Power = Voltage × Ampere. If volts are decreased, ampere increases. Power consumption of a device will remain same.
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Can you please share the link to 2.5G ethernet via mPCIE adapter?
Hi, How did you manage to order Wemos from Aliexpress to India? Do they ship to India?
Had a relative coming from China lol.
100wemos was only one tiny box full of chips
Edit: China was autocorrected to Chennai?
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The Dell WYSE 3040 has a Intel Atom x5-Z8350 and supports AES-NI and will obliterate the MediaTek MT7621 which is commonly found in domestic routers such as Asus or ER605 in its Wireguard performance. Its going to be costiler (than 3K) though after you have added an additional network Interface or a managed switch and its not going to have wifi in that price.
Already have usb ethernet, and 2 extra routers
Remember to use the USB3 port for the USB ethernet otherwise you may not get the full network speed.
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I am in a similar boat, thinking of moving router duties off the over‑spec’d Lenovo P330 to a low‑power x86 device like a Dell Wyse 3040 (AES‑NI capable) will reduce power usage, keep networking separate from virtualization (Unraid/Proxmox), and still support Pi‑hole/AdGuard, multiple VLANs, and Tailscale/WireGuard, with the flexibility to migrate to pfSense later; a Pi could work but lacks AES‑NI and would have lower VPN performance.
I’m gonna use it as wan port, so usb 2.0 would suffice to provide 200mbps 25MBps net.. but still will use 3.0
Yes that would be much more power friendly. If purchasing, try to get one with dual NIC or provision to add internal NIC. USB NIC tend to be a bit janky from my experience. Pfsense does the best job when there are multiple WANs and you can selectively choose to loadbalance or failover the clients. It offers much better control than commercial solutions like ER605. However pfsense (FreeBSD) is quite finicky about network adapters and I have had superior results using Intel NIC’s. For a more lightweight single WAN use, OpenWRT is fine, you could even load samba on OpenWRT and use an USB drive for a janky low-cost NAS.
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Yes that’s true.. i have another mini pc for jellyfin hw transcoding, windows file sharing, and rdp. It has intel n100, 16gb ram, 1tb wd black sn770, dual nic.. but it is too overkill for being a router. With openwrt, i can install docker and docker also have windows deployment. But previously with proxmox setup i had it was very hard to pass igpu to windows rdp. So i now just run everything on windows directly, jellyfin server and all. Seems to work just fine and eat 3 watts at idle.
Even i deployed openwrt image on hyper-v, which worked nicely. But then again when i add movies and tv shows to it, library scanning eats up 100% of cpu slowing the whole system down until it finishes. Running router interface on it would be problematic..
so i need a seperate dedicated device for openwrt, which also can provide proper wireguard vpn throughput. I will offload other task to other device such as access point and lan..
Recently i came accross dell wyse 5070, which is a proper x86 pc with proper bios. So it maybe more straightforward and install openwrt without doing any modifications to the image.. it comes at 6-7k refurbished with 1 year warranty from few sites.. maybe I will go for it instead? It comes with 8gb ram and 128gb m.2 ssd, supposedly have 4-5 watts idle and 10 watts peak..
I currently am running the P330 with unraid, I plan to expand it further, but having it act as a router does affect the experiments I plan to run on it. I plan to stay mostly on OpenWRT, as it serves my purpose absolutely fine and I have more experience with it over the years. Currently I virtualize the openWRT, which I hear isnt ideal, and now I see why. Once everything is locked in, one can run virtualized router, but not while experimenting.
I have a chromebox with i7 8255u, I was thinking maybe leveraging that too instead of wyse, same. I am waiting on the M2 NIC interface as I do not plan to run WiFi on it. I have checked with my USB C cable which has the WATTAGE display, it takes barely 2-3W on idle.
This is a much better option because of PCIe expansion slot which can be used for proper NIC. The integrated NIC is also seems to be supported by FreeBSD as well. Best of all, it does away with janky USB NIC. PCIe expansion means even a multi-port NIC can be used. Spec says it has inbuilt emmc but I am not sure this can be used to install OS.
Have you ever considered using the NanoPi R2S Plus as your router?
I’m currently using the barebone version with a 3D printed case and using with Jio Fiber 300 Mbps connection it is working fine with SQM and AdGuard Home no issues at all.
To be safe I also added a small heatsink and a 5V DC fan to keep it cool.
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Totally doable and easily if bios is normal…
The 35 watts idle will cost me more than my internet bill.. otherwise its a good device.
Dell wyse 5070 on other hand, have 1 unused slot where i can put a m.2 to 2.5g ethernet in the m.2 wifi slot, i guess its e.key.. there’s a yt video on it, the adaptor is available to buy in india for 2-3k rs. I dont need more than 1gbps port for now. My hdd cant max out the data transfer speed of gigabit lan, and i have no intention to upgrade to 2.5gbps or 10gbps lan for the foreseeable future.
NanoPi r2s cpu is as weak as my router cpu. Almost have the same wireguard throughput.. so it would be sidegrade if i go with it..
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I agree once we increase the budjet The Nano Pi is good for OpenWRT. The R2S has one PCIe 1Gb NIC and another 1Gb NIC which is converted from USB. Later versions like R3 have both PCIe. Advantages are very low power requirements and tiny size. It is ARM based though and wont support pfsense or additional interfaces. To be rugged it needs the emmc option rather than SD card.
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It could be as weak as a commercial router costing upwards of 10K and using ARM. It supports “armv8crypto” which is ARM equivalent of AES-NI.