MGCN51N 4*I226V

This is a very nice little box. The designers should be proud. I had no problem loading and running FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE (the unit comes with pfSense on FreeBSD 12.3-STABLE.) I vaguely remember booting Fedora 37 on it from a USB drive. I did not try Windows 10 or 11. I've gotten used to powering devices via USB-C. This platform uses a 36W power brick. It has the fairly recent Intel I225-V network interfaces - those can ramp all the way up to 2.5G. It's taken a while for Linux and FreeBSD to get drivers for this NIC, but they are there now. It is easy to remove the bottom cover plate and get to the M-SATA SSD and the memory. I preserved the original pfSense M-Sata drive and replaced it with one that I could play with. (If you do this yourself, make sure you get an "M-SATA" SSD, not an M.2 SSD.) The issues I found are these: 1. There is a long (up to 30 delay) during booting while it asks whether you want to enter Setup - even if you've set that delay to 1 second. Entering Setup also takes many seconds. Once booted it runs quite well. 2. I have not found a boot-device selection menu - I often boot from USB "live" drives - and going into Setup to do this is a bother. 3. The documentation has errors - such as conflating the LEDs on the left/right sides of the ethernet ports (the Intel i225 nics seem to have tripped a lot of designers on this.) 4. The USB ports are upside down - not that most people will notice or care, but the USB spec does specify which way is supposed to be "up". (I wish this platform had USB-C, including being powered via USB-C.) 5. I saw no way to update the BIOS. I could only boot from USB with drives inserted directly rather than via a USB-3 hub. That's an annoyance for me, but I doubt that many people would even notice. The box is almost all heat sink - but I've never yet felt it more than slightly warm to the touch. There is so much heat sink that there's not much roon to attach an external label.

Been using this for a little under a month (uptime is 28 Days, 17 Hours, 45 Minutes) at time of writing this. No issues with hardware stability using pfsense v2.6.0 since getting this mini PC it has been rock solid and running on average around 46c as per the Dashboard temp gauge. Purchased the version with the 8Gb RAM and 128Gb SSD which is way more than enough for a pfsense appliance. Currently my setup is using this as an edge firewall with snort, pfblocker-NG and a couple other Packages to make sure it's secure with an SSL cert. Placement is Modem>Pfsense>Switch>router>wifi mesh network Have Spectrums 1Gb down 40Mbps up and achieve those speeds across the network with any wired device, on wireless it's average around 600Mbps down and 35Mbps up which is not bad at all and am able to run multiple client devices at the same time streaming 4k video, gaming (Little more on this further down), work from home using multiple VMs and VPN connections without issue. As for the gaming not willing to use UPnP but don't play online multiplayer games so it's not something we need, if needed you can make a VLAN and segregate the consoles. If you are looking to use this and game you will have to configure the NAT settings, by default NAT is restricted on all gaming consoles. The 2.5Gb ports are nice to have but if your other network devices don't support 2.5Gb then you'll be using the lowest speed of those ports. A great youtube channel to follow for some configurations and helpful explanations is TheTecknowledge other wise known as Lawrence Systems. One thing that took me a little longer to figure out (first time having more than a modem/router) was make sure that during the setup your other network hardware has DHCP and NAT off and just let this pfsense box do it, double NAT was a headache and DHCP conflicts can make it hard for RDP or other client share settings to be seen. Set DHCP on AP to disabled if you can and use the LAN ports to connect between each device. If you do connect this to your modem make sure to power down the modem then connect it to the WAN on this box then power modem on, power on pfsense, etc... one at a time so that it can receive the new DHCP lease. Overall this is an awesome device and out of the box is great if you get the pre-installed version. If not would assume you can make it whatever you want by installing a Linux distro, haven't tried that yet.

My order was shipped from China and was received 2 weeks earlier than originally expected, thanks for that! If you are ordering this, you should be VERY competent in computer networking. (A firewall is in no way something for an inexperienced person to try.) Once received, the coin-battery was loose and rattling inside the computer. The double sided tape that was supposed to hold it to the USB ports did not last shipping halfway around the world, so this is something for the manufacturer needs to correct. (The coin-battery is not heavy enough damage the circuittry inside, and it was completely encased in a rubber shrink wrap.) This is the sole reason for 4 stars, not 5 stars. The computer was not damaged because of the unsecured battery. Since I had the device open, I looked the device over. Everything was installed correctly. (By the way, I am A+ certified, and have built many computers in the past.) The RAM was even secured with hot glue. The RAM and M2-drive were not brands known to most US consumers, but they perform respectable. Once the computer was closed, I did some prep work on my home network. I Changed my mesh WIFI setup to access point(AP) mode. (You should not set it as a router when you have a separate firewall device.) I also made sure to turn off the DHCP server on my cable/DSL modem, and set to bridge mode. (A firewall will have its own DHCP server, 2 DHCP servers will be a bad thing.) pfSense was pre-installed on this device, so in theory you could turn it on and be ready to go. But I, and everyone else should do this, rest the BIOS/UEFI settings, and erased the pre-installed pfSense. I Installed pfsense again with my own settings and configuration. Not that I don't trust the computer manufacturers, I just want to have things done MY way. I was able to get everything done in 2 hours. The big question is "Why did I want my own firewall?" Because my cable provider has my modem locked down, and I cannot make any adjustments with the configuration of a piece of equipment that I purchased. Including updating the firmware on the cable modem, which would fix a known security vulnerability! They will not install the new firmware that would fix the security issue on my behalf either. I understand that you don't want unprofessional users messing with updating the firmware on devices, but to force people to leave their home devices vulnerable to a security threat is unacceptable! ( Ahem... off topic...) Instead of purchasing a new cable modem, I decided to get a firewall that will block the known (and many unknown) security vulnerabilities. The firewall costs about 30% more than a new cable modem, and pfSense is constantly updated, open sourced (so everyone can see what is happening "under the hood" of the program), and free. The new cable modem would also be locked down by the cable company. The four 2.5Gb ethernet ports make this device ready for the long term future. 1Gbe has been standard for 10 years or so, and we are just starting the transition to 2.5Gb. And 2.5Gb can use CAT5e (or CAT6 and higher) cable, which has been the standard cabling installation since 1998-2000. The Intel 5105 CPU is a great choice to do deep packet inspection and not slow down your connection. 8GB RAM and 128GB M2 are both overkill for a firewall, but allows for other things to get installed alongside pfSense in the future. 30 days in and I am not having any issues and the machine is working fine. I have an energy monitoring device installed in my circuit breaker panel (for solar panels) and this small computer draws 20-40 watts, depending upon the load. Usually 22 watts.

Our family has recently switched its network router infrastructure from a mainstream vendor to open platforms running OPNsense and OpenWRT. After successful testing of OPNsense on an older Dell PC we wanted to move to a lower power and fan-less appliance. The MOGINSOK appliance has proved to be a perfect match for our needs. The average power consumption running our configuration is now 7 watts (down from 30). During initial testing, we did hit an issue with the mSATA device. The vendor was very responsive and the issue was quickly diagnosed and resolved. We just purchased and successfully installed a second MOGINSOK appliance for our vacation home.

so, in short, its a show-stopper. I insist that my installs be able to work with DOS disk partitions (not gpt) and with a regular /dev/sda1 (or nvme0n1p1) partition and NOT that uefi nonsense. this is NOT windows.. so, I struggle to get into bios. its not DEL but its ESC key. and the default vendor install turns off all delays at boot so it was a real struggle to get to bios. I try to disable secure boot and install regular linux via usb. I finally get in but it insists on it being GPT and I wont accept that. (it does not have to be, either; grub works just fine on dos and 4 primary parts like the old days). this system is not fun to work with, either. internally the wifi card slot is under the m2 ssd slot. I find that annoying and for heat, its a problem. even routing wires for antennas is going to be harder than it has to be. I had hopes for this box but its not worth the high cost of it, for what it is. and the state of pfsense is pretty bad too, I have to say. trying to connect to comcast, it would NOT get the proper dhcp from the isp. it should be 76.* but it kept seeing 192.168.100 nonsense. that should never happen. I tried for hours and could not get simple wan routing to work. I gave up on pfsense. have not tried opensense yet but pfsense is a loser since it cant even do simple comcast dhcp client. overall, a disappointing experience. the hardware looks like it COULD work, but its just underwhelming and a time sync, which I dont want to throw more time at, at this point.

Just like some of the other reviews, my unit died within the 24 hours of first power on. I cycled in a known working western digital SSD and known working RAM and it fired up and has been running OPNsense flawlessly ever since. I was going to return the unit but didn’t want to bother once I got it working. That said, while you absolutely shouldn’t need to replace the stock SSD, definitely count on doing so. As far as stars are concerned, I’m going with three out of five because the unit works flawlessly, except the fact that it died immediately and I had to use my own parts for the repair.

First of all, if you've previously bought a fanless pfSense router from a Chinese vender, this one is *significantly* larger than the previous one. The size is because it has a lot more fins on it than the smaller routers, so many fins that it barely gets warm with my gigabit Comcast cable Internet. Needless to say, don't buy this thing if you don't *thoroughly* understand networking. This is a professional tool for network professionals (or wanna be network professionals), not something that the random person off the street should be buying. To use it with my Comcast xFi service, I had to put the Comcast-provided router into passthrough mode (which does away with the WiFi on the Comcast-provided router), which also meant I had to add WiFi access point for my home network in bridge mode rather than NAT mode. I then could set up a dynamic DNS service in pfSense and CNAME it on my DNS so I could set up OpenVPN to get into my home network from anywhere in the world. If you don't know what any of this is, go buy a consumer router, not this thing. So anyhow, now I have my OpenVPN VPN set up on my laptops and on this router and can VPN in to my security system and video recorder system at home any time that I wish from wherever in the world I am travelling. I can unlock my front door with my home automation system if I need someone to come in to e.g. repair something, and I can watch them walk around my house on the video cameras. None of that was possible with the Comcast-provided router that came with my Xfi service. So. It's doing what it's supposed to do, and it's staying cool doing it. What else would you want from a pfSense router system?

This is a pretty decent little piece of hardware that runs on the warm side. I'm running Openwrt on the device and using it as a router. It works well enough, but the real issue is the 2.5 GbE ports get terrible throughput. I have a 2.5 GbE WAN connection into my home, and on other hardware, I get about 2350 gbps. On this hardware, it caps out at about 1800 gbps. I could try disabling c-states in the BIOS, but then this thing would be hot enough to cook an egg.