CWWK Mini PC Intel N Series 4 Core N100 Fanless Mini Host Soft Route (Barebone)

Purchased the barebone kit with my own memory and NVMe drive (Silicon Power 256GB NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen3x4 2280 SSD and Crucial RAM 8GB DDR5 4800MHz CL40 Laptop Memory). The mini pc was packaged well and plastic wrapped. I have installed opnsense and am using it as a firewall/router. The memory and ssd were very easy to install, just unscrew the bottom cover. Installation of opnsense went smoothly. It detected the USB boot drive right away, I didn't even have to go into the bios. Everything has been running smoothly. It feels a little warm, but not hot. I would definitely recommend it.

Bought the bare bones version to run a home installation of pfsense. The box works well with pfsense and several of the pfsense cpu intensive add on packages. Plenty of cpu and it runs cool. Good mechanical design, easy to take apart and has a substantial heatsink case design. Did have a problem with Corsair memory getting sporadic errors. Ordered Crucial memory replacement and the errors disappeared. Did not seriously troubleshoot the memory errors but theory is that it was a timing issue and not a real memory problem. It has been my experience that Crucial is more conservative than Corsair is with timing parameters.

I purchased this for Opnsense/pfsense and was initially surprised by how hot it was getting. I was experiencing spikes in temperature reaching over 80C. The spikes are indicative of a lack of thermal inertia (maybe lack of contact with the heatsink?). For a 15W device, this was very surprising even passively cooled so I took upon myself to take that little thing apart and redo the Thermal interface. I couldn't tell what the problem was just by looking at it but after repasting it with a very viscous (Arctic MX5) thermal compound and looking at the design, it became obvious that there is a gap between the CPU and the copper shim which was meant to be filled with thermal paste. The mounting screws of the motherboard are too far away from the CPU to apply any compression between the CPU and the cooling element. Unfortunately the thermal paste from factory was abundant but also of very low viscosity which means that it could just reflow itself out of place. After using the the viscous compound, the temperature spikes disappeared and the device now never exceed 45C in the same location/thermal environment. I think using the CPU heatsink mounting holes to attach the motherboard to the frame/heatsink and add more compression would have significantly improved the tolerance. Gravity also plays a role as the PCB may bow down around the CPU and increase the CPU/heatsink gap.... This could explain some of the negative reviews here with people observing early failures and poor thermals.

This thing sips electricity, especially if you tune the bios settings and tweak your OS to utilize power saving features of the hardware. Despite being quite efficient this thing has good performance and supports a large amount of RAM / Storage. The built in Ethernet interfaces are a bit quirky and require a relatively new Linux kernel to support them properly. I had to use the unstable version of Debian in order to get the appropriate Ethernet drivers because they are not yet part of the stable kernel. Using an unstable OS isn't ideal but I haven't experienced any crashes or other issues and the thing has been rock solid for over a month now acting as my main firewall / gateway my home and home office networks. The 2.5gbit Ethernet is a nice upgrade over my previous router, especially since my previous router could barely sustain ~500mbit throughput with any sort of firewall and routing rules enabled. This router easily sustains 2+gbit on my internal network and maxes out my 1gbit cable internet connection (sustaining over 960mbit throughput on a speed test) while the cpu utilization stays in the 3% to 5% range and most of the time is spent in low-power sleep states. I have not done extensive testing of the current draw, however, I haven't seen it use more than 15 watts even running a bunch of stuff like extensive firewall configuration in nftables, a wireguard vpn and multiple services and containers such as home assistant, a video streaming server for my security cameras, ubiquiti unifi controller, mariadb, a git server, samba file server and more.

I bought this and also one of those little mini cubes with 4x 2.5g Intel nics as well at the same time, this one had the N100 (only avail at the time) and the mini cube I got with the N305 cpu. The BIOS in both are a "hot mess" so to speak but I was easily able to update the cube while this one was outdated and couldn't really find a "new" version. My plan was to run Proxmox on both with either pfSense or OPNsense (i'm running OPN now)... and the cube has 16gb of ram built on while I got ""Crucial RAM 16GB DDR5 4800MHz'' for this unit. It runs fine, don't get me wrong but there's a bug or glitch in the BIOS that throttles the CPU speed and you have to DIG.. and DIG, and reboot and test to get the CPU/ cores to boost to regular speed. Also, in Proxmox and other OS's there's ALOT of memory and IO latency while on the N305 its fast 0% issues. I tried it for weeks and tested under different enviroments plus the problem is, there's only 3 TRUE hardware NICs, while the 4th is USB tied... So in my opinion, go for something else or one of the many little mini cubes out there (they seem to draw less power too).. Also, i did do the removal/ heat sink compound on this one and it does make it run cooler, the junk they use is like a putty and useless so if you get one and plan to keep it, def take it apart and put something else on there. One thing I do like about it is the size and how you can stuff it full of drives and expansion, etc.. something you can't do on a mini cube.