My experience with a CV860A 3R53 embedded system (nettop)
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I have two CV860A (don't know the actual manufacturer) systems, a 3R53 and a 3R80. Have a web search for the details on those systems.
In a nutshell, they both have the same basic chips, the main difference is the CPU. While the 3R53 uses a VIA Eden @533MHz the 3R80 has a VIA C3 @800MHz.
Both come with three "RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX" onboard NICs which can be deactivated individually via jumpers. The CV860A also has an internal CompactFlash slot in which I put a 512MB card. The single RAM slot is fitted with 256MB (which is the maximum I guess, at least it won't accept the 512MB module I tried to add).
I thought this makes a perfect router firewall…
But the issue with this decive is the high interrupt load during basic network traffic. I deactivated the unused NIC and also gave the remaining two dedicated interrupts, which made 0 difference. Using device polling the interrupt load went up to ~25% during network idling, which might be normal?
For my current broadband connection the one I use (533MHz) is sufficient tho. I have a 32MBit/s down, 2MBit/s up cable connection and when using a web crawler the overall interrupt loads is between 45-55%.
So far I've never reached ~100% CPU utilization. But it's needless to say, that I can't do any intrusion detection or other more CPU intensive stuff.
I got them for free and it might be possible that some of you stumble across one of these, too. I wouldn't pay a lot for it if I were you, but if it's being offered to you for free, then take it! The nice thing about it is the onboard CF slot and the possibility of a fanless CPU heatsink (my 3R80 has a 40mm fan, the 3R53 has not but a large heatsink).