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3 Jan 2025 : CWWK i3 N305 Fanless Mini PC first impressions #
Late last year I invested in a CWWK Fanless Mini PC to replace my previous home server. It took me about a month of deliberation before I finally settled on this over other potential options available, so I wanted to share my initial experiences with it.
This particular device is the snappily named "12th Gen Intel Firewall Mini PC Alder Lake i3 N305 8 Core Fanless Soft Router Proxmox DDR5 4800MHz 4xi226-V 2.5G". It seems to be available under a range of different brand names, but I believe CWWK is the manufacturer.
I've spent the last three or four days configuring the hardware and software on it so that it's just as I want it. Here are the main things I've configured on it and which I plan to make most use of:
But before I talk about my experiences with the device itself, first let me say something about its delivery. I ordered the device direct from CWWK on 2nd December. Between then and the 17th December I heard nothing from them, which gave me considerable pause for thought and made me rather nervous.
The website looks legitimate at first, but the more you look at it the more dubious it looks. Support is provided through a GMail address and the shop still shows Shopify branding (the Social media links point to Shopify defaults). While the support questions I asked before ordering were answered swiftly, following my purchase my questions went unanswered. If you search the web there are several automated reports of the cwwk.net site being bogus. On the other hand you'll also find forum posts claiming that everything went fine when ordering from them.
I'd resigned myself to the server never arriving and me losing my money when on 17th December I received an alert claiming a package was heading my way, along with a tracking link. The package eventually arrived from China ten days later with server and everything else enclosed, intact, working and just as expected. So, apparently not a scam after all!
Nail-biting period of angst aside, CWWK fully delivered my order and I don't regret that I bought it direct from them. But I'm just a random person on the Internet, so if you're thinking of doing the same please don't take this as being any sort of evidence!
The best way to describe the hardware itself is solid. Heavy and solid. It looks a bit like a standard metal-encased mini PC, but sporting a wild haircut. That's because this thing needs a big-ol' heat-sink to dissipate excess energy during periods of heavy use.
It's also bristling with ports: four 2.5 G Ethernet ports, eight USB-A ports, HDMI, DisplayPort, a micro SD Card reader and power in. There are no USB-C ports.
Some notes about this configuration: there are other very similar devices available that have USB-C ports. If I planned to use this as a desktop replacement I'd absolutely want USB-C ports. I'd want it powered over USB-C. I wouldn't want any USB-A ports at all.
But I plan to use this as a headless server, equivalent of a cloud device, so I expect to plug devices into it only very rarely. So for my purposes the lack of USB-C isn't a problem. But I'd very much expect others to feel differently about this.
Although it's great to have 2.5 G Ethernet, in practice I can't really make use of the full bandwidth on my home network. The Intel i226-V network controllers that provide the 2.5 G support are too new to be picked up by anything except relatively new Linux kernels, which is something to be aware of.
For software, I'm running Ubuntu 24.04, which is the first LTS release to support the Ethernet ports. With this, everything is working just great.
From a performance point of view I've so far found it to be excellent. Desktop performance is completely usable, although that's not something I'm concerned about. More importantly for me I've found performance as a network server to be great. To be honest, my previous server had become noticeably slow at serving Nextcloud pages. That had an Intel Atom N2800 CPU with two cores, compared to the N305 in this device with eight cores. That's a big jump up so it's not really surprising it feels so swift.
Being fanless you can't hear any activity from it unless it's the dead of night and you stick your ear right up against it. But the chassis does give off some heat. While idle it stays mildly warm — not warm enough to be comfortable bath temperature — but during burst usage it gets a lot warmer. It's never hot though and placing my hand firmly on it has yet to feel uncomfortable.
I bought the device bare-bones for $327.40 including the expansion board that increases storage to five M.2 NVMe slots. I spent £141.34 on 16 GiB of SO-DIMM RAM, a 500 GB Gen4 NVMe SSD (4 700 MB/s) for the operating system and a 1 TB Gen4 SSD (5 150 MB/s) for data. So the complete package set me back £400.
My last device ran for 12 years before failing, so it's a bit early to rush to any judgement, but if this one last a couple of years I'll consider that to be money well spent. Right now, it's doing the job I bought it for perfectly and I'm very happy with it.
So I'm happy. But there's an obvious follow-up question to all of this: would I have been equally happy with the other devices I considered buying?
I made fans a deal-breaker during the decision-making process and I stand by this decision. This is my first server that's had no moving parts and I'm happy with the silence and reassurance this brings. When I entered the world of computing in the nineties moving parts were a rarity and it gratifies me that by the time I leave the world of computing we'll have returned to the same paradigm.
On the other hand, it's harder to justify my decision to go with an N305 processor when I suspect an N100 would have been more than sufficient and would probably have ended up more power-efficient as well. Eight cores sounds great, but in practice four probably would have been enough.
In particular, while the solid metal case of this CWWK device is one of its best features, if I'd dropped down to an N100 processor this may not have been necessary. In summary, with an N305 the metal case is probably wise, but less so for one of the more power-efficient CPUs.
I have to conclude that many of the other devices would have worked just fine as well. Of the twelve I considered, it looks like the HUNSN BM34, iKoolCore R2 Max and Shuttle XPC slim DL30N would all have been just fine. Some of the others would have been fine were it not for the fact they had fans, came with Windows pre-installed, or lacked the space for two drives.
But clearly these are all rather personal to my requirements. It's easy to conclude that we live in a world of rich possibilities. There are numerous great options for low-power home servers and having one of these can offer a genuine quality of life improvement.
This particular device is the snappily named "12th Gen Intel Firewall Mini PC Alder Lake i3 N305 8 Core Fanless Soft Router Proxmox DDR5 4800MHz 4xi226-V 2.5G". It seems to be available under a range of different brand names, but I believe CWWK is the manufacturer.
I've spent the last three or four days configuring the hardware and software on it so that it's just as I want it. Here are the main things I've configured on it and which I plan to make most use of:
- SSH
- Apache 2
- Let's Encrypt
- Nextcloud
- File sharing
- Shared calendar
- Contact sharing
- Phone backup
- Gitolite
- Subversion
- Jitsi
- OpenVPN
- ZNC
- BIND
- Offsite backups
- Various Cron jobs
But before I talk about my experiences with the device itself, first let me say something about its delivery. I ordered the device direct from CWWK on 2nd December. Between then and the 17th December I heard nothing from them, which gave me considerable pause for thought and made me rather nervous.
The website looks legitimate at first, but the more you look at it the more dubious it looks. Support is provided through a GMail address and the shop still shows Shopify branding (the Social media links point to Shopify defaults). While the support questions I asked before ordering were answered swiftly, following my purchase my questions went unanswered. If you search the web there are several automated reports of the cwwk.net site being bogus. On the other hand you'll also find forum posts claiming that everything went fine when ordering from them.
I'd resigned myself to the server never arriving and me losing my money when on 17th December I received an alert claiming a package was heading my way, along with a tracking link. The package eventually arrived from China ten days later with server and everything else enclosed, intact, working and just as expected. So, apparently not a scam after all!
Nail-biting period of angst aside, CWWK fully delivered my order and I don't regret that I bought it direct from them. But I'm just a random person on the Internet, so if you're thinking of doing the same please don't take this as being any sort of evidence!
The best way to describe the hardware itself is solid. Heavy and solid. It looks a bit like a standard metal-encased mini PC, but sporting a wild haircut. That's because this thing needs a big-ol' heat-sink to dissipate excess energy during periods of heavy use.
It's also bristling with ports: four 2.5 G Ethernet ports, eight USB-A ports, HDMI, DisplayPort, a micro SD Card reader and power in. There are no USB-C ports.
Some notes about this configuration: there are other very similar devices available that have USB-C ports. If I planned to use this as a desktop replacement I'd absolutely want USB-C ports. I'd want it powered over USB-C. I wouldn't want any USB-A ports at all.
But I plan to use this as a headless server, equivalent of a cloud device, so I expect to plug devices into it only very rarely. So for my purposes the lack of USB-C isn't a problem. But I'd very much expect others to feel differently about this.
Although it's great to have 2.5 G Ethernet, in practice I can't really make use of the full bandwidth on my home network. The Intel i226-V network controllers that provide the 2.5 G support are too new to be picked up by anything except relatively new Linux kernels, which is something to be aware of.
For software, I'm running Ubuntu 24.04, which is the first LTS release to support the Ethernet ports. With this, everything is working just great.
From a performance point of view I've so far found it to be excellent. Desktop performance is completely usable, although that's not something I'm concerned about. More importantly for me I've found performance as a network server to be great. To be honest, my previous server had become noticeably slow at serving Nextcloud pages. That had an Intel Atom N2800 CPU with two cores, compared to the N305 in this device with eight cores. That's a big jump up so it's not really surprising it feels so swift.
Being fanless you can't hear any activity from it unless it's the dead of night and you stick your ear right up against it. But the chassis does give off some heat. While idle it stays mildly warm — not warm enough to be comfortable bath temperature — but during burst usage it gets a lot warmer. It's never hot though and placing my hand firmly on it has yet to feel uncomfortable.
I bought the device bare-bones for $327.40 including the expansion board that increases storage to five M.2 NVMe slots. I spent £141.34 on 16 GiB of SO-DIMM RAM, a 500 GB Gen4 NVMe SSD (4 700 MB/s) for the operating system and a 1 TB Gen4 SSD (5 150 MB/s) for data. So the complete package set me back £400.
My last device ran for 12 years before failing, so it's a bit early to rush to any judgement, but if this one last a couple of years I'll consider that to be money well spent. Right now, it's doing the job I bought it for perfectly and I'm very happy with it.
So I'm happy. But there's an obvious follow-up question to all of this: would I have been equally happy with the other devices I considered buying?
I made fans a deal-breaker during the decision-making process and I stand by this decision. This is my first server that's had no moving parts and I'm happy with the silence and reassurance this brings. When I entered the world of computing in the nineties moving parts were a rarity and it gratifies me that by the time I leave the world of computing we'll have returned to the same paradigm.
On the other hand, it's harder to justify my decision to go with an N305 processor when I suspect an N100 would have been more than sufficient and would probably have ended up more power-efficient as well. Eight cores sounds great, but in practice four probably would have been enough.
In particular, while the solid metal case of this CWWK device is one of its best features, if I'd dropped down to an N100 processor this may not have been necessary. In summary, with an N305 the metal case is probably wise, but less so for one of the more power-efficient CPUs.
I have to conclude that many of the other devices would have worked just fine as well. Of the twelve I considered, it looks like the HUNSN BM34, iKoolCore R2 Max and Shuttle XPC slim DL30N would all have been just fine. Some of the others would have been fine were it not for the fact they had fans, came with Windows pre-installed, or lacked the space for two drives.
But clearly these are all rather personal to my requirements. It's easy to conclude that we live in a world of rich possibilities. There are numerous great options for low-power home servers and having one of these can offer a genuine quality of life improvement.
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