GMKTek Mini PC with Intel N97

The one I've got is a "Soyo", its probably another one of the cheap ones. But I remember buying soyo mobo's many years ago, maybe even 486, can't remember. Anyway it's just a trade name, it may not even be made by the same company. It's been a good little PC though, very stable. Runs freebsd ok.
 
The one I've got is a "Soyo", its probably another one of the cheap ones. But I remember buying soyo mobo's many years ago, maybe even 486, can't remember. Anyway it's just a trade name, it may not even be the same company. It's been a good little PC though, very stable.
Oh i remember Soyo from back in the day. Very solid motherboards during 486 and Pentium era. And i saw some mini pcs from Soyo on ali express and i think that is the same brand, but if i recall corectly, Soyo went through some serious restructuring and its basically completely different company today. Only the branding has remained.
 
I will go and check if I made some notes... it was a couple of years ago. I found the name and then the company website, and its a big mobo oem. It looks like the industry is structured as some companies make the motherboards, other companies assemble them into cases to make the finished machine.
 
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It's a Weibu ADL-N mobo. So I think it comes from this company. http://www.weibu.com/ They make a lot of stuff, founded in 2001. The website says 5 manufacturing sites, so they are a decent size. Of course it's not big like foxconn.
ECS have a page on that motherboard here https://www.ecs.com.tw/en/Product/Motherboard/ADLN-I/specification at least, I think that's the same one.

I think the design is quite conservative, they have prioritised stability over performance, but that's what I wanted. The bios seems quite well developed, there are a lot of tuning options in the bios on this one.
The only thing I have done to improve it is change the heatsink paste, when I opened it up I found they had put far too much on in the factory, so I replaced it with a thin layer of arctic mx, and temperatures
dropped about 7 or 8 degC. It's been very nice and stable, everything works. I think it did hang a couple of times when I first bought it which is what made me change the h/s paste, since then it's been fine.

The PC itself is a soyo M2 Plus, but it looks like that one isn't sold any more, I just ran a search on aliexpress but no hits. The current model is called the soyo Y5.
 
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It's a WeiBu ADL-N. So I think it comes from this company. http://www.weibu.com/ They make a lot of stuff, founded in 2001. The website says 5 manufacturing sites, so they are a decent size. Of course it's not big like foxconn.
ECS have a page on that motherboard here https://www.ecs.com.tw/en/Product/Motherboard/ADLN-I/specification

I think the design is quite conservative, they have prioritised stability over performance, but that's what I wanted. The bios seems quite well developed, there are a lot of tuning options in the bios on this one.
The only thing I have done to improve it is change the heatsink paste, when I opened it up I found they had put far too much on in the factory, so I replaced it with a thin layer of arctic mx, and temperatures
dropped about 7 or 8 degC. It's been very nice and stable, everything works.

The PC itself is a soyo M2 Plus, but it looks like that one isn't sold any more, I just ran a search on aliexpress but no hits. The current model appears to be an i3 machine.
Yup. This WeiBu aint your typical Chinese crapware. I just checked their minipc line and i swear i saw BeeLink PCs that look exactly the same. These guys might be OEM for them along with AZW Technology. And just like Yanling, they are not on aliexpress. Thanks for this info.
 
If you browse through the product range on their website they make a lot of kit... full size motherboards, industrial pc's, laptops, complete systems, etc, so they are obviously quite a big OEM. In business for 20 years, 2 R&D sites and 5 manufacturing sites. So it's not a fly-by-night operation. I've been pleased with this particular mini-pc anyway. What I don't know is whether other 'soyo' mini-pc's like the current model would have weibu motherboards in them, although its probably quite likely.
 
Hmm, I didn't spot that before, the ECS page says my mobo has 100% solid capacitor design. According to this page solid caps have a longer service life than standard electrolytics, the electrolyte doesn't evaporate.
So maybe I got lucky and got a good quality mobo.
 
No. Thats Topton. They are proven to be very unreliable cheap garbage. As i said in previous post, Yanling is Protectli without Protectli logo. You cant find Yanling on aliexpress. They dont exist over there. You can buy only from their web site, or from Protectli, iWillPC, MiniSys or Thomas Krenn. All of these brands are manufactured by Yanling.
Using a 12C/14T processor for a 8 port firewall mini PC is a bit excessive, IMO.

I have 2 Intel GMKTec's. They're indeed nice. But I needed a better excuse for spending on yet another mini PC so I chose AMD lol.
 
I've just been reading this review of the soyo Y5. I wouldnt recommend it, they say it has a Haswell-grade low-performance CPU from 2013 that's not as powerful as the N100. It's very cheap, but I don't think I'd bother.

"In practice, with Windows 11 Pro, the system boots in about 25-35 seconds from the M.2 SSD. The experience with office tasks (Word, Excel, browsing with 5-8 tabs) is acceptable but not fast. With more than 10 tabs open or several applications running simultaneously, the system starts to struggle."

I guess it could be useful if you wanted a little portable unit to carry around and were just going to do some office-type work on it, or reading emails or a bit of light web browsing. But it's an old cpu design.
 
If you browse through the product range on their website they make a lot of kit... full size motherboards, industrial pc's, laptops, complete systems, etc, so they are obviously quite a big OEM. In business for 20 years, 2 R&D sites and 5 manufacturing sites.
I was just checking their product line and its quite impressive. This is why i was asking you to tell me the brand name. Its because of OEM`s like this, you can get ultra quality unit for a reasonable price. Unfortunately, not many people know about this and they just go on aliexpress and search for minipc and buy whatever comes up first. Its usually Topton or Firebat. They are the cheapest and the worst. People think that these units are high quality because they have metal case, but they do not realize that there are different levels of metal quality. This is why when you buy a Topton or XCY you have to put additional cooling to stop it from overheating because metal they use has poor thermal properties. And even if you manage to cool it down, your motherboard will just randomly die. This is not a problem for big cats because you are covered with Waranty. Good luck doing RMA with XCY.
So it's not a fly-by-night operation. I've been pleased with this particular mini-pc anyway. What I don't know is whether other 'soyo' mini-pc's like the current model would have weibu motherboards in them, although its probably quite likely.
Only if someone has those systems and they can open it for you. Otherwise i would not gamble.
Hmm, I didn't spot that before, the ECS page says its 100% solid capacitor design. According to this page solid caps have a longer service life than standard electrolytics, the electrolyte doesn't evaporate.
So maybe I got lucky and got a good quality mobo. :-)
Unfortunately solid caps are not always indicator of good quality. Just like low quality metal, there are low quality caps. Or pretty much any other component.
Using a 12C/14T processor for a 8 port firewall mini PC is a bit excessive, IMO.
If you have multiple VPN tunnels, epecially if they are not multithreaded like OpenVPN, you would be surprised how much CPU power is actually needed to avoid significant speed loss. Check this chart provided by Protectli. If you have 1Gbps internet speed, a single OpenVPN tunnel without DCO can peg your CPU at 100% and reduce your speed from 1Gbps to just 170Mbps. If you add traffic shaping and VLANS into that equation, your connection becomes unusable. There is a good reason why these units exist and cost so much.
I have 2 Intel GMKTec's. They're indeed nice. But I needed a better excuse for spending on yet another mini PC so I chose AMD lol.
These devices are not for average users. You buy them and you host whole bunch of services on it. I run ProxMox on mine and this single unit hosts.

Opnsense
Home assistant
Nextcloud
Frigate
Searxng
Graylog
Immich
Freshrss
Kasm

No fans. No moving pars. No nose. No heat. Zero maintenance.
 
If you have multiple VPN tunnels, epecially if they are not multithreaded like OpenVPN, you would be surprised how much CPU power is actually needed to avoid significant speed loss. Check this chart provided by Protectli. If you have 1Gbps internet speed, a single OpenVPN tunnel without DCO can peg your CPU at 100% and reduce your speed from 1Gbps to just 170Mbps. If you add traffic shaping and VLANS into that equation, your connection becomes unusable. There is a good reason why these units exist and cost so much.
The chips having AES extensions is what makes all the difference with OpenVPN + DCO.
 
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