6 Ports Firewall Micro Appliance, Mini PC Intel Quad Celeron N5105, Inter i226-V LAN, DDR4 RAM, AES-NI, Router PC, VPN, 8 GB RAM 128 GB SSD

Decent hardware. I use this as PFsense router. Works great for this application..

Aluminum alloy extruded case with flat side panels is very well designed on the outside. Note the two rectangular side panels that have machined side bevels to match the grooves on the extruded main body. Motherboard is solid and has the things you need to set up a nice fanless router (Opnsense/PFsense). The only flaw is that the CPU die does not make close contact with the copper block. To deal with this design issue, a huge amount of thermal paste is used to bridge the mm gap. A better design would have reduced the gap, used spring bolts to hold the center of the motherboard down, so as to give some flex for thermal expansion. If you system thermal throttles or random crashes after getting hot, mind the gap. If you are handy with CPU, paste, shims, this design issue is user correctable.

It pays to watch the pricing on this class of "micro firewall appliance" over a period of time. I got lucky and was able to purchase one of these N5105, 6x2.5gbs Intel NIC units (barebones) for use as a backup OPNsense box while running Fedora server and using as a Layer 7 switch and IoT network monitoring box in the meantime for significantly less than the normal, listed price. I was expecting shipping to take 4-6 weeks, but the unit arrived within 3 days of placing the order. So my take is that the unit was already in this country and it was an "open box" resale rather than 100% brand new. Primary clue was that the included power cord did not fit the unit (seller was very responsive upon contact, and promised to send a replacement pwr cord). Thankfully I had an extra that met the pwr spec I could use temporarily. I upgraded with 16gb ddr4 ram and 512gb NVE sdd, and flashed with Fedora server. One thing to note is that Linux allows all 6 NICs to function as tagged vlan trunk ports, whereas BSD including OPNsense and pfSense, does not allow bridging of non-physical ports meaning that only one port can be a vlan trunk, so if I do need to reflash with OPNsense to replace my current FW box 4 of the NICs would become useless. But for now I'm able to use them all as part of a multi-gig speed home network. I've only had it for a few days, so this review may get an update, but so far, so good.

This machine is built really well. Very configurable bios. I would have given 5 stars, but my only complaint is that it was labeled as being compatible with pfSense however it is not compatible with 2.6.0 which is the current stable release. You need to download the 2.7.0 dev daily snapshot in order for it to detect the network devices. Opensense worked fine with v23.1.Internally it has an available m.2 slot and an extra ddr4 ram slot so it should be easily expandible.