KingnovyPC 12th Gen Firewall Micro Appliance, 6 Port i226 2.5GbE LAN Fanless Mini PC Pentium Gold 8505, No Ram No SSD, 4*USB, HDMI, DP, Type-C, Gigabit Ethernet AES-NI VPN Router Openwrt Barebone

KingnovyPC 12th Gen Firewall Micro Appliance, 6 Port i226 2.5GbE LAN Fanless Mini PC with Pentium Gold CPU. I use this for a Proxmox setup. I discarded the M2 adapter which looks like it'll snap in half if you breath on it, pretty much the same with the supplied SATA adapter, I don't understand how you can make wires so small that can carry SATA signals and wasn't going to put that to the test. Seriously why did they bother? I wasn't expecting those in the package anyway. I was pleasantly surprised to find plenty of heatsink compound on the CPU as that can be a problem with these devices (some manuf. just save money by leaving it missing and your temps suffer). The CMOS battery is a joke, it's just stuck on the ether ports and it doesn't take much to shake it free and it rattles around inside the case. The circuit board is easy to take apart from the case. Aside from the battery it's all neat inside. You can add a fan if you want but I didn't. The mountings are OK, screw the plate to a vertical wall and then push the case towards the plate and down. If someone brushes against the case in the 'up' direction they'll take it off the wall. I suppose this is meant to be somewhere inaccessible. Would have been nice to have something to lock it in place, a catch or something. This of course means it's out of the question to mount it underneath something, because if something pushes it to one side it will drop. Similar if you mount it on top of a box. But the fins mean best airflow in the vertical orientation anyway for fanless operation, so this is how I mounted it, on the side of my patch panel rack. Only problem with that is the cable routing is a bit ugly if you want the passive airflow, but that's an issue with any NUC-like PC. I added Kingston FURY Impact 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) 3200MHz DDR4 CL20 Laptop Memory Kit of 2 KF432S20IBK2/32 also from Amazon and a 250GB WD Blue SSD. I give this device full marks for reliability so far, had it running for >6 months which is just as well as it runs my firewall and if it goes down I lose my network. Haven't tested it at 2.5G yet, only connected 1G devices. A few wrinkles but happy overall. BTW: It took ages to arrive so don't get this if you want something quick!

Had no difficulty setting this up as a pfSense router/firewall, after adding an NVMe drive and 16GB of RAM (I got the barebones version). You do want to remember to enable the power setting in the BIOS to turn it back on automatically if it loses power. That comes disabled by default, and could cause you a lot of trouble if you're going to leave this somewhere where you don't have quick access to it.On a home ADSL connection with multiple users streaming video or downloading, it uses about 2-4% of CPU and around 5% of the RAM. Overkill for most home internet users, but it has more than enough memory to avoid the sort of lockups you'll often get on a lot of consumer routers when you're doing anything that fills up the connection buffers. If you have a router that you keep having to reboot every few days, you know what I mean.The thermal sensor has been reporting about 28C/82F at all times for weeks, with nothing but the passive cooling of the finned aluminum case. The unit is absolutely silent, and usually barely feels warm to the touch. But I'm not pushing that much traffic through it, or doing a lot of complex packet filtering.Not much more to say. It works.

I installed OpenWrt in the router but, as you can observe, the OS is limited to 2.50 GHz for all CPUs. I also tried Lubuntu 22.04 which uses Linux 6.5. This is very strange because the BIOS settings are the default ones. I can see that the BIOS itself has a Turbo multiplier of 44 for P-cores and 33 for E-cores.Windows also fails to reach the maximum CPU frequency. When running Windows, the CPU info section will show as follows:CWWK CW-MBX-AD12Intel Pentium Gold 8505 @ 2.50 GHz1 Processor, 5 Cores, 6 ThreadsSo, this is not an OS issue. I plan to contact CWWK about this issue, but in the mean time, I do not recommend purchasing this model. I don't know if the Core versions will suffer this same issue as the Pentium version.Edit: there is a fixed BIOS in a computer forum. It fixes the clock frequency issue. This confirms that the BIOS is buggy.