked at a LOT of options, including the later Atoms, Celerons, etc. Nothing beat the price/performance ratio of what I've mentioned above, in my opinion and use case scenario.
https://www.newegg.com/global/uk/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157726&cm_re=j3355b--13-157-726--Product
Looks like about £55 including VAT for a much better product that also happens to be new instead of used.
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That's not a bad board for £55 and I did put that on my short list. It requires DDR3L (1.35v) memory which I don't have so I would have needed to spend a little more to get some. It also lacks an Intel NIC onboard and I have plans to utilize the two I'll be getting on the Portwell board. So that's what swayed me in the end.
The inefficiency is yet to be seen, I think the difference between a Apollo lake celeron and a Arrandale i5 won't be too big a concern for me personally.
I may post back with the wattage numbers from the wall if anyone is interested?
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It can use DDR3L, but standard ddr3 SO-DIMM is also.supported , per the product specs and my j3355 HTPC with standard ddr3.
J3355b build would pull sub 20w, likely sub 15w. That i5 very likely in excess of 40W. J3355 also better at openvpn.
Realtek NICs work just fine for sub gigabit throughput (management nic, wireless AP NIC, fast ether NIC, etc.).Anyways, to each their own. It might somehow have made sense for you, but I wouldn't go around claiming that it's a great price/performance buy for others -it is decidedly not a good way to go for most people.
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That heper guy is correct if you ask me.
I like the newest latest greatest low power stuff but if you want something cheap with high performance, an old 3ghz to 4ghz 4 core desktop intel or amd that can be had for like $75 or $100 is just unbeatable. You will pay for it in the power bill but they are cheap and reliable and blazing fast.
Alternately, AMD processors like the 8150 just scream and support AES-NI at the same time. Not energy efficient but cheap and reliable. Probably 3 or 4 times faster than the top of the line energy efficient appliances.
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It can use DDR3L, but standard ddr3 SO-DIMM is also.supported , per the product specs and my j3355 HTPC with standard ddr3.
J3355b build would pull sub 20w, likely sub 15w. That i5 very likely in excess of 40W. J3355 also better at openvpn.
Realtek NICs work just fine for sub gigabit throughput (management nic, wireless AP NIC, fast ether NIC, etc.).Anyways, to each their own. It might somehow have made sense for you, but I wouldn't go around claiming that it's a great price/performance buy for others -it is decidedly not a good way to go for most people.
I will admit the J3355 will more than likely consume less power than the i5 520m, I will give you that one.
To dismiss the performance advantage of the "older" i5 over the J3355 is one thing I will not concede on. Every benchmark I looked at has the i5 520m in front of the J3355, not by a huge margin but its quicker, including AES, LZMA, SQLite, etc. That is just single core benchmarks, when multicore is factored in, the i5 further stretches its legs.
I haven't cherry picked any site or benchmark, feel free to look for yourself if you wish.
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It can use DDR3L, but standard ddr3 SO-DIMM is also.supported , per the product specs and my j3355 HTPC with standard ddr3.
J3355b build would pull sub 20w, likely sub 15w. That i5 very likely in excess of 40W. J3355 also better at openvpn.
Realtek NICs work just fine for sub gigabit throughput (management nic, wireless AP NIC, fast ether NIC, etc.).Anyways, to each their own. It might somehow have made sense for you, but I wouldn't go around claiming that it's a great price/performance buy for others -it is decidedly not a good way to go for most people.
I will admit the J3355 will more than likely consume less power than the i5 520m, I will give you that one.
To dismiss the performance advantage of the "older" i5 over the J3355 is one thing I will not concede on. Every benchmark I looked at has the i5 520m in front of the J3355, not by a huge margin but its quicker, including AES, LZMA, SQLite, etc. That is just single core benchmarks, when multicore is factored in, the i5 further stretches its legs.
I haven't cherry picked any site or benchmark, feel free to look for yourself if you wish.
i5 520m is new enough to PCLMULQDQ, so it has optimized AES-GCM but not the improved implementation of the newer generations of intel's high-power chips. In theory the goldmont has SHA acceleration, which would help for non-GCM openvpn, but I honestly haven't looked to see if OpenVPN would actually benefit from that. In the end I'd expect the two chips to be pretty similar performance-wise. The J3355 isn't a performance beast, it's just "good enough" for most home users at a compelling price point (and much faster at crypto than avoton, let alone the crippled non-aes bay trail chips like the J1900.)
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SHA acceleration effectively makes CBC encryption like GCM.
There are some benchmarks comparing them on the j3355 and the results are pretty much odentical.Yes, the i5 will edge out the Celeron, barely. Still probably not I'm OpenVPN. But that doesn't make it a good selection.