We have 20Mbs/10Mbs cable connection for around 25-30$ for last at least ten years, before it was 10/1 for the same price for ten years. THANK GOD FOR O2 !!! They slowed my life so much
7:26: Just to note: the eBay search results shown there are for the Dell rNDC card, not the stand-alone PCIe version. Unless you have a Dell server with a compatible onboard networking port, don't buy the parts shown on screen here.
Regarding the AT&T BGW320-500/505 we have found a way around not using it at all on AT&T's network. It involves using an external XGS-PON ONT which has a 10G ethernet port. Availability is abysmal and it's been a community effort figuring the device out (big ups to the few people who got deep into it and figured it out), the manufacture either won't or doesn't respond to emails thus far. Thanks for the video Wendell.
Definitely going to be hunting for that on the forums, currently still have the BGW210 and getting it sorted to bypass at least that unit, but being able to pass the ONT too would be awesome if the same approach works, though admittedly less necessary as the BGW210 is the main source of my issues. Thanks for letting us know the options exist :D
Some things to add, the X550 does better at longer cable runs than the aquantia chipset. Also there are router OSes made specifically with low latency in mind like VyOS or tnsr (from netgate the makers of pfsense).
@@mitch7918 vyos is targeted at enterprises and carriers. Those have staff that are comfortable with CLI. The CLI on vyos is pretty easy to work with once you understand the syntaxes and configuration modes. It does struggle with hairpin NAT, so use split DNS for that.
Jeez, keep it up. The tidbit about pcore and ecore on linux vs freebsd was a good nugget of info. Thanks to you and the commenters. The comments about these horrible att routers was great too. Led me down a path. Maybe I can join and figure it out. I do not know how youtube bullseyed this one but I'm here.
this forbidden router makes so much sense in a lot of homelab setups, it's simple, a proper machine running a VM that contains your software router, and has proper hardware to connect to your switch. You can add dns, proxy, nginx, vpn, and everything network on the server, and even Firewall rules! If you don't need 10G you can get a 4 port 2.5G ethernet card for cheap and maybe even ditch the expensive managed switch all together! Assigning vlans for each port and rules to connect everything together. All at a low price and with the benefits of a VM!
7:30 I had no idea there was a Firmware update to the X550, that “unlocks” 2 & 5gbe. I’ve been hunting for the 700series that they made that supports this. Makes a great bargain, even better. 👍
2 months ago, and that specific motherboard is nowhere to be found...any w680 board is $500 I think? that's what my searches have found. What alternatives do you have for that board? how budget are we talking here?
Sliger is a really fantastic company to work with. I had the opportunity to work with Kahlin Sliger in designing a chassis for a medical instrument. The company was so great to work with commercially, that I only ever recommend them personally.
I'm rockin an old Dell PowerEdge R210 II running pfsense. I slapped in a Realtek quad 2.5G network card (I know eww realtek) but it actually works fine if you install the proper drivers. May be upgrading to a R330 soonish. Love your videos, you literally do things I find interesting and I may even go to school for networking next year
I’m from Chile, here I have 2 isp connections, one at 800 Mbps and another at 600 Mbps. I can upgrade one of the isp connetion to 2 Gbps, and for that reason I’m building a custom router with one of those super micro motherboard with 6x10G ports that you can find on ebay.
Gotta be nice to have an Internet connection to do your router justice. :) My own network uses 1000 base T/ Gigabit ethernet. The bottleneck is the cable modem. For the router, I use the Linksys WRT1200AC with the OpenWRT on it. If you can upgrade a consumer router with OpenWRT you won't be disappointed. You can then use NFS and have it also be a light show machine - AND a router!
Been using a ryzen 3200g in a router box since late 2019. Works fine with 3gbs fiber. For anything faster than 3gbs, you likely need openwrt as I don't think the freebsd can do 10gbs yet - unless they fixed it.
No SR-IOV on Aquantia. :( RE: P-cores and E-cores, I think the way to go is pinning VMs to cores and using isolcpus or cpusets to keep the hypervisor from using them.
I've been working on a home router project over the last year, got a supermicro 1u 5019D-4C-FN8TP with xeon D-2123IT. Setup Proxmox and created a virtualized PFsense. My biggest issues were the 2.5/5/10gb negotiations. My modem has 2.5gb but had trouble getting things to work, so tried passing through the NICs to Pfsense but found out BSD has trouble with realtek drivers. Got things sorted out now using an intel i225 nic but virtualized and passed to the VM using virtio. My connection is 1.2gb but I can get a consistent 1400mbs out of it and iperf gives me stable 10gb between my homelab servers. I have the t540 nic in my desktop, if I had known about the t550 and firmware to get 2.5/5 that would have made my life alot easier. Thanks for the video!
Also have the 540. Didn't realize until this video it doesn't negotiate 2.5/5. Had I paid attention to that detail a couple of years ago I would have saved myself a whole lot of stress. Looking into 550 options now, that 5 second comment in the video just explained so much for the problems I've been having.
@@beepboopbeepboop190 I ended up getting a TEG-S762 switch for my office to connect to my desktop. Has 2x10gb ports so I don't have to worry about negotiation. 10gb to desktop then 10gb uplink to my homelab, and it has 4x2.5gb ports as well.
@@krj15489 That's a good call. Mine is installed in my firewall/router so one is connected to a 10G switch on the lan side but the other port is connected to my ISP's terminal. I'm 99% sure that's not 10G but I think it might be more than 1G. The nic on the fw's motherboard is 2.5 though so I may just swap to that for the wan.
A lot of useful information here as always. I would be interested in hearing what other homelab users are doing with > 1Gbe ISP connections (webscraping? actual commercial/public facing websites? etc). For my work almost everything over >1Gbe is constrained to my local network(NAS related). That said it would be interesting to see either a bifurcated or low-idle power solution that could be left on 24x7(e.g. I don't want a 100-300 watt router running a 10pm at night just to watch netflix or browser the web)
Please do the kickstarter. As I commented last time you did a video on this board, I would buy one right now for almost any cost. It seems like a much better choice then starting a platform on the ASROCK rack x570 boards. Gigabyte needs to direct sell these things to kick up competition in this space.
Great video, Wendell, it really got me thinking about a new router build down the road. AT&T Fiber sounds... less than ideal. We have CenturyLink here (1Gb) and I just hooked up my homebrew opnsense box in place of their Zyxel C4000 modem/router and we were in business. Having to work around subpar ISP hardware is never fun. Cheers!
I get about ~2.5 Gbps L3 performance using OPNsense with 4 cores of a 2680 v4 under ESXi. I tried with 8 cores and it scaled linearly so I'm not convinced you need hardware as good as what's on display for consumer 2.5 or 5 Gbps services unless you're going to run something like Wireguard.
I have a Dell R420 w/ Dual E5-2430 w/ 32GB ECC RAM and X520 2xSFP+ card booting pfsense off a SATA SSD. It has no problem with 2Gbit internet and even tested 10Gbit with it (using another machine acting as my WAN connection). I'm into it for maybe $300 and it is absolutely solid as a rock. I'll trust enterprise hardware a lot more than consumer grade hardware. Am I missing something?
I know this is old, but your video is relevant. You can pickup tons of power edge servers right now for around $500 with quad 10gbe a raid controller drac etc and quad xeons. I just picked one up with quad v3's for $300 on Marketplace.
If most of your traffic is GSO/GRO friendly (which is usually the case if you are not like a ISP or data center) even a Atom C3xxx will do 8+Gbps *per core* with routing, firewalling and NAT under plain Linux networking (at least on bare metal.) Of course if you need to do something requiring traffic inspection such weak cores could become very painful very quick, or if you are routing a metric crap-ton of non-TCP traffic (no GRO/GSO, but there was some work to fix that recently at least for UDP, wonder if it has fully landed and enabled for routing yet) Still, perf/$ is prob way better on a W680/Alder lake platform, at least the more sensible SKUs, the headroom can come in handy, and the idle wattage - where its probably going to spend most of its life anyway - does seem pretty decent - go for it :)
Just put in 8 Gig internet. I have the equipment to handle it, but I have opposite problems with some of my machines. Download and uploads are not symmetrical, both ways in different machines. I do need to look into building a router, since I have an Asus RT-AX89X that does handle 10 gig, but maybe not well? Your videos are the best!
Hey Wendell, thanks for the great video! I was wondering how would a mikrotik routeros compare to the pfsense/opnsense, since there was a debate that pfsense could have problems pushing 10gbit. rOS level 4 license is around $45 and it comes with everything a home router would need, so kinda curious how would it stack against pfsense in some higher speed routing.
Hey Wendell, Attempted to go out and find these components and had trouble finding where to buy the motherboard. It appears no one sells it standalone. I went through the gigabyte sites resellers and distributors list and found no motherboards with any of them.
This is basically how I started my internet company in the 1990's, T-1, T-3, and serial multiport cards... Voila, internet company, initially started on a 486 dx2 back then... LOL 😂
Or alternatively as cheaper solutions, you buy an old refurbished i3/i5/i7 (or Ryzen) computer adding a high-speed multi-port NIC card or one of the bevy of firewall appliance mini-computers on Amazon for a couple of hundred bucks (or upcycle an old computer with a decent processor).
I have 2 kids and a wife all using our home router and I'm trying to use my Flex remote Ham radio. Would this help? Beacuse I'm bored of packet loss on my radios audio stream..
This is my current build project at the moment. Never realized how underpowered consumer routers were. Always went with custom firmware on mine and got the functionality I wanted. Then I learned of how much more potential there is building one yourself. I also plan to build a plex streaming server. Would it be advisable to put in a separate machine or would it be ok combined with the router? I already have it on my NAS server (readynas) and perf sucks when transcoding is needed.
I had plex running on my Synology NAS and it had a tough time transcoding big files as well. Build a media server with a AMD 2700x and it's been a champ. I'm about to drop. 5900x in that box and spin up another VM for this project :) But yah, plex running on a PC is flawless compared to a consumer NAS. Still love my Synology though.
The "forbidden" router: running the router software as a VM while a hypervisor like XCPng actually runs on the bare metal. This would allow you to create another VM for your Plex. However, this configuration is "forbidden" because it has lots of potential for weirdness when the routing software is virtualized.
When they say the x540 can not do 2.5 or 5gbe it is technically true but if connected to another 10gbe component depending on drive speed it will do all of the range from .1 to 10gbe
I'd love to see some comparison between sth like Vyos and Opnsense/pfsense. Would love to know how big the routing difference really is nowadays since it has been pretty big in the past, especially in virtualized environments
what a lucky chap have gigabyte internet straight into his house. you should be thanking god all the time day and night because you are very blessed. extremely blessed. please thank god right now.
Mostly due to when you upgrade software or change the virtualization box the network, including the internet, goes down. Should be a short duration but then you might have errors you have to troubleshoot. Then you have find troubleshooting guides and download patches without Internet. That’s why I like layered systems. Put the forbidden router behind a physical box firewall. The area in-between is your dmz. You can always plug directly in dmz in emergency.
@@Level1Techs As someone who's looking to do a TrueNAS Scale build with ECC RAM at home, the MW31-SP0 + 12600 look like the perfect combo. I'd be interested in such a group buy for sure.
I love these types of build your own solutions but obtaining a good OS with the features I desire has always shifted me away. After trying pre-build enterprise solutions I shifted to building with Sophos XG, PFsense, Open Sense and others I landed on just purchasing a Firewalla Gold. The price, hardware and most of all the software experience all with my current needs. I hope you review it one day.
I second this I have a Firewalla purple and just ordered the new gold plus after running pfsense for a few years and trying opnsense for half a year I think Firewalla is the perfect balance of being able to tinker with low energy use hardware and solid stability.
One other thing that I would suggest is that an AMD 7600 using PCIe 5 interfaces should yield better results especially locked all core clocks with a Linux or similar OS stripped to its bare bones.
Would a new M2 Mac Mini with 10GIG and a few Thunderbolt to 10Gig adapters / SFP adapters work better? Seems like that's how I would go with it. Its small. Sips power. It does run UNIX flavor. Seems Like that's how I would go with it. Its also SMALL.
I wouldn’t bother, macOS is not made to be a router or firewall. And Linux on M2 is likely not there yet, especially with Thunderbolt support. If you want less tinkering, the Minisforum MS-01 is probably the better fit. And it’s around the same price as the Mac Mini M2, it also has built in SFP+ ports (Intel X710).
i have laying around a 3200g , B550 2x 4gb 2400 ddr4 .... and 2x Intel PRO 1000 Quad Port which i want to trade it fo Low Profile but 2 or more years ago none of the Router OS Supported WiFi 6 and i didnt have a Low Profile Quad port Ethernet
VyOS is the key , if you want to have a big learn success. :) And checkout the Chassis: Supermicro SC523L-505B , it's really oweseome for a router build, front-panel IO 2U.
+1, I actually emailed their sales channel (through the MW34-SP0 page on their site), but didn't get a response. (To be fair, I'm not representing an enterprise or a system integrator, so it doesn't surprise me too much, but I was hoping....)
I feel like there's a market segment in the mobo market for people looking to DIY this sort of project that is not being served by manufacturers. It feels like there's room for someone to crowd fund a project here. Just throwing it out there.
I would love a couple of these to throw in my home lab at home here is Australia!! I would go in for the kickstarter group buy that Wendell suggested!!! Does anyone know where i could buy this in Australia??
Meh, built my own router back in the early 1990's using a 486, a 28K modem, a ShareTheNet bootable Floppy, and a 10bt hub... so we could all be online at the same time. Made my house the most popular house in the neighborhood. Those crazy teens loved that Napster and Limewire. Now I do it with wireless bridges neighborhood wide using DD WRT and those potato routers you disparage.
Interesting video, inspiring for our Home Labs. How does it handle VPN? Is there an Intel QuickAssist card you can recommend to improve performance? Would you be interested in doing a shootout between a Linux based routing solution versus BSD? For example IPFire vs pfSense; both bare-metal and via Proxmox.
I just got a internet upgrade from 1gbps to Fiberlink 2.5 Gbps. My motherboard has a 2.5G LAN port and they gave me a Zyxel AX7501 router.If I pay a one time fee of 100€ I get 10 gbps internet for the same monthly subscription. What do you think,I have a 5800x3d on B550 TOMAHAWK and the only motherboard I found with a 10g port is the X570 creation but used..I don't want to change the processor or the platform... is it worth changing the motherboard or getting a separate network card with 10g network port?
While it's good to see 2.5G ports becoming the norm now, 10GbE ports in motherboards need to really catch up, especially high-end ITX boards. I tried to find an x570 motherboard with 10GbE onboard and the only one I considered was the $1000 Gigabyte board, which I did not get. For now I'd recommend to just buy a plug-in 10GbE card. I have the Asus XG-C100C that I got for $100 USD that works well in my X570 board.
Can you set the bios to have this boot on power loss? You want your router auto rebooting always. It would suck to have to go hit the power button or log in to ipmi, or worse not know you lost power because you’re away and have to wait until you come home to power up your network!
not in my experience. I have mine setup and the nics passed through using virtio. Also handy to have whole vm backup via proxmox for when I break things.
@@krj15489 well that's good to know because I put mine on bare metal but I also have a proxmox server in my rack. So I could play around with it a bit in the future
I'd love to see a scaling video, or maybe a video with a more modest Am4 board and cpu. Given say the 5600 has gone on sale as low as $99 and some low-mid range b 450 or 550 boards can be gotten for sub $100 as well. That'd be an interesting thing to see.
Regarding the X550-T2. Intel's product page claims that 2gb and 5gb are only supported in Linux. Since pfsense is freebsd based doesn't that mean x550 would only negotiate at 1gb or 10gb in pfsense?
If the case is the least expensive component, why is the msrp of that motherboard well over 600 bucks. Also that motherboard is discontinued, and I cannot find one less than 900 bucks? Budget build?? I can afford the cpu at 160 bucks, but holy shnikies????
I will admit, that for canned, carrier-provided routers, the Verizon FiOS router was the only one I've ever seen that had a full-fat implementation of UPnP (including all the optional features!), to the point that it could handle two Xbox voice channels to a single public address. Everything else couldn't do it, and would die after a day due to memory fragmentation of the buggy little 64MB brain that it had.
Still can't understand why do you talk about copper card ?!?! Everybody knows that SFP+ solutions are cheaper right ? You can get dual port 10G NIC for about $30 from eBay, 48 port SFP+ switch for $200, SFP+ itself can be found for under $5 a piece for multimode ones and multi mode patch cords are cheaper too :) With such setup you even not need to worry about distances compared to copper link :)
we have 25 Gbit/s Residential in switzerland for 65$ a month but no routers to handle it 🤣🤣
Meanwhile, I’m on about 24mbps/8mbps in Australia in a city 😂
wow, this is stupidity fast for home use! can DIY a x86 router to chug this bandwidth
vyos
We have 20Mbs/10Mbs cable connection for around 25-30$ for last at least ten years, before it was 10/1 for the same price for ten years.
THANK GOD FOR O2 !!! They slowed my life so much
Fiber 7? right
7:26: Just to note: the eBay search results shown there are for the Dell rNDC card, not the stand-alone PCIe version. Unless you have a Dell server with a compatible onboard networking port, don't buy the parts shown on screen here.
Regarding the AT&T BGW320-500/505 we have found a way around not using it at all on AT&T's network. It involves using an external XGS-PON ONT which has a 10G ethernet port. Availability is abysmal and it's been a community effort figuring the device out (big ups to the few people who got deep into it and figured it out), the manufacture either won't or doesn't respond to emails thus far. Thanks for the video Wendell.
where is this being tracked? just signed onto ATT Fiber 1gig
Deets and link to buy? Lol
@@Level1Techs I attempted to reply but I'm not sure if the comment got ate by TH-cam or deleted, didn't post a link but described where it was.
Don't see it even in held. Email me at Wendell at level1techs dot com and I'll make a forum post for it
Definitely going to be hunting for that on the forums, currently still have the BGW210 and getting it sorted to bypass at least that unit, but being able to pass the ONT too would be awesome if the same approach works, though admittedly less necessary as the BGW210 is the main source of my issues. Thanks for letting us know the options exist :D
Some things to add, the X550 does better at longer cable runs than the aquantia chipset. Also there are router OSes made specifically with low latency in mind like VyOS or tnsr (from netgate the makers of pfsense).
Interesting. The aquantia has been fairly flakey in my experience. Maybe I should try a shorter cable run.
Wish VyOS had a web gui, sticking with OPNSense
@@mitch7918 vyos is targeted at enterprises and carriers. Those have staff that are comfortable with CLI.
The CLI on vyos is pretty easy to work with once you understand the syntaxes and configuration modes. It does struggle with hairpin NAT, so use split DNS for that.
What are you talking about VyOS and low-latency? I fail to see what VyOS has that OpenWRT/OPNsense don't.
@@mitch7918 I'd kill for a GUI for VyOS
A group buy is an interesting idea. I'd do it.
Wendell and team are like the deep dive tech friends I never had! Thanks for being you!
THIS is the content we need more of. Thank you so much!
Omg omg omg omg! I’ve been waiting for this. In my city they are upgrading from 10Gbps to 25Gbps on SFP28
what city is this?
Jeez, keep it up. The tidbit about pcore and ecore on linux vs freebsd was a good nugget of info. Thanks to you and the commenters. The comments about these horrible att routers was great too. Led me down a path. Maybe I can join and figure it out. I do not know how youtube bullseyed this one but I'm here.
this forbidden router makes so much sense in a lot of homelab setups, it's simple, a proper machine running a VM that contains your software router, and has proper hardware to connect to your switch. You can add dns, proxy, nginx, vpn, and everything network on the server, and even Firewall rules! If you don't need 10G you can get a 4 port 2.5G ethernet card for cheap and maybe even ditch the expensive managed switch all together! Assigning vlans for each port and rules to connect everything together. All at a low price and with the benefits of a VM!
7:30 I had no idea there was a Firmware update to the X550, that “unlocks” 2 & 5gbe. I’ve been hunting for the 700series that they made that supports this. Makes a great bargain, even better. 👍
I just updated the firmware on my x550 and if I plug it into a 2.5g switch port it drops to 1g.
@@grizredford8407 I wonder if there are sequential firmware updates. Perhaps still needs to be manually negotiated.
2 months ago, and that specific motherboard is nowhere to be found...any w680 board is $500 I think? that's what my searches have found. What alternatives do you have for that board? how budget are we talking here?
My 50mbit connection would like to have a word with this 2,5gbit internet connection out of dreamland.
Sliger is a really fantastic company to work with. I had the opportunity to work with Kahlin Sliger in designing a chassis for a medical instrument. The company was so great to work with commercially, that I only ever recommend them personally.
I'm rockin an old Dell PowerEdge R210 II running pfsense. I slapped in a Realtek quad 2.5G network card (I know eww realtek) but it actually works fine if you install the proper drivers. May be upgrading to a R330 soonish. Love your videos, you literally do things I find interesting and I may even go to school for networking next year
I’m from Chile, here I have 2 isp connections, one at 800 Mbps and another at 600 Mbps. I can upgrade one of the isp connetion to 2 Gbps, and for that reason I’m building a custom router with one of those super micro motherboard with 6x10G ports that you can find on ebay.
Gotta be nice to have an Internet connection to do your router justice. :) My own network uses 1000 base T/ Gigabit ethernet. The bottleneck is the cable modem. For the router, I use the Linksys WRT1200AC with the OpenWRT on it. If you can upgrade a consumer router with OpenWRT you won't be disappointed. You can then use NFS and have it also be a light show machine - AND a router!
Been using a ryzen 3200g in a router box since late 2019. Works fine with 3gbs fiber. For anything faster than 3gbs, you likely need openwrt as I don't think the freebsd can do 10gbs yet - unless they fixed it.
Definitely would be interested in a group buy on this setup.
No SR-IOV on Aquantia. :(
RE: P-cores and E-cores, I think the way to go is pinning VMs to cores and using isolcpus or cpusets to keep the hypervisor from using them.
So it is forbidden after all
I don't know where your intro music comes from, but it is consistently among the best for any YT channel I know.
I've been working on a home router project over the last year, got a supermicro 1u 5019D-4C-FN8TP with xeon D-2123IT. Setup Proxmox and created a virtualized PFsense. My biggest issues were the 2.5/5/10gb negotiations. My modem has 2.5gb but had trouble getting things to work, so tried passing through the NICs to Pfsense but found out BSD has trouble with realtek drivers. Got things sorted out now using an intel i225 nic but virtualized and passed to the VM using virtio. My connection is 1.2gb but I can get a consistent 1400mbs out of it and iperf gives me stable 10gb between my homelab servers. I have the t540 nic in my desktop, if I had known about the t550 and firmware to get 2.5/5 that would have made my life alot easier. Thanks for the video!
Also have the 540. Didn't realize until this video it doesn't negotiate 2.5/5. Had I paid attention to that detail a couple of years ago I would have saved myself a whole lot of stress. Looking into 550 options now, that 5 second comment in the video just explained so much for the problems I've been having.
@@beepboopbeepboop190 I ended up getting a TEG-S762 switch for my office to connect to my desktop. Has 2x10gb ports so I don't have to worry about negotiation. 10gb to desktop then 10gb uplink to my homelab, and it has 4x2.5gb ports as well.
@@krj15489 That's a good call. Mine is installed in my firewall/router so one is connected to a 10G switch on the lan side but the other port is connected to my ISP's terminal. I'm 99% sure that's not 10G but I think it might be more than 1G. The nic on the fw's motherboard is 2.5 though so I may just swap to that for the wan.
I've found the Wiitek SFP+ to RJ45 copper modules will negotiate 1/2.5/5/10 for cheaper SFP+ network cards and things like the UDM Pro.
A lot of useful information here as always. I would be interested in hearing what other homelab users are doing with > 1Gbe ISP connections (webscraping? actual commercial/public facing websites? etc). For my work almost everything over >1Gbe is constrained to my local network(NAS related). That said it would be interesting to see either a bifurcated or low-idle power solution that could be left on 24x7(e.g. I don't want a 100-300 watt router running a 10pm at night just to watch netflix or browser the web)
I just have it because I can. 5gbps fiber is cheaper from my provider than 100mbps from Spectrum at $60/month.
Great video,. especially the coverage of the nuances of the 10GbE card.
I like the 4x NVMe and 8x SATA ports on that board. I may actually buy one as an "everything" box.
Imagine in the next 2-3 years when ALL consumer motherboards will have this level of IO.
So exciting, it's like a glimpse of the future :D
The group buy for the motherboard is a good idea. I’d consider buying a new router for my University’s ACM chapter if it went through.
You should look into VPP (w/Linux Control Plane plugin) + DPDK + FRR.
i really do like these builds just DIY everything
I use the X540-AT2 in my main home workstation and home servers. I use Trendnet TEG-10GECTX and Asus XG-C100C in my other rigs
Please do the kickstarter. As I commented last time you did a video on this board, I would buy one right now for almost any cost. It seems like a much better choice then starting a platform on the ASROCK rack x570 boards. Gigabyte needs to direct sell these things to kick up competition in this space.
It seems AsRock Rack are also getting in W680 boards now. But I don't think they're selling them yet, they're listed as "preliminary"?
Group buy for the MW34-SP0 would be great!
Great video, Wendell, it really got me thinking about a new router build down the road. AT&T Fiber sounds... less than ideal. We have CenturyLink here (1Gb) and I just hooked up my homebrew opnsense box in place of their Zyxel C4000 modem/router and we were in business. Having to work around subpar ISP hardware is never fun. Cheers!
I get about ~2.5 Gbps L3 performance using OPNsense with 4 cores of a 2680 v4 under ESXi. I tried with 8 cores and it scaled linearly so I'm not convinced you need hardware as good as what's on display for consumer 2.5 or 5 Gbps services unless you're going to run something like Wireguard.
I have a Dell R420 w/ Dual E5-2430 w/ 32GB ECC RAM and X520 2xSFP+ card booting pfsense off a SATA SSD. It has no problem with 2Gbit internet and even tested 10Gbit with it (using another machine acting as my WAN connection). I'm into it for maybe $300 and it is absolutely solid as a rock. I'll trust enterprise hardware a lot more than consumer grade hardware. Am I missing something?
It would be cool to have a short or some short video updating this video.
I know this is old, but your video is relevant. You can pickup tons of power edge servers right now for around $500 with quad 10gbe a raid controller drac etc and quad xeons. I just picked one up with quad v3's for $300 on Marketplace.
If most of your traffic is GSO/GRO friendly (which is usually the case if you are not like a ISP or data center) even a Atom C3xxx will do 8+Gbps *per core* with routing, firewalling and NAT under plain Linux networking (at least on bare metal.) Of course if you need to do something requiring traffic inspection such weak cores could become very painful very quick, or if you are routing a metric crap-ton of non-TCP traffic (no GRO/GSO, but there was some work to fix that recently at least for UDP, wonder if it has fully landed and enabled for routing yet)
Still, perf/$ is prob way better on a W680/Alder lake platform, at least the more sensible SKUs, the headroom can come in handy, and the idle wattage - where its probably going to spend most of its life anyway - does seem pretty decent - go for it :)
Just put in 8 Gig internet. I have the equipment to handle it, but I have opposite problems with some of my machines. Download and uploads are not symmetrical, both ways in different machines. I do need to look into building a router, since I have an Asus RT-AX89X that does handle 10 gig, but maybe not well? Your videos are the best!
Yeah I have that exact spectrum router that I have to use for my static ip’s, so it’s modem -> spectrum router -> pfsense
L1Techs: Saturates 5gbE from ISP
American ISP Technician: "Ive never seen anything so fast"
All of the US: 😭
I went for a Topton N305 mini pc, passive cooling, 32GB ram, 2TB nvme, 4 x 2.5Gbit ports, low idle power as seen on STH ;) (obviously no 10Gb though)
Ive been waiting for a video like this, some areas in the UK have access to 3Gbps down
Hey Wendell, thanks for the great video! I was wondering how would a mikrotik routeros compare to the pfsense/opnsense, since there was a debate that pfsense could have problems pushing 10gbit. rOS level 4 license is around $45 and it comes with everything a home router would need, so kinda curious how would it stack against pfsense in some higher speed routing.
I am officially impressed!
Now that the Minisforum MS-01 is out. The MS-01 might be the better appliance for high speed (> 10 Gbe) routing and firewall.
Hey Wendell, Attempted to go out and find these components and had trouble finding where to buy the motherboard. It appears no one sells it standalone. I went through the gigabyte sites resellers and distributors list and found no motherboards with any of them.
Once again recommended the 12500 because it actually supports ECC and is only a few bucks more.
Dudeeeee, the 13900 on this motherboard would be a nutty home server! VMs for days!
This is basically how I started my internet company in the 1990's, T-1, T-3, and serial multiport cards... Voila, internet company, initially started on a 486 dx2 back then... LOL 😂
have you done some openwrt?
Or alternatively as cheaper solutions, you buy an old refurbished i3/i5/i7 (or Ryzen) computer adding a high-speed multi-port NIC card or one of the bevy of firewall appliance mini-computers on Amazon for a couple of hundred bucks (or upcycle an old computer with a decent processor).
I have 2 kids and a wife all using our home router and I'm trying to use my Flex remote Ham radio. Would this help? Beacuse I'm bored of packet loss on my radios audio stream..
This is my current build project at the moment. Never realized how underpowered consumer routers were. Always went with custom firmware on mine and got the functionality I wanted. Then I learned of how much more potential there is building one yourself.
I also plan to build a plex streaming server. Would it be advisable to put in a separate machine or would it be ok combined with the router? I already have it on my NAS server (readynas) and perf sucks when transcoding is needed.
I had plex running on my Synology NAS and it had a tough time transcoding big files as well. Build a media server with a AMD 2700x and it's been a champ. I'm about to drop. 5900x in that box and spin up another VM for this project :)
But yah, plex running on a PC is flawless compared to a consumer NAS. Still love my Synology though.
The "forbidden" router: running the router software as a VM while a hypervisor like XCPng actually runs on the bare metal. This would allow you to create another VM for your Plex. However, this configuration is "forbidden" because it has lots of potential for weirdness when the routing software is virtualized.
I think the only usecase for E cores is to help with an IPS/IDS like suricata
That’s scary… maybe less demanding stuff like dhcp, dns services
When they say the x540 can not do 2.5 or 5gbe it is technically true but if connected to another 10gbe component depending on drive speed it will do all of the range from .1 to 10gbe
Cost efficient??? Nextwarehouse has it (motherboard) just above 700$.
Crying in dollar signs
I'd love to see some comparison between sth like Vyos and Opnsense/pfsense. Would love to know how big the routing difference really is nowadays since it has been pretty big in the past, especially in virtualized environments
That moment where the router you show that is "canned" is my exact router provided by Spectrum hahaha.
what a lucky chap have gigabyte internet straight into his house. you should be thanking god all the time day and night because you are very blessed. extremely blessed. please thank god right now.
SFTP performance?
I've never understood the fear of virtualizing your router.
Mostly due to when you upgrade software or change the virtualization box the network, including the internet, goes down.
Should be a short duration but then you might have errors you have to troubleshoot. Then you have find troubleshooting guides and download patches without Internet.
That’s why I like layered systems. Put the forbidden router behind a physical box firewall. The area in-between is your dmz. You can always plug directly in dmz in emergency.
Additional latency
too bad the board/Gigabyte MW31-SP0 is unobtainium
Group buy!?!?! And we can get it to come back. Lol
@@Level1Techs dooo iiiiittt
@@Level1Techs As someone who's looking to do a TrueNAS Scale build with ECC RAM at home, the MW31-SP0 + 12600 look like the perfect combo. I'd be interested in such a group buy for sure.
I love these types of build your own solutions but obtaining a good OS with the features I desire has always shifted me away. After trying pre-build enterprise solutions I shifted to building with Sophos XG, PFsense, Open Sense and others I landed on just purchasing a Firewalla Gold. The price, hardware and most of all the software experience all with my current needs. I hope you review it one day.
I second this I have a Firewalla purple and just ordered the new gold plus after running pfsense for a few years and trying opnsense for half a year I think Firewalla is the perfect balance of being able to tinker with low energy use hardware and solid stability.
Would love to see the forbidden grandchild, some of us don't have more than 1gig but also don't want the isp modem/ont
Wendell did you do any VPN Client testing for through put speeds?
One other thing that I would suggest is that an AMD 7600 using PCIe 5 interfaces should yield better results especially locked all core clocks with a Linux or similar OS stripped to its bare bones.
No sign of MW34-SPO in UK so have to use raspberry pi instead
Intel ark does not show ECC support for i5-12400. Is it working even though it is not listed?
Would a new M2 Mac Mini with 10GIG and a few Thunderbolt to 10Gig adapters / SFP adapters work better? Seems like that's how I would go with it. Its small. Sips power. It does run UNIX flavor. Seems Like that's how I would go with it. Its also SMALL.
I wouldn’t bother, macOS is not made to be a router or firewall. And Linux on M2 is likely not there yet, especially with Thunderbolt support.
If you want less tinkering, the Minisforum MS-01 is probably the better fit. And it’s around the same price as the Mac Mini M2, it also has built in SFP+ ports (Intel X710).
Yes! Group buy mobo please!
How much power does it consume on average?
oh my god ITS ALIVE!! 😮🎉
i have laying around a 3200g , B550 2x 4gb 2400 ddr4 .... and 2x Intel PRO 1000 Quad Port which i want to trade it fo Low Profile but 2 or more years ago none of the Router OS Supported WiFi 6 and i didnt have a Low Profile Quad port Ethernet
I wonder do you need this much performance for a over 1 Gigabit router?
Will you PLEASE use the Dark Reader extension when showing web pages! Quit melting my eyeballs out!
This man is building a router for over gigabit speeds and im here with my 7 mbit like... yea that be so nice.
VyOS is the key , if you want to have a big learn success. :) And checkout the Chassis: Supermicro SC523L-505B , it's really oweseome for a router build, front-panel IO 2U.
I have had 10 for the last 4 years Hopefully this can help get the most out of it lol
I'd really like to get that Gigabyte MW34-SPO shown here. I guess GIgabyte isn't into selling these as I can't find one anywhere.
+1, I actually emailed their sales channel (through the MW34-SP0 page on their site), but didn't get a response. (To be fair, I'm not representing an enterprise or a system integrator, so it doesn't surprise me too much, but I was hoping....)
Same, it was first announced all the way back in the spring and... nothing.
MSRP for the mobo?
I feel like there's a market segment in the mobo market for people looking to DIY this sort of project that is not being served by manufacturers. It feels like there's room for someone to crowd fund a project here.
Just throwing it out there.
I would love a couple of these to throw in my home lab at home here is Australia!! I would go in for the kickstarter group buy that Wendell suggested!!!
Does anyone know where i could buy this in Australia??
Meh, built my own router back in the early 1990's using a 486, a 28K modem, a ShareTheNet bootable Floppy, and a 10bt hub... so we could all be online at the same time. Made my house the most popular house in the neighborhood. Those crazy teens loved that Napster and Limewire.
Now I do it with wireless bridges neighborhood wide using DD WRT and those potato routers you disparage.
pfSense and OPNsense is firewalls, not routers. That will matter, when you cant understand, why networks don't route. Untill you have allowed them to.
Ah but can you not also build bridges out of stone
Interesting video, inspiring for our Home Labs.
How does it handle VPN? Is there an Intel QuickAssist card you can recommend to improve performance?
Would you be interested in doing a shootout between a Linux based routing solution versus BSD? For example IPFire vs pfSense; both bare-metal and via Proxmox.
Would I follow the same process if I didn't need a router but wanted to build my own managed network switch?
I just got a internet upgrade from 1gbps to Fiberlink 2.5 Gbps. My motherboard has a 2.5G LAN port and they gave me a Zyxel AX7501 router.If I pay a one time fee of 100€ I get 10 gbps internet for the same monthly subscription. What do you think,I have a 5800x3d on B550 TOMAHAWK and the only motherboard I found with a 10g port is the X570 creation but used..I don't want to change the processor or the platform... is it worth changing the motherboard or getting a separate network card with 10g network port?
While it's good to see 2.5G ports becoming the norm now, 10GbE ports in motherboards need to really catch up, especially high-end ITX boards. I tried to find an x570 motherboard with 10GbE onboard and the only one I considered was the $1000 Gigabyte board, which I did not get.
For now I'd recommend to just buy a plug-in 10GbE card. I have the Asus XG-C100C that I got for $100 USD that works well in my X570 board.
Can you set the bios to have this boot on power loss? You want your router auto rebooting always. It would suck to have to go hit the power button or log in to ipmi, or worse not know you lost power because you’re away and have to wait until you come home to power up your network!
Doesn't virtualization of pfsense cause a bunch of issues?
not in my experience. I have mine setup and the nics passed through using virtio. Also handy to have whole vm backup via proxmox for when I break things.
@@krj15489 well that's good to know because I put mine on bare metal but I also have a proxmox server in my rack. So I could play around with it a bit in the future
It has potential too, espcially if your NICs don't have proper VM passthrough support.
I'd love to see a scaling video, or maybe a video with a more modest Am4 board and cpu. Given say the 5600 has gone on sale as low as $99 and some low-mid range b 450 or 550 boards can be gotten for sub $100 as well. That'd be an interesting thing to see.
Regarding the X550-T2. Intel's product page claims that 2gb and 5gb are only supported in Linux. Since pfsense is freebsd based doesn't that mean x550 would only negotiate at 1gb or 10gb in pfsense?
If the case is the least expensive component, why is the msrp of that motherboard well over 600 bucks. Also that motherboard is discontinued, and I cannot find one less than 900 bucks? Budget build?? I can afford the cpu at 160 bucks, but holy shnikies????
so the only way to get this board is to request a review sample from gigabyte?
Unless Wendell starts a group-buy!
Looking at the MB+12500 with the nas sliger case for a nas build. Just a shame the MB isnt really out yet.
Can you disable the auto negotiation?
I will admit, that for canned, carrier-provided routers, the Verizon FiOS router was the only one I've ever seen that had a full-fat implementation of UPnP (including all the optional features!), to the point that it could handle two Xbox voice channels to a single public address. Everything else couldn't do it, and would die after a day due to memory fragmentation of the buggy little 64MB brain that it had.
Still can't understand why do you talk about copper card ?!?! Everybody knows that SFP+ solutions are cheaper right ? You can get dual port 10G NIC for about $30 from eBay, 48 port SFP+ switch for $200, SFP+ itself can be found for under $5 a piece for multimode ones and multi mode patch cords are cheaper too :) With such setup you even not need to worry about distances compared to copper link :)
Would you say the the processor and ram are more responsible for your performance and if so what other motherboard would you recommend.
wouldnt this build be better equipped with a threadripper since it gives you more pcie lanes on the CPU