Page 4 – The DIY Life

N97 vs N100 vs Raspberry Pi 5: Which Is Right For You?

Michael Klements

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January 8, 2025

N97 vs N100 vs Raspberry Pi 5: Which Is Right For You?

I recently did some testing to compare the performance and features of an N100 mini PC as a replacement for a Raspberry Pi 5. In response to that test, quite a few people asked how an N97 PC compares to a Pi 5 or N100 PC. So Today I’ve got a NucBox G5, which is a tiny N97-based mini PC from GMKtec to try out and add to the comparison.

Here’s my video of the test and results, read on for the write-up;

Purchase Links For The Computers and Parts Used For Testing

GMKtec NucBox G5 – Buy Here
Beelink Mini S12 Pro N100 Mini PC – Buy Here
Raspberry Pi 5 – Buy Here
Pi 5 Active Cooler – Buy Here
Pi 5 Power Supply – Buy Here
Pimoroni NVMe Base – Buy Here
Lexar NVMe SSD – Buy Here

Equipment Used

Video Capture Box – Buy Here
Mains Power Meter – Buy Here

Hardware and Features of Each Computer

Like the N100 PC, the N97-based PC is a mini PC built around Intel’s Alder Lake N family of processors, and in this case the N97 CPU. Despite the naming conversion which may suggest that the N100 CPU is the more powerful of the two, the N97 is actually the more powerful and more expensive CPU.

The N97 CPU package is a little over double the price and has double the thermal design power or TDP. It has the same number of cores as the N100 CPU but they can run up to 3.6GHz instead of the 3.4GHz that the N100’s cores can do.

Despite the N97 CPU package being listed as more expensive than the N100 CPU, there are quite a few N97-based mini PCs available for a very similar price.

The Beelink Mini S12 Pro N100 PC that I used previously cost me $159 and there are a number of N97 options available in the $150-$160 range. The NucBox G5 cost me $158 and is currently listed for $150 on their website.

So the three options are very similarly priced once we’ve added some basic accessories to the Pi 5 to match the PC’s inclusions;

8GB Raspberry Pi 5 – $80
Official Active Cooler – $5
Official Power Supply – $12
Pimoroni NVMe Base – $15
NVMe SSD – $48

The fully kitted-out Pi 5 (without a case) comes to a total of $160.

In terms of specifications, the N97 PC has 4 CPU cores which run 200MHz faster than the N100 and has integrated UHD graphics which runs 450MHz faster.

The N97 PC has 12GB of DDR5 RAM running at 4800MT/s and a 500GB SSD, so its memory is right in the middle of the Pi 5 and N100 PC and its storage capacity is the same. Besides the SSD and WiFi adaptor, nothing else is upgradeable in the N97 mini pc.

The N97 PC has similar connectivity options to the Pi 5 and N100 PC. It has Gigabit Ethernet, two HDMI ports, three USB 3.2 ports, a MicroSD card slot and an audio jack.

Storage is likely going to be quite a bit slower on the N97 PC as it has an M.2 SATA drive, not an NVMe drive. I’m not really sure why they have done this on this PC as the N97 CPU has the same number of PCIe lanes as the N100, but we’ll see what effect this has on performance during testing.

The N97 PC is also an Intel X86-based system and for testing, we’re going to use the same version of Ubuntu that I used to test the N100 PC and Pi 5, Ubuntu Desktop 24.04.

Testing The N97, N100 and Pi 5 Computers

To add to the N100 and Raspberry Pi 5 results, to test performance we’re going to do the following tests;

Video Playback at 1080P in a Browser
A Sysbench CPU Benchmark
An NVMe Storage Speed Benchmark
GLMark2 GPU Benchmark
Power Consumption Test

Video Playback at 1080P

To test video playback, we’re going to be playing back a YouTube video in the browser – both in a window and fullscreen. Let’s start with video playback at 1080P.

The N97 PC has no problem playing back 1080P video, playback was smooth right from the start with very few dropped frames and playback remained unaffected running in the window or fullscreen.

So, like the N100 PC, the N97 PC is great for 1080P video playback.

Also like the N100 PC, but even a little better, it handles 4K playback really well as well. We get a couple of dropped frames in the beginning but nothing ongoing.

The integrated GPUs in the N97 and N100 PCs far outpaced the Rapsberry Pi 5’s, which struggled a little with even 1080P playback.

Sysbench CPU Benchmark

Next let’s run a Sysbench CPU benchmark. I ran three consecutive tests and then averaged the scores.

I ran the following test three times;

sysbench cpu --threads=4 --cpu-max-prime=20000 --validate run

The N97 Pc managed an average score of 44,045.

The scores for each of the three tests were 44,021, 44,072 & 44,042.

So the N97 PC scored essentially the same as the N100 PC which scored an average of 44,058. This is a little surprising given the higher available clock speed on the N97 CPU. Both are about 9% faster than the Pi 5 which scored an average of 40,359.

GMKtec may have limited the maximum performance of the CPU a little because of the compact design and very small cooling system.

Storage Drive Speed Benchmark

To test the storage speed, I used James Chamber’s Pi Benchmarks script. This script favours random read/write performance, so is a good representation of how an operating system would be making use of the drive.

To run the test, enter the following command in the terminal;

sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/PiBenchmarks/master/Storage.sh | sudo bash

Over three tests, the N97 PC managed an average score of 30,819 with average sequential read speeds of 487MB/s and average sequential write speeds of 357MB/s.

So as expected, the N97 PC’s storage speed is substantially slower than the N100 PC, which scored an average of 44,803 – almost 50% faster. The N97 PC is even slower than the Pi 5, which scored an average of 32,089. The Pi 5 also only uses a single PCIe lane but uses an NVMe drive instead of a SATA drive.

GLMark2 GPU Benchmark

The N97 has the most powerful GPU by a good margin, so I expect it to do quite a lot better than the N100’s results in our GLMark2 GPU benchmark.

This benchmark needs to be downloaded and built from source code, and is then run by entering the below command in the terminal;

glmark2

The N97 PC managed a score of 2,863, beating the N100 PC’s score of 2,070 by over 38% and it is over 9 times faster than the Pi 5’s score of 307.

So there is a massive difference in GPU performance between the N97 PC and a Pi 5, and even quite a substantial difference between the N97 and N100 PC.

Power Consumption Test

Lastly, let’s look at power consumption, like with the N100 PC, I expect that the N97 PC to do quite poorly in comparison to the Pi 5.

At idle the N97 PC uses around 6W and this goes up to 24W under load.

So power under load and at idle is a little lower than the N100 PC but expectedly higher than the Pi;

N100 PC – 8W Idle and 27W Under Load
Pi 5 – 4W Idle and 9W Under Load

Like with the CPU test results, this further suggests that they’ve done some performance limiting on the CPU to keep power and thermals down as the N97 CPU should use a lot more power than the N100 CPU.

Power consumption is quite good for a PC but it’s still over 2.5 times the consumption of the Pi under load.

As I said in my original comparison video, this probably makes little difference on mains, but for battery-powered projects that are required to run for many hours or even a few days, this difference can lead to substantial savings in power supply hardware and batteries. There is a significant benefit in using a processor that has been designed for mobile or low-power applications.

Results Discussion and Thoughts on the Three Computers

So the N97 PC beats the N100 PC in all of our tests except for storage speed and the Pi is still the best at power consumption.

There are other things that the Pi 5 does much better than either of these PC options. The GPIO pins on the Pi are significantly easier to use than any USB or microcontroller-based option that you can add to a PC like an Arduino Pro Mini or Nano, or even one of these purpose-built Adafruit FT232H USB to GPIO breakout boards. There are also loads of tutorials and software packages for the Pi 5 to help you use them.

So if you plan on using the computer for electronics or robotics projects with a reliance on the GPIO pins then the Pi 5 is still the best option of the three, but for experimenting with home server projects, running anything reliant on a GPU, or getting started with Docker or Kubernetes then an N97 or N100 mini PC is a great alternative.

If you can find them for a similar price then I’d probably go with an N97 PC over the N100 for any application where the faster storage drive speed isn’t a significant advantage.

I’m still of the opinion that Raspberry Pi have missed the mark a little with the pricing of the Pi 5. If they do launch a 1GB version of the Pi 5 for around $40 then this would be a great starter board for tinkering with electronics projects, but until they do, you’re probably better off going for a base version of the Pi 4. This still has plenty of CPU power to run projects locally and you’ll have access to a similar set of IO to the Pi 5 but without the additional cost.

Let me know which of these three computers you prefer and what your use case is in the comments section below.

Raspberry Pi 5 Case With An Integrated Water-Cooling Loop

Michael Klements

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December 11, 2024

1

Raspberry Pi 5 Case With An Integrated Water-Cooling Loop

A while back, I built a water-cooled Raspberry Pi 4 computer using a Pi CM4 module and the official IO board. This computer and its water-cooling loop worked well but was quite bulky for a Raspberry Pi build, so I recently wondered how I could make it more compact.

Ultimate Raspberry Pi Computer Build – Water Cooled CM4 with NVMe SSD

One of the challenges with this type of build is that standard water cooling parts for computers are just way too big. Even the most compact pumps, reservoirs and cooling blocks are much larger than a Raspberry Pi. You can comfortably cool a whole cluster of Pis with a single water cooling kit for a full-size PC.

Water Cooled Raspberry Pi Cluster Being Tested

So we’ll need to use more unconventional hardware and in some cases, make our own parts.

Here’s my video of the build, read on for the write-up:

Parts Used To Build My Pi 5 Case With Integrated Water-Cooling

Raspberry Pi 5 – Buy Here
MicroSD Card – Buy Here
Raspberry Pi 5 Power Supply – Buy Here
Ice Pump Cooling Block – Buy Here
5V Submersible Pump – Buy Here
60mm Radiator – Buy Here
60mm 5V Fan – Buy Here
M2.5 x 6mm Button Head Screws – Buy Here
M2.5 Brass Inserts – Buy Here
2mm Clear Acrylic – Buy Here

Equipment Used

USB-C Pencil Screwdriver – Buy Here
TS100 Soldering Iron – Buy Here
Elegoo Mars Ultra 5 SLA Printer – Buy Here
Bambulab X1c FDM Printer – Buy Here
Omtech Polar Laser Cutter – Buy Here

Designing The Water-Cooling Case

I tried this water cooling kit for a Pi 5 earlier in the year and this kit has a nice waterblock design but the radiator and fan are overkill.

The acrylic top of this block got me thinking that maybe I can design a new top for the copper base that incorporates some of the tubing and perhaps even a reservoir which I can 3D print as an all-in-one design to make the whole water cooling loop a lot more compact.

This way I only need to add a fan, radiator and pump to the case and the 3D print will take care of connecting them all together and will store the additional cooling liquid.

So I opened up Fusion360 and started modelling the components.

The design of this case was quite a long process – probably one of the most complicated ones that I’ve done. In the end, I settled on a design that has the Pi mounted vertically towards the back of the case, with cutouts for the ports out the back.

The Pi screws onto the cooling block through the side panel and on the opposite side is the reservoir with an integrated pump. On the front, we’ve got the radiator and fan. The cooling lines are all integrated into the print as far as possible with short flexible runs to the radiator.

I then went and added some design features to the case like a grill to cover the radiator, a top cover to install the pump through, some feet and a Pi logo on the side of the reservoir which I’m hoping will be a bit more visible with a contrasting coloured coolant.

Download The 3D Print Files

3D Printing The Pi 5 Case

My first thought was to try to print the case out as a large single resin print so that the water cooling loop really is a part of the case. This turned out to be a bit of a mess. I couldn’t get good results with a transparent resin and such large overhanging areas. The print came out distorted and generally looked terrible.

I then tried printing the whole case on an FDM printer. This surprisingly holds water better than I expected it to, but you can’t actually see the coolant and under pressure tiny leaks form droplets along the seams and leak into the infill.

So, I abandoned the single large print idea and instead separated the tank, block and cooling lines from the case so that I could print each part on the printer best suited for that particular part.

I printed the tank and block with its cover out first. I printed this in a smokey black transparent resin. This came out looking better than clear – mainly because the clear kept turning a weird shade of yellow when cured. The smokey black still provides some visibility into the tank and water cooling lines. After washing off the uncured resin, I put brass inserts into the print to mount components onto and then cured it under UV light.

Printing Reservoir In Smokey Black Resin

I’m really happy with how this print turned out on its own.

Next, we need the case and covers.

I printed the main body of the case in a dark blue sparkle PLA with white accents on the fan grill and top cover, and white feet. These will hopefully work well with the white coolant I plan to use in the reservoir.

These parts also came out well – well at least much better than the sad resin print looked.

To finish these parts off, I just need to add some M2.5 threaded brass inserts to the main body of the case, which I’ll do with a soldering iron.

Lastly, we need the side panels. Like with my other case designs, I went with clear acrylic for the side panels so that the internals are all visible. These are cut laser cut from a sheet of 2mm clear acrylic.

Assembling The Water-Cooling Case

I’ll start by assembling the cooling loop. First, let’s add the copper heatsink to the cooling block. My design uses the same o-ring as the original, so we can just swap it over. I hope I’ve got the dimensions right on the o-ring so that this doesn’t become a leak point!

For the pump, I’m using a 5V submersible USB pump. I’ve cut the connector off and I’ve crimped DuPont connectors onto the wires to plug directly into the Pi’s GPIO pins for power.

The pump also needs a short section of flexible tubing to connect it to the outlet through the top of the reservoir. I’ve put a zip tie on the pump outlet because it felt a little loose.

We can then connect the radiator to the loop.

This also needs some flexible tubing but first I’m going to mount the fan onto it. This is a 60mm radiator and I’ve got a 60mm 5V fan to mount onto it.

Similar to the pump, I’ve crimped connectors onto the wires to plug it into the Pi’s GPIO pins.

With the cooling loop mostly assembled, I’m going to give it a try before closing the reservoir and installing it into the case so that I can fix any issues with leaks or power while I still have easy access to it.

With some water added to the loop and power being provided by a 5V supply, it doesn’t look like we have any major problems. I left this to run for half an hour just to be sure and I had to repair two tiny holes in the resin print.

Testing The Water Cooling Loop For Leaks

We can then close the reservoir up. I’m using a couple of drops of hot glue for this so that it holds it in place enough that it doesn’t fall apart but not too much so that I can’t get it apart again if I need to access the pump.

Water Cooling Loop Ready For Installation

The whole assembly can then be put into the case. One screw holds the reservoir in place for now but this will be supported by a second when the side panel is installed.

Securing Water Cooling Loop To Main Case Body

Next, let’s mount the Pi to the assembly. I’ve plugged the fan into the Pi’s 3.3V and ground pins and the pump into the 5V and ground pins. I’ve left the cooling pads on the copper block in place and the Pi is secured to the cooling loop with four M2.5 screws through the bottom.

Installaing Raspberry Pi 5 Through Back Cover

We can then finish the case off by installing the side panels and cover plates.

I realised when installing the side panel on the Pi side that I was supposed to add some ventilation holes to this panel so the air from the radiator could escape after running over the Pi. So I added these in and cut a new side panel out.

I also made up some decals to stick on the opposite side.

And that’s the case complete. Let’s fill the reservoir with coolant, boot it up and do some thermal tests on it.

Testing The Water-Cooling Case’s Thermals

I used a utility called CPU Burn to put a full load onto all four CPU cores and logged the temperature over a half hour.

CPU Burn Running To Load Raspberry Pi 5 Cores

It runs much the same as the Pi does on my water-cooling stand. At idle, temperatures are around 28°C, after a minute and a half under full load, the temperature levels off at about 42°C and remained steady for the remainder of the test.

If I overlay the results from my water cooling stand, you can see that the results are very similar. The temperature just spikes a bit fast on the cooling stand, I guess because the block has a bit less thermal mass.

As expected, the water cooling system performs significantly better than the official Pi 5 Active Cooler, with a 25°C difference in steady-state temperature.

At the end of the test, with the CPU unloaded, the temperature drops back down to 28°C in about a minute and a half.

Temperature Drops Down Quickly Once Test Is Stopped

Final Thoughts On My Water Cooled Pi 5 Case

Overall I’m really happy with how this build came out. It took far longer than I expected it to, but I think it was worth it.

As usual, there is some room for improvement. My next iteration is going to include a power button for the Pi and allow some space underneath the Pi for an NVMe drive. I’d also like to secure the cooling loop to the case a bit better and improve upon the cable management.

Raspberry Pi 5 Compact Water Cooling Case

Let me know what you think of my water-cooled Pi 5 project in the comments section below or if there’s anything you think I should add to it.

Add an OLED Stats Display to Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm

Michael Klements

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November 27, 2024

25

Add an OLED Stats Display to Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm

Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm has been out for a little over a year now. It comes with a few visual changes like a Wayland native taskbar with plugins like a CPU and GPU monitor, and a new default background, but far more changes have been made under the hood. One of these changes is the requirement to use a virtual environment to install third-party packages with pip rather than installing them system-wide. This places packages in a managed space instead of at system level, which lowers the risk of causing conflicts or breaking other software packages or the operating system.

Unfortunately, this change along with a few tweaks to the way the GPIO pins are used has made my previous tutorial for installing an OLED stats display on a Pi 4 outdated. If you try to follow this tutorial you’ll end up with a number of errors around virtual environments and broken libraries.

So today I’m going to run through how to connect and program and OLED stats display on a Raspberry Pi 5 running PI OS Bookworm.

Here’s my video tutorial, read on for the written tutorial;

What You Need For This Project

Raspberry Pi 5 – Buy Here
Raspberry Pi 5 Power Supply – Buy Here
32GB MicroSD Card – Buy Here
I2C OLED Display (128×64) – Buy Here
4-Wire Female to Female Jumper Cable – Buy Here
Ice Tower Cooler – Buy Here

Note: The above parts are affiliate links. By purchasing products through the above links, you’ll be supporting this channel, with no additional cost to you.

Connect the OLED Display to Your Raspberry Pi

To start out, let’s get the OLED display connected to our Raspberry Pi.

To do this, you’ll need a 4-wire female-to-female jumper cable. The colours don’t matter, they just help you to keep track of which wire goes to which terminal.

The OLED display’s terminals are labelled on the front, so make sure that you take note of them or label the wires before installing it in a case or you won’t be able to see them.

The pin arrangement on these displays is most commonly GND, VCC, SCL and SDA.

You can’t just copy this arrangement though as there are versions of this display that have the GND and VCC pins switched around.

If you connect power to the display incorrectly, even just a single time, you’ll likely damage it and it will no longer work, even if you correct the wiring afterwards – ask me how I know this.

Plug your jumper cable into these four pins and then take note of which colours you’ve got connected to which pins.

Next, we can plug the other ends into our Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins. Make sure that your Pi is off and power is disconnected before doing this, you don’t want to short a connection or plug a lead into an incorrect pin and not have a chance to check the connections before powering it up.

GPIO-Pinout-Diagram — Source – https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberry-pi.html

There are a few options for the power pins. I usually plug the GND jumper into pin 9 and the VCC jumper into pin 1. You can use any of the pins labelled ground for the ground jumper and these displays will run on 3.3V or 5V so you can use any of these labelled pins for the VCC jumper.

GND to Pin 9 (Ground)
VCC (3.3V) to Pin 1 (3.3V)
SCL to Pin 5 (GPIO 3)
SDA to Pin 3 (GPIO 2)

Next, we need to connect the SCL and SDA jumpers, which just get plugged into the corresponding GPIO pins. Plug SCL into pin 5 and SDA into pin 3. Don’t get mixed up with the GPIO numbers and Pin numbers, I’m working off the physical pin numbers.

Display-Connected-To-GPIO-Pins-Both-Sides

Quickly recheck your connections and we can then start programming the display.

Programming The OLED Stats Display

I’m going to be working on a fresh 64-bit install of Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm, which you can flash to your microSD card or SSD using Raspberry Pi Imager.

Plug the microSD card into your Pi’s card reader and then plug in your power adaptor to boot it up.

If this is your first boot, you’ll need to go through a few setup steps and you’ll then land on the desktop.

It’s possible to do this installation on a headless Pi too as we’ll only be working in the terminal.

Updating The Pi & Installing Libraries

Open up a new terminal window or SSH into your headless Pi and we’ll start by making sure that the Pi is up to date by entering the following commands. When the updates are finished installing, reboot the pi.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y upgrade
sudo reboot

Once rebooted, open up the terminal again and then enter these commands to install two libraries.

sudo apt-get install python3-pip
sudo apt install --upgrade python3-setuptools

Now we need to create a virtual environment to continue the setup in. We’ll call this stats_env.

sudo apt install python3-venv
python3 -m venv stats_env --system-site-packages
source stats_env/bin/activate

Once activated, you should see stats_env at the start of your current terminal line.

Next, let’s install the Adafruit Blinka library. Once complete, confirm yes at the end to reboot your pi.

cd ~
pip3 install --upgrade adafruit-python-shell
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/adafruit/Raspberry-Pi-Installer-Scripts/master/raspi-blinka.py
sudo -E env PATH=$PATH python3 raspi-blinka.py

With the Pi rebooted, let’s now check that it can see the connected display. Enter this command and you should then see an address table and importantly you should get the characters 3c in the top right area of the table.

sudo i2cdetect -y 1

        0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  a  b  c  d  e  f
    00:                         -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
    10: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
    20: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
    30: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 3c -- -- --
    40: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
    50: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
    60: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
    70: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

If you don’t see any characters in the table then your Pi isn’t recognising the connected display. First, check your display is connected correctly and then make sure that the I2C interface is enabled. If you get a table full of characters then you’ve probably made a wiring mistake as this happens if SDA is shorted to ground.

To check that the I2C interface is enabled, use the below command to open up configuration options, then select “3 Interfacing Options”, then select “I5 I2C”, “Yes” to enable the interface, “Ok” and then “Finish”

sudo raspi-config

Next, we can install the CircuitPython libraries specific to this display. We start by re-entering the virtual environment and then enter these commands to install the libraries.

source stats_env/bin/activate
pip3 install --upgrade adafruit_blinka
pip3 install adafruit-circuitpython-ssd1306
sudo apt-get install python3-pil

Running The Stats Script

We can then exit the virtual environment and download the stats display Python script from my GitHub repository.

deactivate
sudo apt-get install git
git clone https://github.com/mklements/OLED_Stats.git

We then need to re-enter the virtual environment to run the script.

source stats_env/bin/activate
cd OLED_Stats

There are two options for scripts to run. The first is a text-based one called stats.py and the second is one with icons called monitor.py. You’ll need to change the filename in the run command depending on which one you’d like to run.

python3 stats.py

or

python3 monitor.py

The script is now running and your display should show your IP address and system stats.

We can’t leave it like this though, if we close the terminal or reboot the Pi, the script will terminate and the display will stop being updated. So we need to follow some additional steps to get the script to run automatically on startup.

Programming The Pi To Run The Script On Startup

This is quite easy to do, we just need to copy this file from my GitHub repository into the root directory, then make it executable and then use crontab to tell it to run on startup. You’ll need to open a new terminal window for the below steps. Remember to change your username (“pi” below) if you’re not using a default username

curl -OL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mklements/OLED_Stats/main/OLED_display
sudo chmod +x /home/pi/OLED_display

The OLED_display script runs the stats.py file by default. To change this to the monitor.py file, you’ll need to open it up in a text or code editor and change the target filename from stats.py to monitor.py.

Open up crontab by entering this command. If this is the first time you’re opening crontab then you’ll be prompted to select an editor, select 1 and hit enter.

crontab -e

Then add this line to the end of the file. Make sure to change your name to your username if you’re not using the default username pi.

@reboot /home/pi/OLED_display &

You should now have a working OLED stats display that starts up automatically each time your pi boots up.

You can go ahead and install it into your case if you haven’t done so already. My favourite case at the moment is my Pimoroni NVMe case which accommodates an NVMe drive underneath the Pi and an Ice Tower for cooling.

Let me know what you’re using your OLED stats display for in the comments section below, or if there’s anything you’d like to see added to the display script in the future.

Gweike G2 Pro 30W Fibre Laser Unboxing & Review

Michael Klements

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November 13, 2024

1

Gweike G2 Pro 30W Fibre Laser Unboxing & Review

I’ve been using diode and CO2 lasers in my home workshop for quite some time. Combined with a 3D printer, they’ve been fantastic for bringing my project ideas to life.

My main go-to laser is the Gweike Cloud 50W CO2 laser, so when Gweike reached out about trying out their latest Fibre laser, I couldn’t help but take them up on the offer.

Gweike Cloud Home Laser Cutter & Engraver

Being a fibre laser, the G2 Pro is quite different to any of the other lasers that I’ve used previously. Not only does it look and function differently but it’s able to cut and mark different materials too.

I was particularly interested in is its ability to engrave metals, with the possibility of engraving stainless steel in colour, and I wanted to see whether I could use it to engrave or mark my 3D-printed parts and enclosures.

Pi 5 Desktop Case For NVMe Bottom Side 2

Here’s my video using the Gweike G2 Pro to engrave on 3D printed parts and colour stainless steel engraving. Read on for the written review:

Where To Buy The Gweike G2 Pro

Gweike G2 Pro (Web Store) – Buy Here
Gweike G2 Pro (Amazon) – Buy Here
Gweike G2 Pro Rotary Tool – Buy Here

Get USD700 / EUR100 Off With The Coupon Code MICHAEL for a limited time

Equipment Used In This Review

USB-C Pencil Screwdriver – Buy Here
Dremel 4300 Rotary Tool – Buy Here
Dremel Compatible Milling Bit – Buy Here

Unboxing & First Look At The G2 Pro

The G2 Pro comes in a branded box with white foam inserts to protect it.

There are two main parts to the laser system, the base and the head, and they’re permanently attached to each other with a braided sleeve.

Included in the box along with the two-part laser is a stand, the power and USB cables, a set of safety glasses, screws and clamps for the work bed positioning guides, a ruler to set the focus height, some basic tools, a flash drive containing the software and a user manual.

Assembly is relatively straightforward. The vertical part of the stand bolts onto the base and the laser head then sits on top of it and is secured with a thumb screw.

This model requires a USB cable to power the electric height adjustment on the stand and another USB cable connects the laser to your computer to control it.

You can use Lightburn or their included GLaser software to control the laser. I’ve used Lightburn on all of my other lasers, so I decided to give the included GLaser software a try for a change. This is quite basic in comparison but has everything you need to get good results from the G2 Pro – and it’s free to use.

With the laser set up, let’s try engraving something.

Engraving 3D Printed Parts

I’ve often wanted to find an easy way to label the ports or IO interfaces on an enclosure, but this has always turned out to be quite difficult to do. With advancements in 3D printing, I can add labels to the enclosure by changing filament colours, but this makes the prints take much longer and you’re quite limited in the detail or clarity of the text that this method is able to produce. You can’t really produce crisp readible text smaller than about 8mm.

PET2Print Running To Convert Bottle To Filament

I’ve experimented with laser engraving onto 3D printed parts in the past with diode and CO2 lasers, but the main issue is that the 3D printed plastic melts rather than being marked or engraved. In some cases you can see the text but it’s because a layer or two of the 3D print has been removed.

Fibre lasers have a fixed head and move the laser dot through a series of rotating mirrors, so they’re able to move orders of magnitude faster than CO2 or diode lasers which need to move a whole gantry. The G2 Pro claims a maximum speed of 15000mm/s while a typical CO2 laser like the Glowforge or Gweike Cloud can only do a couple of hundred mm/s. With a fibre laser, the area being marked is exposed to the laser dot for such a short period of time that the plastic doesn’t have a chance to melt. This is not the only reason that a fibre laser can mark plastics better, the wavelength and frequency of light produced make it much better at marking plastics and metals than CO2 or diode lasers.

To figure out what settings produce the best results on 3D printed parts, we first need to do some testing. There are a lot of variables that can be tweaked but the main three settings are the laser speed, which is how fast the dot is moved across the surface, the laser power which is how much of the lasers strength is used as a percentage and then the frequency, which is how quickly the lasers dot pulses on and off.

I ran quite a few tests to try out different speed power and frequency settings, which I won’t bore you with too much but essentially my findings were that the laser’s speed needs to be quite fast, the power needs to be very low and the frequency works best at the higher end of the range that the laser can handle.

With the G2 Pro, these settings are a speed of 7000mm/s, a power of 15% and a frequency of 150kHz.

The settings also vary depending on the type and colour of filament being used but these work as a good starting point for most dark PLA filaments, which is what I tend to use most often.

Given that the laser essentially decolours or bleaches that filament, it works on a range of coloured filaments but obviously won’t be able to mark white or very light colours.

I prepared these 3D-printed side panels for my Pi 5 NVMe case and I then drew up a circuit board pattern and some text to engrave onto them.

There is a red outline marker that helps guide the placement of the components on the bed and on this model, the laser height is electrically adjustable to set the focus distance to the top surface of the object being engraved.

The G2 Pro flies through engraving the intricate circuit board patterns. My video at the beginning of the post shows the laser running in real-time and this engraving would have easily taken 20-30 times longer on a diode or CO2 laser if I were engraving onto a material like wood or acrylic. A second pass helps clean up any dark spots and makes the text and lines a bit more defined.

After a little over a minute for both passes, the engraved circuit board pattern came out looking really good.

The text is also nice and clear. These small labels are only 2mm high, so this would have been impossible to 3D print.

I really like how much character can be added to plain surfaces by being able to mark 3D-printed parts.

Engraving Stainless Steel

Next, I want to try colour engraving on some stainless steel.

Colour engraving might seem strange since the laser isn’t depositing anything onto the surface of the metal, but you can create several different colours by again varying the power and frequency of the laser dot. As far as I can tell this works by applying a fairly precise amount of heat to the surface which causes it to oxidise and the level of oxidiation determines the colour.

This also requires a lot of experimenting but I found that I could get a nice green colour for the Raspberry Pi logo’s leaves by using 50% power and a frequency of 20kHz, I could get a red colour for the raspberry using 50% power but at 30kHz. On the opposite side panel I put a similar circuit board pattern but this time I’ll be trying to engrave it in a dark red/gold colour which I’ll do at 40% power and 30kHz.

The G2 Pro can engrave stainless steel but can’t cut it, so I had to make the rest of the cutouts to turn these into side panels for my Pi case using a dremel.

I think the colours came out well. I’m not sure how durable they’ll be but the graphics seem to be quite well etched into the surface.

I’m really happy with the results of both of these tests, I now have a way to mark or label 3D-printed parts without having to build the labels into the printing process. The ability to add multi-coloured features to stainless steel parts is going to open up some interesting design opportunities.

Circuit Board Pattern Engraved Onto Side Panel

Other Features Of The G2 Pro

The G2 Pro can engrave other metals like brass, gold, silver and aluminium and also other materials like dark acrylic, plastic, leather or painted surfaces. There are also loads of tutorials online for creating awesome-looking 3D engraved coins from brass blanks. The one below by Justin Laser is really good.

It also has an optional safety shield that allows you to use it as a handheld device on materials that you can’t place on the bed. You can remove the head of the G2 Pro from the stand and the shield clips onto the bottom of it. The shield spaces the head at the correct distance from the material so that the laser is in focus.

G2 Pro Lens Cover For Engraving Onto Large Objects

Fibre Laser Limitations and Drawbacks

The G2 Pro and other fibre lasers do have some disadvantages when compared to diode or CO2 lasers, so you need to look at what your particular requirements are.

Fibre lasers generally have quite a small bed size because of the mirror head design. The working area on this version of the G2 Pro is 150mm x 150mm. This is large enough for engraving onto jewellery, mugs, coasters etc. but can be limiting for larger projects.

A fibre laser is also not designed to do any cutting, it is primarily a marking or engraving laser, so you’ll need to use precut blanks for your projects.

Lastly, the wavelength of fibre lasers is quite short and as a result, the laser energy is partially absorbed by organic materials like most woods, making it difficult or in some cases impossible to engrave. For similar reasons, it also only works on dark leather.

Final Thoughts On The Gweike G2 Pro

So if marking 3D printed parts or engraving onto metals in a range of colours is something you’d like to get from a laser, then have a look at the G2 Pro. It’s priced from $1,800, which is quite a lot for a workshop or small business tool but it’s priced very competitively when compared to other lasers of a similar power and the G2 Pro is faster and more accurate than these.

Let me know what you think of it in the comments section below and if you’ve got any use cases that you’d like me to try out when using it.

Khadas Mind 2 Unboxing & Review

Michael Klements

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October 31, 2024

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Over the past two years, I’ve tried two of Khadas’ single board computers which were aimed at being compact and low power computers for home server or media centre projects.

More recently Khadas have come up with something equally small but a lot more powerful. The Mind 2 is an ultra-small, dockable mini PC with a couple of unique features. This is the second generation in the Mind series that brings in the Intel Core Ultra 5 and 7 series CPUs to replace the i5 and i7 CPUs in the original.

Where To Buy The Khadas Mind 2

Khadas Mind 2 Core Ultra 5 (This Review) – Buy Here
Khadas Mind 2 Core Ultra 7 (More Powerful) – Buy Here
Mind Dock – Buy Here
Mind Graphics – Buy Here

Equipment Used In This Review

USB-C Pencil Screwdriver – Buy Here
Infiray P2 Pro Thermal Camera – Buy Here
Video Capture Box – Buy Here

Unboxing and First Look

The Khadas Mind 2 comes in a minimalist white branded box with an image of the Mind 2 on the top and the name on either side.

It is available in two processor options, this review is done on the less power Intel Core Ultra 5 version. It is also available in an Intel Core Ultra 7 version, and that version has two different RAM options, 32GB and 64GB.

Inside the box, first up we’ve got the Mind 2. Underneath it is a sleeve with the manual and warranty card.

Lastly, beneath that, we’ve got a USB-C power cable and a 65W USB-C power adaptor.

It’s quite clear that they’ve tried to replicate Apple’s packaging with the minimalistic white box and even the way they’ve packaged the power cable and adaptor. It’s not done cheaply though, the packaging feels like you’re unboxing a premium product.

The palm-sized Mind 2 weighs just 435grams. It feels well-built in an anodized aluminium unibody enclosure.

It’s quite small too, it measures 146mm long, 105mm wide and is just 20mm thick.

Ports & Features On The Mind 2

Taking a look around the Mind 2, on the front we’ve got a single power button with an integrated power indicator LED. This doesn’t seem to do anything out of the box, so either it is disabled without power connected or that battery is empty on arrival.

Each of the two short sides have symmetrical cooling vents on them, one is an air inlet and the other an outlet.

On the back, we’ve got a Thunderbolt 4 port which doubles up as the USB C power input. Alongside it is a USB 4 port, then we’ve got an HDMI 2.1 port which will do 4K 60Hz and then two USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports. So they’ve included all of the ports you’d need to use the Mind 2 as a standalone PC without a dock if you’d like to. Above the ports are some more ventilation holes – also air inlets.

Notably, and perhaps disappointingly for a workstation, it doesn’t have any wired networking ports, but it does have WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity. To get wired networking you’ll need to use a USB adaptor or their dock which we’ll discuss a bit later.

Similar to the PCIe port that I recently tried out on the GTi 14 Ultra, the Mind 2 has an expansion port on the bottom. This is a proprietary port that they’ve called the Mind Link.

This port has the bandwidth of a PCIe Gen 5.0 x 8 port, allowing up to 256 GT/s. It supports USB 3.2 Gen 2, HDMI 2.1 and it allows for up to 10A of input power.

The Mind 2 has a 512GB NVMe SSD but also has an additional M.2 slot to add a second SSD which is accessed through an easy-to-use magnetic cover on the bottom. The slot is limited to 2230 size drives though.

The text on the bottom looks good framed in the cover plate but I’m not sure it’s the best idea to have the serial number on an easily swappable component.

Opening Up The Mind 2 To Take A Look Inside

The bottom cover is held in place with four screws underneath the rubber pads. Internally, the only upgradable component is the NVMe SSD.

The Mind 2 has an Intel Core Ultra 5 125H Processor which is essentially a CPU, GPU and NPU all on a single chip. This is a mobile processor with 18MB of cache and 14 cores;

4 Performance cores that can run at up to 4.5Ghz
8 Efficiency cores that can run at up to 3.6Ghz
2 Low-Power Efficiency cores that run at up to 2.5GHz

It has an integrated Intel Arc GPU with a maximum frequency of 2.2GHz and this supports hardware-based ray tracing.

It’s also got 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM running at 6400 mega transfers per second. The RAM is non-removable so can’t be upgraded.

Unlike any of the other mini PCs I’ve tried on this channel, the Mind 2 comes with a built-in 5.55Wh battery. Being relatively low capacity for the high-performance CPU we’ve got in the Mind 2, this battery isn’t designed to run the Mind 2 without a mains connection but rather allows the Mind 2 to be used like a laptop in sleep mode in case of a power interruption or to move it between locations like a home or office. You can run the Mind 2 on the battery but it’ll only run for about half an hour.

So the Mind 2 is like the brains of a laptop that is designed to be transportable between workstations without shutting down.

Cooling is achieved by a single fan with two air inlets, one on the back and one on the side, and a single air outlet along the opposite side.

First Boot & Performance Benchmarks

The Khadas Mind 2 comes with a clean install of Windows 11 Home. There is an application called Mind that comes preinstalled but this is responsible for the battery management like most laptops would have.

Opening up the performance monitor we can see our CPU is an Intel Core Ultra 5 and it’s running at a base speed of 3.6GHz. We’ve got our 16GB of RAM running at 6400Mhz and our 512GB storage drive. Our GPU is an Intel Arc and it’s sharing 9Gb of RAM.

To test the Mind 2, we’ll run two benchmarks. The first is Geekbench to test the CPU and GPU performance.

The CPU benchmark took about 5 minutes to complete. We get a single core score of 2,163 and a multicore score of 11,024. These results are not far off the results I got on the GTi 14 Ultra which has the more powerful Core Ultra 7 CPU.

Similarly to that CPU, single-core scores are fairly average but the multicore score is quite good.

The GPU benchmark took just over a minute and we got a score of 28,270. This is quite good for an integrated GPU but is quite a lot lower than the results on the Core Ultra 7 CPU. It should still be powerful enough to do some low-level 1080p gaming on it, well test that out in a bit.

Next, let’s run Furmark to test the computer’s GPU and thermals. I ran the Vulkan 1.3.289 test at 1080P.

We get a score of 2079 with an average of 34fps. Interestingly Furmark reported the maximum GPU clock frequency reached to be 1.8GHz, which is quite a bit short of the 2.2GHz available.

1080P Gameplay On The Mind 2

Now that we’ve run a few benchmarks to test performance, let’s try running Counterstrike 2 and Doom Eternal on it.

In Counterstrike 2, we get around 60fps with graphics settings on High. Turning graphics up to Very High, the fps drops to a little under 50. This is not a particularly demanding game but is still a fairly good result for such a small PC without a dedicated GPU.

Next, I tried running Doom Eternal. I had all graphics settings on Ultra Nightmare and Ray Tracing turned off. I was getting about 60fps fairly consistently which is also pretty good. Turning ray tracing on mid-game first caused the game to crash as it seemed to run out of video memory, but turning it on before loading the game then worked and we lost about 10fps.

So the Mind 2 by itself handles 1080P gaming fairly well with the integrated Intel Arc graphics, both games were very playable with mid to high graphics settings and also ran ok with graphics settings maxed out. This is also only the base version of the Mind 2, there is a more powerful option available and you can add on the graphics module to further boost gaming performance.

One thing that did get quite annoying was the loud fan. If you’re just doing light work on the Mind 2 it’s barely audible but under load like when playing games, it can be quite noisy. There is an audio clip of the fan noise in my video at the beginning of the post.

Power Consumption & Power Management

In terms of power consumption. The Mind 2 uses around 9W when idle on the desktop with the battery fully charged and it goes up to a little over 45W with the GPU and CPU being used during gaming. The idle consumption is really impressive for a fairly powerful mini PC. This is around the same as the low-power N100 computers I’ve tried.

If we pull the power cable out of the back, the Mind 2 goes into sleep mode. This allows you to move it to another workstation or take it home and when you plug it back in you can carry on right where you left off. There’s no need to close documents or applications.

You can also disable going into sleep mode and it’ll run on the internal battery. In this mode, I was able to get about half an hour of run time before the battery was depleted.

Final Thoughts On The Khadas Mind 2

So that’s my overview of the Mind 2, but we’ve only really had a look at half of the complete product and this is where I have mixed feelings about it. Sure, you can use the Mind 2 as a standalone mini PC like this, but at $799 for this entry-level version, you’re paying quite a lot for a mini PC that is missing quite a few features.

That’s where the Mind Link come in. Khadas have already developed a Dock and an external GPU solution for the Mind series and they’re currently working on a portable display too. These each add functionality to the mini PC to suit a particular application.

The Dock makes it easy to add and remove the Mind 2 to a home or office workstation and the external GPU adds an RTX4060 to it for gaming. Both of these are fantastic options to have, but they do also add quite significantly to the total price. You’d be in for almost $2,500 if you bought the top-spec Mind 2 and Mind Graphics module!

Overall, the Mind 2 is well-built and has a number of features that I really like. I like that it is powered through a USB-C cable and the integrated battery allowing it to be used more like a laptop adds to its flexibility in size and form factor. It really is a palm-sized mini PC, and quite a powerful one too.

I don’t like that it doesn’t include a wired network option and because they’ve tried to make it very compact, it is also not upgradable (other than increasing storage). I personally don’t mind the proprietary Mind Link interface as this type of hot-swappable high-speed interface would be very difficult to achieve otherwise, but I would like to see their expansion options include some more versatile modules like a x8 PCIe port that can be used to add your own GPU or PCIe cards to. This would negate some of the concerns around spending $1000 on a graphics module that is not compatible with any other platform.

Let me know what you think of the Khadas Mind 2 in the comments section below.

Elegoo Mars 5 Ultra Unboxing and Review

Michael Klements

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October 23, 2024

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The Mars 5 Ultra is the latest revision to Elegoo’s successful Mars series of SLA printers. Its product page advertises an impressive set of features like 9K resolution, automatic build plate levelling, resin level detection and remote monitoring via an integrated AI camera.

The Mars 5 Ultra retails for $270 on Elegoo’s web store and $285 on Amazon at the time of writing this review, which makes it an attractive option as an entry-level or budget-friendly printer.

Where To Buy The Mars 5 Ultra

Elegoo’s Web Store – Buy Here
Amazon US – Buy Here

Other Equipment Used In This Review

Elegoo Photopolymer Resin – Buy Here
Elegoo Mercury Plus Wash & Cure Station – Buy Here

Unboxing The Mars 5 Ultra

The Mars 5 Ultra comes horizontally packaged rather than vertically like I’m used to seeing with other SLA printers. It is well protected with white high-density foam inserts protecting all the major components and a clear wrap around the acrylic cover to prevent scratches.

Like with most SLA printers, the Mars 5 Ultra comes pre-assembled. You only need to install the build plate and resin vat, which are easy to do and typically part of the printing process.

Included in the box is the Mars 5 Ultra, its build plate and power supply along with some accessories to get you started with your first prints.

These accessories include a USB stick with software and test print files preloaded, a WiFi antenna, Allen keys and screws to replace the resin vat film, gloves, face mask and paper filters for handling the resin and a drip tray to contain spills when removing prints. It also includes a license code card for Chitubox Pro.

The design of the Mars 5 Ultra, and especially the cover, gives it a futuristic cyberpunk feel. A lot of the design style feels unnecessary, but I think it works and I quite like the look of it.

First Look Around The Mars 5 Ultra

The Mars 5 Ultra feels like a solid and well-built printer. Its construction is primarily metal, with only the front panel and clear cover being plastic.

The build plate attaches to the z-axis arm with a toolless clamp, which is solidly built and easy to use. They claim that the Mars 5 Ultra is ready to run out of the box and doesn’t require any manual calibration or levelling of the build plate – we’ll discuss this a bit later when we try a test print.

The z-axis arm runs on a single linear rail and like most printers these days, has a silent stepper motor driver.

The resin vat is held in place with a thumbscrew on each side and features a typical “max level” indication line. It has also been designed with pouring points on both sides, which is good to have.

A notable feature of the Mars 5 is that the resin vat is designed to tilt during prints. This tilting motion peels prints off of the film from one side to the other rather than just pulling up on them until they “pop off”. This allows the Mars 5 to get slightly better print speeds and reduces the likelihood of adhesion issues.

It also includes a 720p AI camera. This camera allows you to monitor prints remotely and create timelapses of your prints as they are completed. The AI part of the camera includes warp detection and empty build plate detection – both of which assist in alerting you of any failed prints.

Interaction with the Mars 5 Ultra is done through an integrated vertical colour touchscreen on the front. The user interface is simple and refined – I could find all of the settings that I was looking for as well as start and stop prints fairly intuitively.

In terms of IO, along the right-hand side, we have a USB type A port to plug flash drives into for prints, the power switch, the DC power input and the WiFi antenna.

Elegoo have also included a drip tray with the Mars 5 Ultra, which snaps into place around the resin vat. This has been added to catch drips or spills that may land on the printer when you’re removing prints from the build plate, preventing drips or spills from damaging the LCD or the vat tilting mechanism. This is a nice feature but the plastic that it is made from feels more like packaging than an actual product.

Mars 5 Ultra Specifications

Printer Dimensions: 260mm [L] x 268mm [W] x 452mm [H]
Build Volume: 153mm [L] x 77mm [W] x 165mm [H]
LCD Resolution: 8520 x 4320px (9K)
LCD Size: 7″
Pixel Size: 0.018mm (18um)
Z-Axis Precision: 0.02mm
Print Speed: < 150mm/h
Connectivity: WiFi and Direct USB
Control Panel: 4″ Capacitive Touchscreen

Printing Out The Included Test Print

The Mars 5 Ultra includes a rook demo print on the supplied flash drive, which has been customised with Elegoo’s logo and the Mars 5 Ultra name on it.

Before each print, the Mars 5 Ultra runs through a self-test routine, which is displayed on the LCD display as a checklist. It also warns you not to touch or bump the printer during this routine.

Part of the routine includes self-levelling or calibrating the build plate level. I didn’t have any issues with this during my testing but a lot of the failed print issues that I’ve seen users talk about online have been due to the lack of information around manually levelling this build plate or at least checking it during setup. I know Elegoo have aimed at creating a “ready to run” printer, but it would be really helpful to include some troubleshooting advice or steps in the included manual.

I had no issues with printing out the rook test print using Elegoo’s smokey grey translucent resin. It was however quite difficult to remove from the build plate – but I guess this is better than losing the print during printing.

The build plate design is a lot more rigid than the typical single-point support, but this does have a disadvantage in that it is more difficult to clean in between each of the support posts.

The Rook test print came out really well, aside from the difficulty in getting it off of the build plate.

Slicing My Own Test Print In Chitubox

Included on the flash drive that comes with the Mars 5 Ultra are two versions of Chitubox – Chitubox Basic and Chitubox Pro.

Chitubox Basic is free-to-use software that doesn’t require a license.

Chitubox Pro requires an annual subscription but Elegoo include a 3-month license with the Mars 5 Ultra. This is a nice inclusion but Chitubox Pro is quite expensive ($170 per year) if you’re not frequently making use of the pro-level features (likely for business use) and the included 3-month license is quite short.

The Mars 5 Ultra has built-in WiFi which allows it to do firmware updates without being connected to a PC, but also allows prints to be sent to it wirelessly using the ChituManager plugin. This plugin also allows you to use the Mars 5 Ultra’s integrated camera for remote monitoring.

The model that I chose to slice was a Lattice Benchy by DaveMakesStuff. This too can be printed directly on the build plate without having to be printed at an angle and should be printed without supports.

I used Elegoo’s recommended settings for their ABS-Like Smokey Black Resin, which was readily available on their website – both under the printer’s product page and on their resin’s listing.

The lattice structure printed out impressively well considering the fine detail. The benchy came out flawlessly. There was no visible warping or distortion and the high resolution makes it very hard to see any

The location of the camera is useful in that it is out of the way when you’re topping up the resin vat or removing prints, but being forward facing and with the dark lid, the quality of timelapse videos is not great. That said, it is easy to use and most casual users would be happy with the results.

I also tried printing out a

Final Thoughts On The Mars 5 Ultra

The Mars 5 Ultra impressed me quite significantly. Having not used a new SLA printer in a couple of years, it was great to see how quickly you can get set up and running, and the print quality is amazing. There is no more fiddling with bed levelling and calibration issues to resolve, it just works.

The Mars 5 Ultra includes all of the higher-end features of Elegoo’s flagship Saturn 4 Ultra but at a much lower price point. You’re getting a very capable printer with integrated WiFi and a camera for only a little over $250.

I like the automatic build plate levelling although it would have been nice to have some instructions included in the manual on how to manually level the build plate if you run into issues with it. The manual could also do with a bit more troubleshooting guidance, although there is a lot of support available online.

The integrated AI camera is a great feature for its automated detection features although its placement and lack of internal lighting within the enclosure leave the timelapse video quality being quite poor.

Overall, I think the Mars 5 Ultra is a great product at an even better price point. You wouldn’t be disappointed with the Mars 5 Ultra as your first SLA printer or as an upgrade to an older printer.

LincStation N1 All-SSD NAS by LincPlus, Unboxing & Review

Michael Klements

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October 9, 2024

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LincStation N1 All-SSD NAS by LincPlus, Unboxing & Review

Today we’re going to be taking a look at the LincStation N1, a 6-bay all-SSD NAS by LincPlus. It is marketed as being great for a home or small office, being silent, powerful and easy-to-use. Let’s find out if it stands up to these claims.

Here’s my video review of the LincStation N1, read on for my written review;

Where To Buy The LincStation N1

LincStation N1 – Buy Here
Crucial P3 Plus NVMe SSDs – Buy Here
Crucial 2.5″ BX500 SSDs – Buy Here
QNAP 2.5G Ethernet Switch – Buy Here
Power Meter – Buy Here
Infiray P2 Pro Thermal Camera – Buy Here

Unboxing and First Look

The LincStation N1 comes in a fairly minimalistic black branded box.

Inside the box, the NAS is on the top in a white protective sleeve.

Underneath that is the Software License key card and a user manual, and in the bottom compartment is a screwdriver along with screws for the drives, as well as a 60W power adaptor and mains cable.

Unlike most NAS products, this one doesn’t come with an Ethernet cable.

Taking a look around the LincStation N1. The enclosure is a 2-part design with the top being matt black plastic with a LincPlus logo on it and the bottom being a single piece of aluminium with turned up edges. The top and two sides don’t have any ports on them.

At the front we’ve got a power button which doubles up as an LED power indicator on the right.

Underneath the power button is a this flip down cover, and beneath that is a single USB type C port and two SATA drive bays.

There is also a row of seven drive and network activity LEDs above the USB C port.

Underneath the flip-down cover is an LED strip. This looks like an RGB strip as it includes other colours when booting up but then just pulses in a dark blue while the NAS is running.

At the back, we’ve got a 3.5mm audio port, which is a bit of a strange addition for a NAS, alongside it is an HDMI 2.0 port, then we’ve got two USB 3.2 gen. 2 ports, a 2.5G Ethernet port and a 12V power input.

Underneath the ports are some ventilation holes for the internal fan.

The bottom has two rubber strips on it that act as feet, and has two drive bay covers for the NVMe drives.

Size wise, being an all SSD NAS, it is quite compact. It measures 21cm long, 15cm wide and 3.5cm high. They advertise the LincStation N1 as being the same footprint as an A5 sheet of paper.

I quite like the look of this NAS, it looks like something you wouldn’t mind having visible on a desk rather than hidden away in a rack or behind closed doors.

Drive Bays and Specifications

The six drive bays are a little different to most other NAS’s I’ve seen, which either have 2.5” SATA bays or M.2 bays for NVMe drives. This NAS has a combination; two 2.5” SATA drive bays that can be swapped out at the front, and then four M.2 bays for NVMe drives that are installed though covers underneath it. Through these six bays you can install up to 48TB of storage.

I guess technically you could use the SATA bays for mechanical drives if you wanted cheaper storage capacity, but that would sort of defeat the object of an all flash storage NAS.

The LincStation N1 powered by an Intel N5105 CPU. This is a 4-core CPU running at 2.0GHz. While this means that it’s not as powerful as a NAS like the F8 SSD Plus that I recently reviewed, it costs less than half the price. It is currently available for $399 from their web store or on Amazon.

It’s got 16GB of DDR4 RAM and 128GB of flash storage. The RAM is soldered to the motherboard, so is non-removable, but it’s the maximum that the CPU supports in any case.

The NAS also has Bluetooth 5.2 and WiFi 6 although we’ll talk about the limitations of these a bit later when we look at software.

Installing SSDs Into The LincStation N1’s Drive Bays

Now let’s install some drives into the LincStation N1’s drive bays so that we can test its performance.

I’m populating the two 2.5” drive bays with Crucial BX500 drives and the four M.2 drive bays with Crucial P3 Plus drives.

These are just for testing, you should use NAS-grade drives if you’re going to be using them in a NAS long term.

The 2.5” drives are mounted into the trays using the included screws and the trays then slide into place like traditional NAS drive bays.

The M.2 bays are PCIe gen. 3 x 1, so a fairly slow interface by today’s standards. This is likely constrained by the CPU, but the speed would easily saturate the 2.5G network connection in any case. This limitation is something to keep in mind though, as you could save yourself some money by going for older and slower drives without affecting overall performance.

The bays only support 2280-size drives and have tool-less clasps that hold each drive into place. I really like this feature, it makes installing the drives a breeze.

The covers also act as heatsinks for the drives so there is a large thermal pad on each. You’ll also need to remember to remove the protective film from each pad before replacing the covers.

Now we just need to plug in a network cable and power cable, then press the power button to boot it up.

Setting Up Unraid For The First Time

Unlike a lot of other NAS manufacturers, LincPlus haven’t tried to develop their software for the LincStation N1, but have rather shipped it out with an included Unraid License.

I think this is a good choice. A product can have the greatest hardware and be let down quite significantly by its software. We’ve seen this over and over with SBCs that try to compete with the Raspberry Pi. Unraid has been around for a while and is a reputable software package for NAS setups.

When you first boot it up, you’ll need to enter the included Unraid license key to activate it or you can run a trial of the software for 30 days before activating it.

The Unraid installation is about as clean as it gets. LincPlus haven’t preconfigured anything or installed any supplementary applications. This is probably a pro for an experienced user but may be a con if you’re new to Unraid and are still finding your way around.

You’ll then need to assign your disks, start your array and then create a network share.

Unraid also allows you to install plugins, configure and run Docker Containers, create and run Virtual Machines and they have an App Store with over 2000 apps available to install to add functionality to your NAS.

There are some downsides and limitations to Unraid in the N1. The standard version of Unraid supplied with the N1 doesn’t support the available WiFi and Bluetooth features, so you can’t use either of these as part of the core NAS functionality. You can however use them through a virtual machine.

The more significant issue is that Unraid is focused around physical mechanical drives and hasn’t really been optimised to work with SSDs. There is a risk with some SSDs that they may do on device data management which would damage the parity data. Unraid’s recommendation is to use SSDs as cache drives and mechanical drives for the array, which is obviously not the purpose of the N1.

Testing The Performance Of The LincStation N1

On the product page, LincPlus claim transfer speeds of up to 800MB/s. This is likely referring to the maximum read speed that can be achieved from a single NVMe drive. While this is important in some respects, you’re not going to get anywhere near this speed over the 2.5G network connection. You’d be lucky to get real-world results of around 280MB/s.

You could potentially improve the network speed by adding a second 2.5G ethernet adaptor to one of the USB ports to take advantage of link aggregation but this is just a limitation of the NAS to keep in mind. Most people aren’t running more than 2.5G in their homes in any case.

Testing transfer speeds with a small 256 MB file I got average writes a little over 250 MB/s and reads of a little under 270MB/s.

With a larger 1 GB file I got average writes of a little under 250MB/s and reads a little under 260MB/s.

And with a very large 64GB file I got average writes around 240MB/s and average reads a little over 250MB/s.

So quite consistent results across the three file sizes. Reads come fairly close to saturating the 2.5G network connection and writes are just a little slower.

I then tried running a real-world file transfer test in Windows 11, transferring a large 70G video file.

Writing to the NAS we get a very consistent write speed of a little over 280MB/s and reading from the NAS we get a similarly consistent but slightly slower average transfer speed of about 255MB/s.

Noise and Power Consumption

In agreement with LincPlus’ claims, the LincStation N1 is almost silent. It obviously doesn’t have any mechanical drives in it, which eliminates drive noise. If there is nothing else running in the room, you can faintly hear a fan running when it is on but it is impressively quiet. I also couldn’t hear or measure any difference between the fan noise at idle and when reading or writing to the drives.

Under a full CPU load the fan is a bit more audible but it’s still pretty quiet. You can’t hear it from more than 2 meters away in a quiet room.

Power consumption on the N1 is also great. It uses just 11W at idle and this only goes up to around 17-18W when reading or writing to the drives.

Final Thoughts On The LincStation N1

Overall I think the LincStation N1 is quite a nice entry-level all-flash storage NAS package. It has a well-balanced set of features and although it is limited by the single 2.5G Ethernet connection, this is likely good enough for most home or small office use cases. I think their decision to include an Unraid license rather than developing their own software is a really good one and you’ve obviously still got the flexibility to go with a different OS if you’d like to.

Let me know what you think of the LincStation N1 in the comments section below.

I Tried 3 New Hats For The Raspberry Pi 5

Michael Klements

-

October 2, 2024

4

I Tried 3 New Hats For The Raspberry Pi 5

Today we’ve got three new hats for the Raspberry Pi 5 that we will be trying out. I’ve used variants of each of these on my Pi 4 setups for a few years now and I think these are the most handy hats to keep around for my Pi projects.

Here’s my video trying out and testing these Pi 5 hats, read on for the write-up;

Where To Buy These Pi 5 Hats

X1003 NVMe Hat – Buy Here
PoE & NVMe Hat – Buy Here
X1200 UPS Hat – Buy Here

Tool & Equipment Used:

Raspberry Pi 5 – Buy Here
Sabrent Rocket 4.0 – Buy Here
Pi 5 Power Supply – Buy Here
Pi 5 Active Cooler – Buy Here
USB-C Pencil Screwdriver – Buy Here

X1003 NVMe Hat

The first hat we’re going to be looking at is the X1003 NVMe hat, which you can pick up online for around $15.

I tested three other NVMe hats a few months ago, but this was one that I was told about after doing those tests.

I primarily like that it is compact and simple. This leaves a lot of room around the hat for cooling. The main drawback with the others that I’ve tested is that the bottom mount ones tend to enclose the drive and cause the drive to run hot and the top ones tend to restrict airflow to the cooler.

This hat keeps both the drive and fan open.

There is one strange design choice and that is that it requires an active cooler to be installed on the Pi because it is supported along its edge by picking up on one of the active cooler’s screw holes. I don’t know why they went with this approach rather than picking up on one of the Pi’s mounting holes with a standoff. I assume they wanted to keep those free.

In terms of drive options, you can only use 2230 and 2242 size drives in it. Like the other NVMe hats that I’ve tried, it connects to the Pi with an FPC cable and gets additional power from the GPIO pins.

I tested this hat using James Chambers Pi benchmarks script and a Sabrent Rocket NVMe SSD.

I got an average score over 3 tests of 42,457. This is a good result given that I’ve left the Pi’s PCIe port running at the default Gen 2 speed. It is comparable to this drive running at Gen 2 speeds in the other hats that I’ve tested.

James-Chambers-Pi-Benchmark-Script-Score

The hat will also fit into the official Pi 5 case with the fan plate removed and the active cooler then takes care of keeping the Pi’s CPU cool.

PoE+ & NVMe Hat by HackerGadgets

The next hat that I tested is an NVMe and PoE+ Hat by HackerGadgets which you can get online for $43.

This is a power over ethernet or PoE hat designed for the Pi 5 that isn’t much larger than the official PoE hat for the Pi 4 but also includes an M.2 port for an NVMe drive that makes use of the Pi 5’s PCIe port.

This hat allows you to make use of a PoE switch or PoE injector to power your Pi using the connected network cable rather than having to use a separate power adaptor. It simplifies your setup and allows you to use fewer cables. If you’re running a headless arrangement like you would on a NAS or Pi Hole project then you only need an Ethernet cable and your Pi is good to go.

It’s PoE+ or PoE type 2, which means it can handle a higher power delivery than the original PoE standard. Typically up to 25W instead of the original 12.5W.

This hat’s switch mode power supply can supply 5V at up to 4.8A, so up to 24W, and it’s got an additional USB C power port on the back that you can use to power or charge an external device.

Its also got a cutout in the PCB that you can either mount a 30mm fan to or install over the active cooler and it’ll still allow airflow through to the fan.

Hat-Still-Provides-Path-For-Airflow-To-Cooler

Like the previous hat, this one is also compatible with 2230 and 2242 size drives.

The hat plugs into the GPIO pins to supply power to the Pi and it’s got an FPC cable to connect the NVMe drive to the Pi’s PCIe port. It’s also got a 4-pin connector at the front that picks up power from the Ethernet port.

With the hat installed, we don’t need to hook up a USB C power cable to the Pi as it’ll get power from the Ethernet connection.

Upon booting up I got a warning that the supply is not capable of supplying 5A. This comes up because the Pi isn’t able to carry out the power delivery negotiation with the supply while booting up because the hat is powering it through the GPIO pins.

You can disable this check in firmware by adding the below line to the boot.conf file;

PSU_MAX_CURRENT=5000

Change-Power-Settings-To-Remove-PD-Negotiation

To test this hat, I ran two different tests, one on the NVMe drive and one on the CPU.

I again tested the NVMe drive using James Chambers Pi benchmarks script and a Sabrent Rocket NVMe SSD. I got slightly better results than with the previous hat with an average score over three tests of 43,550, again at gen 2 speeds.

Running-Pi-Benchmark-Script-To-Test-Drive-Speed

I also tested it by running CPU burn to load up the CPU to make sure that the PoE power supply was capable of handling a full CPU load. It ran for 10 minutes without any issues and also without thermal throttling. PoE hats tend to run quite hot but this doesn’t seem to have a significant effect on the Pi.

This hat is also compatible with the official Pi 5 case.

PoE-and-NVMe-Hat-Fit-Into-Official-Pi-5-Case

X1200 UPS Hat

The last hat is very similar to one that I used in my Pi 4 server build a while back and that’s an X1200 UPS hat which you can get for $42.

This hat stores power in two 18650 cells on the bottom and provides uninterruptable power to the Pi 5 through the Pi’s GPIO and power circuit pins.

Also on the bottom are some additional 5V power supply connectors and a power button.

On the top we’ve got a USB type C power input which takes the Pi 5’s official 5V 5A power supply. We’ve also got a charging LED and battery voltage indicator. There are two more status LEDs on the other edge. The Pi 5 one tells you when the Pi 5 powered on and the one alongside it tells you when the hat is on.

Battery-Level-Indicator-and-Charging-LED

The hat uses some cleverly designed pogo pins to make contact with the Pi’s power and GPIO pins from underneath the Pi. With this hat on the bottom, you’ve still got space on top of the Pi to put an active cooler and a top mounted NVMe hat.

Connect-To-GPIO-Pins-From-Underneath-The-Pi

I’m going to add the X1003 NVMe hat to the setup as my boot drive.

Once installed, the Pi can boot up from the batteries if they’re charged and you then provide power to the UPS rather than to the Pi to keep them charged.

There is a script that you can install that’ll provide UPS stats to the Pi via the I2C interface. This will also tell the Pi to safely shutdown if the battery voltage drops below a configurable level.

Install-Script-To-Get-UPS-Status-and-Safe-Shutdown

When mains power is removed, the UPS continues to provide power to the Pi, like in the beginning when it was running off the batteries only. The length of time that it can run will obviously depend on the capacity of the batteries and what you’ve got connected to your Pi but you should be able to get an hour or two from a good set of 3000mAh batteries.

This hat is too big for the official case but there are a couple of other case options available for it, including one of my own designs.

This-Hat-Is-Too-Thick-For-The-Official-Pi-5-Case

Let me know in the comments section if you’ve used any of these hats for your own projects or if there are any other hats for the Pi 5 that you’d like me to try out.

Beelink EX Docking Station For The GTi 14 Ultra

Michael Klements

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September 25, 2024

2

Beelink EX Docking Station For The GTi 14 Ultra

A couple of weeks ago, I tested the Beelink GTi 14 Ultra, a powerful mini PC with a full-size PCIe port underneath it. At the time Beelink said that this was for a dock that they were working on, which would allow an external GPU to be used with the PC, but it hadn’t launched yet. So I tested the interface using my own 3D printed adaptor that screwed onto the bottom of the pc along with a PCIe riser and an external power supply.

Beelink have now completed the dock, so that’s what Im going to be sharing with you in today’s video.

This is the EX Docking Station and it is compatible with the GTi14 and GTi12 series PCs at the time of writing this post.

Here’s my video of the EX Docking Station, read on for my write-up;

Where To Buy The Beelink EX Docking Station?

Beelink EX Docking Station – Buy Here
Beelink GTi 14 Ultra – Buy Here

Tools & Equipment Used

USB-C Pencil Screwdriver – Buy Here
Infiray P2 Pro Thermal Camera – Buy Here
Video Capture Box – Buy Here

Unboxing & First Look

The Beelink EX Docking Station comes in a white branded-sleeved box that is a lot bigger and heavier than I was expecting it to be.

Inside the box you get some manuals, the EX Docking Station, 8-pin power connector cables, a power supply cable, brackets to hold the PC and GPU in place and then a pack of screws and a PCB that looks like an M.2 adaptor for a wifi module.

The EX Docking Station measures 179mm wide, 65mm high and 225mm long.

This is a bit more than just a PCIe adaptor or riser, Beelink have integrated a few other features which make it versatile and really easy to use.

First up is the obvious main feature, the PCIe x8 port which allows you to connect an external GPU to the PC.

Alongside that are two 8-pin power supply ports for the GPU. These are fed from an internal 600W power supply.

There is also a separate port to power an external fan if your GPU requires this.

Next to those is a USB2.0 port. I think this is a bit of a strange addition, it would have been a lot more useful if it were a USB 3.0 port or USB type C port but I guess you could use this for a keyboard or mouse dongle.

Then there are two antenna ports that you can use if you add an internal WiFi adaptor.

At the front is the power button and a power indicator LED alongside it.

At the back, we’ve just got the power supply input and some ventilation holes.

What GPUs Can You Plug Into The EX Docking Station?

The open design and relatively powerful integrated power supply mean that you can use a high-end GPU with the docking station.

Beelink claim that you can run a GeForce RTX 4090 in it. I don’t have a 4090 to test this claim, but it seems like they have sized the power supply at 600W specifically to make sure that high-end cards like these can be used since the 4090 requires around 450W. As shown earlier, the dock only has two 8-pin power ports available though and some cards like the 4090 require 4. So you may need to use additional adaptors to supply power to your card.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the dock is designed for 2-slot cards, so you’ll probably need to remove or not use the retaining bracket to use a 3-slot card like the 4090 but there looks like there is enough room for it.

Internally, the EX Docking Station also has another PCIe 4.0 x 1 expansion port in the form of an M.2 port. You can use this port to add an NVMe SSD or use the small included adaptor board to add a WiFi module.

Installing A GPU On The Dock

Now that we’ve had a look at what the EX Docking Station has to offer, let’s get a GPU plugged into it and try it out. I’m going to be using the same Radeon RX 6600 GPU that I used with my 3D-printed adaptor.

First, we need to install the mounting bracket on the back of the dock.

The GPU plugs into the PCIe port and we just need to hook a single 8-pin power cable up to it.

We then need to remove the cover over the PCIe slot on the bottom of the GTi 14 and then slide it onto the PCIe adaptor on the dock.

A retaining plate then holds the PC in place.

Testing The EX Docking Station

To test the EX Docking Station, I tried running two benchmarks that I ran previously on the stock GTi 14 – Geekbench GPU and Furmark.

In Geekbench we get a GPU score of 78,310, which is unsurprisingly significantly higher than the 37,460 we got on the stock setup.

Running Furmark, we get a score of 7,033, which is also much higher than the 1,920 we got with the stock setup.

To test gameplay, I opened up Counterstrike 2 and set all of the graphics settings to Very High at 1080P.

We get around 150 fps quite consistently. This is about 2.5 times what we’d get on the integrated GPU, which is already quite powerful for a mini PC.

In Doom Eternal with all graphics settings on Ultra Nightmare and Ray Tracing turned off at 1080P, we get over 200fps. This is about 3 times faster than the integrated GPU and the RX 6600 is a pretty low-tier budget GPU.

Can You Use Other PCIe Cards With The Dock?

You don’t have to use this docking station to add a GPU to your PC. Since it uses a standard PCIe interface, you can use it with other PCIe cards too.

I actually used this dock to add a 10G Ethernet adaptor to the GTi 14 recently to do my testing on the Zimacube Pro and the TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus. This is obviously quite an expensive way to add 10G Ethernet to your PC, but it does give you a lot of expansion options for other cards too.

Final Thoughts On The Beelink EX Docking Station

The EX Docking Station retails for $159 on their website at the time of writing this post. You are paying a premium on what is largely a 600W power supply and a PCIe riser with some added features, but I don’t think it’s prohibitively expensive.

Being a first-gen product there are two minor drawbacks that I’d like to mention.

When you use the docking station with the GTi 14 Ultra, you still need to use a power cable for the PC as well. You’ve then got two power cables to plug in and two power buttons to press to boot the PC up. It would have been nice to have these a bit more integrated in some way.

I also would have liked to have seen an easier way to add and remove the PC from the dock. Something like a toolless lever or snap-in lock to hold the PC into place like a laptop dock would make it far easier to remove the PC, which is kinda of the point of a dock.

Other than those two drawbacks, I think this is quite an innovative product. Mini PCs have always been held back by their GPU performance and with this dock, you can add a high-end GPU to an already powerful mini PC to create a good gaming setup that also offers the flexibility to be very portable when you need it to be.

Let me know what you think of the dock in the comments section below.

I Tried The New TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus, Is It Any Good?

Michael Klements

-

September 18, 2024

1

A few months ago I built an all-SSD NAS using a Raspberry Pi 5 and a quad-SATA hat from Radxa. By adding a 2.5Gb Ethernet adapter, I managed to get pretty good transfer speeds out of it. I got about 260MB/s writing files to the NAS and 200MB/s reading files from the NAS.

Following that video, TerraMaster reached out about a new all-SSD NAS that they’re launching this week. This is the new F8 SSD Plus. It’s their first NAS that is designed to be used with SSDs only and internally it’s got space for 8 M.2 NVMe drives.

There are two versions of this NAS. I am testing the higher-end F8 SSD Plus, which has an i3 processor and 16GB of RAM and will retail for $800. They also have a lower-spec F8 SSD with an N95 processor and 8GB of RAM for $600.

Here’s my video review and testing of the F8 SSD Plus, read on for my write-up;

Where To Get The F8 SSD Plus?

TerraMaster F8 SSD Plus – Buy Here
Crucial P3 Plus NVMe SSDs – Buy Here

Tool & Equipment Used

Power Meter – Buy Here
Infiray P2 Pro Thermal Camera – Buy Here

Some of the above parts are affiliate links. By purchasing products through the above links, you’ll be supporting this channel, at no additional cost to you.

Unboxing & First Look At The F8 SSD Plus

The F8 SSD Plus comes in a black branded box that already gives you the impression that this NAS is much smaller than a traditional NAS that takes physical drives.

Included in the box is the F8 SSD Plus along with a Cat6e Ethernet cable, although not a particularly long one, a power cable for the power supply, a screwdriver and screws for installing the NVMe drives, the power supply and a set of 8 heat sinks for the drives. This is quite a nice inclusion which I wasn’t expecting to see.

First up, this NAS is quite small. It’s not much bigger than a single physical 3.5” drive that a traditional NAS would use.

It’s a minimalistic design, which I quite like. There is nothing on the front and the two sides bear the TerraMaster logo.

On the bottom, we’ve got two 50mm PWM fans which draw air in through the bottom and exhaust out of the top of the NAS.

On the back, we’ve got the barrel jack power input, an HDMI 2.1 port, a 10Gb Ethernet port, two USB 3.2 ports and a USB type C port.

On the top, we’ve got some ventilation holes and the power button.

They say that this is a toolless design and it certainly is to open it up, we’ve just got a single thumb screw at the back. This allows the internal chassis to slide out to access the board and drives. I wasn’t sure whether the board slides out of the top or down and out from the bottom, but out from the top is the answer.

I think calling it a toolless design is a bit of a stretch as you need to secure your storage drives with a screw and they include a screwdriver for that. There are some ways they could have made it truly toolless but this is nitpicking, it’s not difficult to install the drives.

Internally we’ve got a single 16GB stick of DDR5 RAM running at 4800MHz. You can upgrade this to 32GB.

The CPU is under a large black heatsink at the bottom, directly above the fans. The F8 SSD Plus has an 8-core Intel i3 N305 processor with a maximum frequency of 3.8GHz. This is a 2023 chip which has got 6MB of cache and a TDP of 15W.

Then we’ve got our 8 M.2 NVMe ports. These are all PCIe gen 3 x 1 ports. This may sound disappointing at first glance, but each of these ports are individually capable of saturating the 10Gb network connection, so there shouldn’t be any issues with this speed. Through these 8 ports, we can connect up to 64TB of storage.

Installing NVMe Drives In The NAS

Now that we’ve taken a look at the internals, let’s get the drives installed.

I’m using four Crucial P3 Plus drives. These are just for testing, if you’re going to be using drives in a NAS long term then you should get NAS-grade drives that have better endurance.

First, we need to fit a heatsink to each drive. They’re held in place with an included band on each end. I don’t particularly like this solution as I’m not sure how long these bands will last, but I do like that they’re fitted directly to the drive and the heatsinks look like they’re good quality.

Installing the drives is easy, they plug into the M.2 port and a single screw holds each drive in place.

With all four drives installed, we can slide the board back into the enclosure, plug in our power and network cable and boot it up.

TerraMaster’s Lastest Operating System TOS 6

By default, the F8 SSD Plus is set up to install and run Terramaster’s latest operating system called TOS 6. It’s based on Linux but they’ve given the web interface a Windows 11 look and feel.

On the first boot, you’ll be guided through a setup process that will set up a drive pool and install TOS 6 onto the available drives. The drives are set up using their TRAID system. There is a bit to go through in understanding how this works but it’s essentially quite similar to RAID 5, providing a good balance of redundancy and storage capacity but it also allows for the flexibility to use different capacity drives within the array.

TOS has done away with a traditional dashboard-style layout with desktop icons and have instead added a taskbar along the top with little tooltips that come up to guide you around.

It feels fairly intuitive to use. It’s even got a sidebar to monitor system stats, which can be modified by dragging and dropping modules, and it includes a notification bar.

I really like their drive management and backup options. You have a lot of options for local and cloud backup. You can also set up an email address to automatically send notifications to if errors with drives or processes are detected.

I also like their file management windows. Again, this interface has a Windows 11 look and feel, but that makes it intuitive. You’ve got right-click options for files and folders, you can create shares directly from this interface.

You can even preview some files like photos directly from the file management window.

You can quickly search for settings or features from the settings window, so you don’t have to waste time looking through menus.

TerraMaster have also included a nice array of apps that you can install to add functionality to your NAS.

If you can’t find what you need with these apps, you can also quite easily install docker to deploy your own containerised apps. The CPU in this NAS has a fair amount of headroom to run these, so the F8 SSD Plus will work well as a small home lab.

Additional-CPU-Headroom-For-Docker-Install

That’s a brief overview of TOS 6. If you don’t like their software you can also install your own operating system like TrueNAS or Unraid on the NAS if you’d prefer.

Testing The F8 SSD Plus’ File Transfer Speed

Next, let’s do some transfer speed tests. I first used AJA System Test to automatically test the transfer speeds and then I did a real-world test on Windows 11.

AJA System Test

Transferring a small 256MB file, I got fairly consistent writes a little over 1000MB/s and reads around 850MB/s.

Going up to a 1GB file, we get very similar results – writes a little over 1000MB/s and reads around 850MB/s.

Transferring a 64GB file started off much slower than the previous two tests. Writing started off 500MB/s but then ramped up during the first half of the transfer and eventually settled at a little under 1000MB/s for the remainder of the write. Reading the 64GB file was stable but was again slower than with the smaller files. Reading remained at a bit under 750MB/s. So both reads and writes were about 100MB/s slower with the large 64GB file.

Windows 11 File Transfer Test

Running a real-world transfer test in Window 11, copying a large 70GB video file to the NAS, writes started off saturating the 10Gb Ethernet connection at 1.1GB/s. This dropped off quite quickly though and eventually settled at a little under 650MB/s for the remainder of the transfer.

Reading the same 70GB video file from the NAS was much faster. Reading stayed at 1.1GB/s for most of the transfer, with just a couple of short dips.

So, overall my testing proved pretty good performance for file transfers. Like with my other NAS reviews, this is straight out of the box with the default setup. I haven’t done any tweaking or optimising of settings.

Fan Noise On The F8 SSD Plus

The F8 SSD Plus is very quiet as it doesn’t emit any physical drive noise. Fan noise is also minimal, you can hardly hear the fans running when at idle. The ambient sound level in my testing room is about 32 decibels, so the fans running at low speed barely register.

When writing to the drives or doing CPU-intensive tasks, you can hear the fans spin up but they’re not much louder. The sound level goes up to about 39-40 decibels.

So this NAS is ideal for a home or small office where you’d have the NAS in the same room that you’re working in.

F8 SSD Plus Power Consumption

Keep in mind that power consumption will obviously vary with the type and quantity of drives installed, so you may get slightly different results. With my 4-drive setup and with the CPU under no load, we get a power consumption of 14W.

This goes up to 35W when writing to all four drives and saturating the network connection.

TOS 6 does have an option to put the drives to sleep if there is no activity for a period of time and this should further decrease the idle power consumption. In their documentation, they say that this will bring power consumption down to 9W. This seems reasonable from my test results.

Limitations of the F8 SSD Plus

Most NAS products in this sort of price point would come with a secondary network connection, so it would have been nice to see a 2.5Gb network port alongside the 10Gb port as a secondary port or failover. You could add an external network adaptor to one of the available USB ports like I did with my Pi NAS, so this is not a major issue.

Each M.2 port also only supports PCIe gen 3 x 1 drive speeds. This sounds slow, but the limitation has to do with the available PCIe lanes on the processor. The i3 N305 processor has only got 9 PCIe lanes available. TerraMaster have distributed these over the 8 drives and the 10G Ethernet port, providing one lane each. I think they’ve made a fair choice here as the drives would individually saturate the 10G port in any case. So you’re not actually losing drive speed. This is worth keeping in mind when choosing drives though as you can save some money by buying older and/or slower drives that work well with the available interface.

The only other limitations I could find are that the F8 SSD Plus doesn’t have ECC memory and is missing native support for ZFS. Neither of these are particularly big concerns, they’re just worth noting.

Final Thoughts On The F8 SSD Plus

Overall I think this is a great product and I haven’t found any significant issues with it. There are a few features that would have been nice to have had included since it is quite pricey, but once you add an NVMe adaptor and 10Gb Ethernet adaptor to a mini PC of a similar size and performance, you’ll probably be around this price point too.

Let me know in the comments section below if you think I should have a go at building my own single board computer based NAS with similar functionality to see how it compares. Also, let me know what you think of the F8 SSD Plus.

The DIY LifeTech & Electronics

The DIY LifeTech & Electronics

Purchase Links For The Computers and Parts Used For Testing

Equipment Used

Hardware and Features of Each Computer

Testing The N97, N100 and Pi 5 Computers

Video Playback at 1080P

Sysbench CPU Benchmark

Storage Drive Speed Benchmark

GLMark2 GPU Benchmark

Power Consumption Test

Results Discussion and Thoughts on the Three Computers

Parts Used To Build My Pi 5 Case With Integrated Water-Cooling

Equipment Used

Designing The Water-Cooling Case

3D Printing The Pi 5 Case

Assembling The Water-Cooling Case

Testing The Water-Cooling Case’s Thermals

Final Thoughts On My Water Cooled Pi 5 Case

What You Need For This Project

Connect the OLED Display to Your Raspberry Pi

Programming The OLED Stats Display

Updating The Pi & Installing Libraries

Running The Stats Script

Programming The Pi To Run The Script On Startup

Where To Buy The Gweike G2 Pro

Equipment Used In This Review

Unboxing & First Look At The G2 Pro

Engraving 3D Printed Parts

Engraving Stainless Steel

Other Features Of The G2 Pro

Fibre Laser Limitations and Drawbacks

Final Thoughts On The Gweike G2 Pro

Where To Buy The Khadas Mind 2

Equipment Used In This Review

Unboxing and First Look

Ports & Features On The Mind 2

Opening Up The Mind 2 To Take A Look Inside

First Boot & Performance Benchmarks

1080P Gameplay On The Mind 2

Power Consumption & Power Management

Final Thoughts On The Khadas Mind 2

Where To Buy The Mars 5 Ultra

Other Equipment Used In This Review

Unboxing The Mars 5 Ultra

First Look Around The Mars 5 Ultra

Mars 5 Ultra Specifications

Printing Out The Included Test Print

Slicing My Own Test Print In Chitubox

Final Thoughts On The Mars 5 Ultra

Where To Buy The LincStation N1

Unboxing and First Look

Drive Bays and Specifications

Installing SSDs Into The LincStation N1’s Drive Bays

Setting Up Unraid For The First Time

Testing The Performance Of The LincStation N1

Noise and Power Consumption

Final Thoughts On The LincStation N1

Where To Buy These Pi 5 Hats

Tool & Equipment Used:

X1003 NVMe Hat

PoE+ & NVMe Hat by HackerGadgets

X1200 UPS Hat

Where To Buy The Beelink EX Docking Station?

Tools & Equipment Used

Unboxing & First Look

What GPUs Can You Plug Into The EX Docking Station?

Installing A GPU On The Dock

Testing The EX Docking Station

Can You Use Other PCIe Cards With The Dock?

Final Thoughts On The Beelink EX Docking Station

Where To Get The F8 SSD Plus?

Tool & Equipment Used

Unboxing & First Look At The F8 SSD Plus

Installing NVMe Drives In The NAS

TerraMaster’s Lastest Operating System TOS 6

Testing The F8 SSD Plus’ File Transfer Speed

AJA System Test

Windows 11 File Transfer Test

Fan Noise On The F8 SSD Plus