Topton Intel N5095 4x 2.5GbE Firewall Review

Living in Europe, I do appreciate your concern for the power consumption of the device!

However, I’m not sure your advice is sound.

Short variant: in an appliance context the max power consumption isn’t nearly as significant as the average power consumption for the job its doing–and that may be neglegable for those different bins.

Long variant:

All these Jasper Lake variants (perhaps even the dual cores) are most likely made from the same set of dice and just binned for outright defects, higher voltage requirements or even pure market segmentation.

In the case of voltage bins, that’s typically chips requiring higher voltages to overcome less than perfect transistores or interconnects, but it could also be chips that simply won’t run reliably at higher clocks.

In the first case an N5095 is liklely to consume more Watts than a N6005 at identical CPU core clocks. In the second case there might be no difference, though typically the two cases aren’t really isolated from one another.

These being 24×7 appliances, idle power consumption is really the bigger factor and the principal reason you should pay close attention to the power supply and it’s efficiency. Yet for the Jasper Lake SoCs, I’d expect very little difference. The difference in power consumption only really comes into play as these chips rev to near maximum clocks. And there somewhat like its Rocket Lake cousins, Jasper Lakes is happy to go into power consumption territory where no Atom has gone before: My J5005 based systems tend to stick pretty close to the 10Watt TDP mark they officially have, while my Jasper Lake N6005 NUC has been observed to really burn the 28Watt PL2 TDP the BIOS allocates by default.

Well, unlike my fully passive J5005 Mini-ITX systems (which never throttle!), it also has a fan…

But at least on the NUC BIOS you can tell it to keep it down and make do with 12 Watts PL2 and 10 Watts PL1, at which point it sure won’t be using more than a N5095, but it might not be much faster either (well Atoms are no speed daemons anyway).

Essentially with the N6005 you get a bit more choice and flexibility: you can let it rip near the maximum speed at the cost of the extra power or you can tone it down, if efficiency really were your top concern. You can’t change your mind with the 5095 and open up that throttle once you notice that that nice new broadband bandwidth update fails to make it through your firewall.

But even without restricting the BIOS TDP setting, chances are the practical difference in terms of power consumption between the top bin Jasper Lake and its lower variants won’t be noticeable, because if you operate them near those top clocks for extended periods of time, you’re most likely using the wrong platform: at 28 Watts a Core mobile part will give you more performance per Watt because that’s operating near its peak efficiency point there, than an Atom that’s left that point far behind and has little left to give except heat.

A couple of years ago I had to migrate from an J1900 Atom to a Kaby Lake i7-7700T Core CPU (35 Watt TDP) for my pfSense firewall , because with all the Suricata rulesets active, an Atom was quite overwhelmed and throttling the broadband bandwith, so be sure to measure realistically before you buy.