[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Hardware Advice Wanted: Router

On 15.11.2023 18:47, Charles Curley wrote:
On Wed, 15 Nov 2023 12:31:52 +0500
"Alexander V. Makartsev" <avbetev@gmail.com> wrote:


On 15.11.2023 07:56, Stefan Monnier wrote:
 [...]  
 [...]  
I wrote that email as a word of caution, because Roberto had
mentioned he is looking for the device with the same conditions as
OP, which is "no fans".
And this model will be very noisy at all times.

How do you figure that it will be noisy at all times? I saw noting in
the specifications or reviews that indicated that.
Are you talking about Neosmay based on i7-1260P CPU?
Like I said previously there are no reviews that would show temperatures under load and no disassembly videos that will show the thermal solution.
IMO the reason for that is simple, to keep it quiet about inconvenient technicalities and to sell sub-optimal product.
Specifications for this CPU shows a requirement of a good thermal solution, which should be adequately large\noisy for this form factor.

 [...]  
And this is why there is no reason to have high power CPU inside.
I expect the CPU temperature to be at 98 degrees Celsius at all times 
and constant throttling under minimal load.

Yikes! None of my machines gets anywhere near that. The fan cooled CPUs
on my desktop are in the 26-32° range right now (early morning, no
load). The machine I am typing this on, a laptop, is reporting core
temps of 44° and 50° right now. All consider high to be ~~86°, with
critical near 98°. (Data courtesy of the sensors program.)
None of my personal machines either. It all depends on specifications for each individual piece of hardware.
My desktop has Skylake CPU rated at 65W Base TDP and cooled by tower-style heatsink with 4 heatpipes rated at 130W TDP.
Idle, small load temps are 28-32°C, busy workloads: 4 cores compiling, 7-zip compression, video rendering, maxes out at 70°C in Summer.
There is also a netbook, I use it on rare occasion, it has 6.5W Atom CPU and Nvidia ION discrete VGA.
It has heatsinks for both Intel SoC and Nvidia chipset with heatpipes and a cooling fan, and it is incapable of overheating even under high load, because of low power CPU.
This netbook is painfully slow, it has quite noisy small fan, but temperatures are maxed out at 50°C.
The thing is desktops and laptops could have much better thermal solution simply because there is space inside for it.

Now let's look at thermal solutions of Intel NUCs [1] [2] for an example.
They look similar to what you could see inside a laptop, except in both cases there is only a small heatsink and two heatpipes.
VRM zone is cooled by air which is not great.
First photo depicts thermal solution for i5-10210U processor [3] which is rated at 15W TDP, or 10-25W base frequency.
Second photo depicts thermal solution for i7-1165G7 processor [4] which is rated at 12-28W base frequency.
Both thermal solutions show sub-par performance under load, because there are multiple complains about overheating NUCs on the Internet.
Most of the solutions for the complaints either a cleanup from dust or set a power limit via BIOS, or both.
There is a fan-less case [5] for NUCs is available, which looks reasonable, basically a brick of aluminum, but even then they are rated 25W TDP maximum and
it is required from user to set BIOS settings to power limit CPU to 25W.

And that's about widely distributed and supported NUCs from Intel.
Now lets take a look at Newsmay Neosmay products. Odd naming.
We can't find any photos of disassembled products on Newsmay official website [6].
There is one good review of S2-B560TPM mini PC [7] with photos of it disassembled.
And there it is, same two heatpipes and a heatsink with a fan.
As shown in the review, even with slightly larger case size, they couldn't manage to design adequate cooling solution for i5-11400T desktop CPU [8] which is rated 35W TDP,
although there are additional heatsinks covering VRM zone, which is a plus.
It looks like a good thermal solution for a 10-15W TDP CPU and that is it.

So once again, what is the point to have high power CPU inside (and pay more for it also),
if because of inadequate thermal solutions you have to power limit it to base frequency, or suffer from constant throttling under load, noise and
other consequences of overheating, such as reduced lifetime of the device?

What good will it be if with high probability the device will burn
out in 3 months?

Indeed. I've gotten 16 years out of my FIT-PCs so far and would like to
get a respectable portion of that out of their replacement.
16 years is a good amount of value. :)
Is it Pentium 4 on ITX motherboard?
Nowadays they don't make them like before, and it is so hard to buy something decent.
Everything is power hungry, working at insane frequency speeds; tiny ICs are more fragile and susceptible to overheating;
BGA SoCs with hundreds of leads on thin PCBs prone to deformation; lead-free solder and all that other planned obsolescence dance..


[1] https://nucblog.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/nuc10i5fnk_heatsink-1024x1024.jpg
[2] https://nucblog.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/nuc11pahi7_heatsink-1024x1024.jpg
[3] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/195436/intel-core-i5-10210u-processor-6m-cache-up-to-4-20-ghz.html
[4] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/208662/intel-core-i71165g7-processor-12m-cache-up-to-4-70-ghz.html
[5] https://www.akasa.co.uk/search.php?seed=A-NUC52-M1B
[6] https://www.newsmaytech.com/product/
[7] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-of-Newsmay-Neosmay-S2-B560TPM-mini-PC-small-office-PC-with-efficient-Intel-Core-i5-11400T.638119.0.html
[8] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/212273/intel-core-i511400t-processor-12m-cache-up-to-3-70-ghz/specifications.html
--
With kindest regards, Alexander.

⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Debian - The universal operating system
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ https://www.debian.org
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀
Reply to: