Is The GoWin R86S Pro i3-N305 With 25G Network Connections an Amazing Homelab Server or Router?

37 thoughts on “Is The GoWin R86S Pro i3-N305 With 25G Network Connections an Amazing Homelab Server or Router?”

• They are working on 1U versions of these, which seems perfect. Those NICs in that chassis are just gonna be generating too much heat.

• Good review Tom, but I GoWin is not happy.

• That fan is tiny. It's amazing that it's able to dissipate that heat within such limited space even with the cover off. The NICs need to become much more power efficient for something like this to work without overheating.
  This thing needs a fully copper case with heat pipes attached to all the hot zones and a giant 140mm fan on top. 🙂

• I'd love to give these to our field techs to put on a customer site for repeat carrier problems to do iperf testing. They could even serve as a forward collector and or relay node for monitoring network installations. Emergency datacenter Jump Box comes to mind. Even customer CPE as a firewall vs whatever Arista wants for their untangle devices.

• Hi Thomas, thank you for the professional review, impressive!

• 0:00: 📦 A review of the 25gig model from Lauren Systems, with a bias due to it being sent for free.
  2:18: 💻 The video discusses the features of the Intel I3 n305 CPU and its compatibility with various software and operating systems.
  4:38: ⚙️ The video discusses software and load testing on a device, revealing power consumption and performance under load.
  6:37: 🖥️ The video discusses the performance and limitations of a specific network CS and BSD kernel for high-speed routing.
  8:46: 🌬️ The video discusses the benefits of passively cooled devices and the challenges of maintaining fan-operated equipment.
  Get Timestamps with TammyAIvideo

• Wonder if this is compatible with Sophos Home Firewall ?

• Intriguing, I would consider using this for a network edge or microserver somewhere.

• The Mellanox NIC must be getting quite hot to cut off. IIRC the junction temp limit is 105 °C. The "mget_temp" utility from the Mellanox firmware tools package reports the junction temp.

• Is there a passively cooled N100 – N305 with 10Gbe or SFP+ and Intel 2.5Gbe onboard?

• In real world, 10 Gbps is barely available for home user. 25 Gbps is what the enterprise need, but not this kind of hardware. I agree, there will be no use case for 25 Gbps network device like this

• I still think the Bee-Link Ryzen 7 is a better homelab choice for virtualization.

• What are the use cases for this device? I currently have the UDP Pro, and unifi 1G and 10G switches for networking. I stopped watching the video as I couldn’t figure out where I’d use this device.

• Im all about the passively cooled devices.

• What about idle power consumption?

• Running the same model for pfsense with zenarmor for awhile.
  I think the 25G port version is apart of compromise due to 10G model network card is PCI-E 2.0 which only offer up to 16G bandwidth.
  Peak fan noise is also an issue, it just keep spinning and stop which non-configurable in BIOS.
  So I need to purchase custom cooling case with extra fan to avoid it.

  But overall, it is a great machine provide great performace in tiny box.
  I wish they will create some bigger and non rack model like F-60F size which balance the cooling and the size.

• thanks for the review, it looks good, but I don't like that it overheats, it means unstable operation of the equipment, I'm stable. The Chinese need to make another case with passive cooling and so that it does not overheat

• Heat problem: use a 120 mm computer fan on the upper surface powered by a wall wart.

• Great review. I use a mini pc for my home firewall. With respect of your concerns about reparability, for the price, we could run them in a cluster and have two for the same price as other solutions. This may be my next learning project. Great work as ever Tom and thanks for the content and knowledge.

• I would remove that little fan and 3D print a fan shroud for a 80×80 or 120×120 fan.

• Has anyone performed a security audit of the BIOS on these? Having a hard time with trusting this as the gatekeeper to my home network.

• I'm wondering if the company would sell replacement fan of one went out

• UNITS MATTER.

• 25Gb, not 25GB

• Something I never see addressed on YouTube. Being based in the U.S., I am wary of using something which may contains chips from rival state actors for networking appliance. I've converted my home lab to as much NDAA compliant gear as possible over the past few years (out goes FS) with the notable exception of Netgate and have been looking for a quiet, low wattage alternative supporting at least 2.5Gb/s that is NDAA but not finding one yet.

• don't call this a server

• Can you LAG the two 25GbEs together? 😜

• it's official, Tom: you don't understand the difference between a bit and a byte.

• For the right price I’d use the version without the SFP addin card for home and small business pfsense boxes as long as the warranty and support is good.

• Impressive specs. I just don’t know who needs 25Gbps and would buy a no name machine like this. What is the intersection of those demographics?

• Tom, did you use DACs or fiber transceivers for the SFP28 connections? I'm wondering about the heat in the cages being a factor…

• Looks like a router to me.
  My current router is running 6x 1 GbE, but I will be upgrading to 10 GbE eventually. Current core switch is only 1 GbE, so that is the next thing to upgrade.

• I like the rack mounted version they have

• Not a fan of the little fans… I feel like this is the sort of device I would try to repackage into a 3D-printed enclosure that can utilize better fans.

• Good video Tom, i have one too ! They are pretty decent. Good for Pfsense or Opnsense too ! Pfsense Latest default installs and sees all network cards. OpnSense needs a few tweaks !

• Thank you for being extra clear that it was sent to you. For free. No strings attached.
  One thing ServeTheHome didn't quite make suuuper duper clear is they were sent, at the time, a model that couldn't be obtained by the public. So it really skewed their "review" of it.

• Need a laptop usb fan cooler below to keep the temps down on full load. 25gbs is overkill, but 10gbe would have been sufficient.

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