Some of you may know that I like the little energy-efficient Raspberry Pi computers. I'm using them as Internet servers and firewalls, and they do this with aplomb and major power savings. Typical power usage of one of these things, in actual operation as, say, a Web server, is 4-5W with the external USB-3 SSD storage. That beats 30-50W of most x86-64 boxes when they're just sitting there resting with little to no load on them.

However, sometimes you've just got to do x86. Today, generally that means some sort of x86-64 box. But I'd still like to save as much power as I can. Even the new AMD Ryzen and Intel Core chips, which I use for video production (in my case, an AMD Ryzen), still use a lot of juice.

So, I decided to an experiment. Turns out a South Korean company named Hardkernel makes a small, fanless x86-64 board, using a quad-core Intel Jasper Lake chip. Its TDP (Thermal Design Power, i. e. max power) is 10W. That's running at full tilt. There are two versions of this little board, about 4 inches by 4 inches. One of them, the Odroid H3, uses a Celeron N5105. The other, the Odroid H3+ (that's H3 Plus), uses the Pentium N6005. The Pentium one clocks a little higher. It comes with two Gigabit Ethernet network ports, HDMI, DisplayPort, two USB 3.0 ports, and two USB 2.0 ports for keyboard and mouse.

My wife (Mrs. B.H.C.), had asked for a way to watch movies in the kitchen while cooking/baking/whatever. I first tried a Raspberry Pi 4B. It worked, but for video, it was running right at the edge, and I had to overclock quite a bit. So, I tried the Odroid H3, the Celeron version. I added two 32GB DDR4 DRAM SODIMM sticks (64GB, the max that these Odroid H3 series boards take) and a 1TB NVMe SSD (Samsung SSD 970 EVO PLus). Then I installed Kubuntu GNU/Linux on it, and she logged into Amazon Prime to watch videos.

Works perfectly. Sips power, for an x86 box, not quite as thrifty as the Raspberry Pi 4, but a lot more appropriate for this kind of load and way less than my 4-core AMD Ryzen 3-based mid-tower, let alone the video-editing station (6-core AMD Ryzen 5).

The entire box is about 5 inches square and about 3 inches tall. Again, there is no fan; it uses a rather large heatsink instead. That heatsink, even when watching 1080p videos or even 4K video, has yet to get hot to the touch. It gets warm, feels like just above body temperature, but no more than that.

I'm impressed with this little thing.

To that end, I just built a second one, the parts for which I had ordered last week. This is the Odroid H3+ (Plus) version, with the optional 4-port Gigabit Ethernet add-on card that plugs into the NVMe slot. So, for storage, I'm using two 1TB SATA SSD's, which are still way faster and more power-efficient than the spinning platters. This will be a test firewall with multiple DMZ's. DRAM is maxed out as with the previous one, with two 32GB SODIMM sticks (total 64GB DRAM--I've always believed in having a big RAM ).

The firewall operating system will be OpenBSD, as is my typical wont. With six total Gigabit Ethernet ports, I can have the trusted (inside) network, the untrusted (outside, i. e. the Internet) network, and up to four DMZ's. The case that I'm using this time was chosen to accommodate the 4-port optional network card and the two 2.5" SATA SSD's. It's about 6 inches wide by 5 inches long, and about 4 inches tall. Out of an abundance of caution, I added a fan right over the CPU's giant heatsink to help things stay cool. But it's likely that it won't be needed; it's just me overengineering a solution again. :-)

So, why this Odroid H3+, given that I just told you all that I'm successfully using Raspberry Pi 4B's as OpenBSD firewalls?

The Pi 4's make great, power-efficient, space-saving little firewalls. However, once you take storage into account, they have provisions for basically a total of two Gigabit Ethernet network interfaces and one 100Mbps interface. That's fine for a lot of situations. But what if you need more than one DMZ? You can't do it; there just aren't enough ports. That's where the Odroid H3-series boxes come in.

I gotta admit: I've taken a WHOLE lot less fancy route to similar results.
(BTW, https://www.logicalincrements.com/ Is a GREAT place to source mix&match tools for building your perfect desktop)

My wife wants to watch movies ... anywhere? Her iPad Mini is perfect for that. The only thing, so far, I've found you can't do in the Android / Apple portable world is ExpressVPN into 9Now Australian TV.

Old laptops are GREAT for server duty. They are small, efficient, and usually network tasks are simple. My old VAIO is running a security system 1000 miles away.
My latest laptop, a now-5 year old Surface Go, is my road warrior. A $45 battery swap (a VERY delicate surgery) and it was like new. 1000 miles away, hooked to a wireless Keyboard and Mouse, and full-sized screen, I almost don't miss my desktop!

YankeeTarheel wrote: Tue Apr 18, 2023 4:43 am I gotta admit: I've taken a WHOLE lot less fancy route to similar results.

Oh, of course! But as a computer systems engineer, it wouldn't have been quite as much fun doing it that way. :-) See, this was a pilot-test. I figured, if this little Odroid is powerful enough to do video at 4K, cleanly, with the Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) encryption that Amazon Video and other Web sites use, then the box will be powerful enough to be a good multi-interface firewall as well. And that's really my end-goal with this thing.

For x86-style computing, old laptops, as you correctly point out, can do pretty well as power-efficient x86-64 servers. I myself used to do something similar. For watching videos, a larger screen is preferable to the wife. She actually had a laptop running Microsoft Windows 11, hooked up to a 4K resolution, 42" LCD TV screen, mounted on the wall. Problem: the laptop wasn't quite fast enough (it was running Micro$oft Windows, after all). So, I was looking for something that I could VESA-mount to the back of that 42" TV. That means, basically, a 4-5" physical form factor. The other nice thing is that it's also fanless, which I was also looking for, though a fan can be added quite easily if one wants.

Going to try out this second one this evening and see how it goes.

CowboyT wrote: Tue Apr 18, 2023 9:43 am

YankeeTarheel wrote: Tue Apr 18, 2023 4:43 am I gotta admit: I've taken a WHOLE lot less fancy route to similar results.

Oh, of course! But as a computer systems engineer, it wouldn't have been quite as much fun doing it that way. :-) See, this was a pilot-test. I figured, if this little Odroid is powerful enough to do video at 4K, cleanly, with the Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) encryption that Amazon Video and other Web sites use, then the box will be powerful enough to be a good multi-interface firewall as well. And that's really my end-goal with this thing.

For x86-style computing, old laptops, as you correctly point out, can do pretty well as power-efficient x86-64 servers. I myself used to do something similar. For watching videos, a larger screen is preferable to the wife. She actually had a laptop running Microsoft Windows 11, hooked up to a 4K resolution, 42" LCD TV screen, mounted on the wall. Problem: the laptop wasn't quite fast enough (it was running Micro$oft Windows, after all). So, I was looking for something that I could VESA-mount to the back of that 42" TV. That means, basically, a 4-5" physical form factor. The other nice thing is that it's also fanless, which I was also looking for, though a fan can be added quite easily if one wants.

Going to try out this second one this evening and see how it goes.

One should never, EVER discount the "FUN" factor!

SSD drives have added speed with less noise. GREAT innovation!
And my favorite fans from 1" to 6+" diagonals are Noctua fans. I KNOW there are other fans out there that move as much air as silently, but I don't mess with what works. I replaced the noisy, crappy DVR fan on the above-mentioned security system with a silent Noctua (both are 1" fans) and it stopped over-heating and went nearly silent.

I've been using this little box for the last couple of weeks as a general-purpose workstation, running Kubuntu. I've got to say, I'm pretty impressed with what I've seen. There is a fan on top. The side with all the ports is about six inches long. The fan only turns on here and there and even then doesn't go all that fast. That's because the heatsink is very efficient in cooling the chips (CPU, etc.) underneath it.

I've got some pics of this little computer.
You will note the four additional network ports. This is the box that I'm going to make the new experimental firewall out of, using OpenBSD. All six network ports are 2.5Gbps, by the way, and several people, including Hardkernel themselves, have shown demos with five of the six ports running simultaneously at full tilt. They were getting real-world throughputs of about 2.3 Gbps on each port. If you run all six ports simultaneously, it comes down to about 1.9Gbps each port. That's really good throughput for a box of this type.

Currently, it's running Kubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish". The astute might note the Liberal Gun Club Web page on the large monitor in the background. :-)