Purchased a Minisforum X35G

Just when I was thinking of what gift to buy for myself for the Christmas holiday, I came to an Indiegogo crowd funding project: Minisforum X35G.

And I suddenly realized that I need to use a mini PC to replace my 5-year-old Lenovo Y50P laptop running as my side router. I have the following reasons to deprecate my laptop:

1. It was a gaming laptop (from 2015), so power consumption is not low.
2. It was a laptop after all, not suppose to run 24×7 like a router or server.
3. I may need to use the laptop, even boot into a Windows OS for some tasks/tests, then all devices connected to this side router will be disconnected from the Internet.
4. I setup LUKS encrypted disk earlier, every time I need to type password when boot / reboot.
5. Fedora 31 is installed, now deprecated.

Mini PCs are perfect for this task. I know using a Mini PC as a side router is a little overkill, with the new server I am able to run more stuff in our little machine.

The X35G has a 10th generation Intel CPU i3-1005G1.

Let’s take a look at the little thing.

The front and side:

The back:

This little machine is about the size of Mac Mini, the entire chassis is made of aluminium, the hand feel is great!

I am not going to go through the specs, you can find it out on its official website.

The version I got is the cheapest one from Indiegogo, which does not come with a M.2 NVMe disk because I have a left-over NVMe disk from my junk desktop PC. The disassembly process is a little tricky, the NVMe slot is at the back of the motherboard which you need to unscrew all screws to see, but still, it is a good practise for enthusiasts like me.

At work, I have been using CentOS, Amazon Linux, RHEL and Ubuntu the most of the time, I do want to get a taste in ArchLinux. The OS I installed is Manjaro Architect 20.0.3. The boot time is about 10s.

UnixBench mark: 3467.8. I can barely hear the fan on full load. My furnace is even louder than that.

Dhrystone 2 using register variables      133599372.3 lps   (10.0 s, 7 samples)
Double-Precision Whetstone                    26195.5 MWIPS (9.9 s, 7 samples)
Execl Throughput                              15115.9 lps   (29.8 s, 2 samples)
File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks       1207122.0 KBps  (30.0 s, 2 samples)
File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks          337511.7 KBps  (30.0 s, 2 samples)
File Copy 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks       3982041.8 KBps  (30.0 s, 2 samples)
Pipe Throughput                             4874841.9 lps   (10.0 s, 7 samples)
Pipe-based Context Switching                 752660.2 lps   (10.0 s, 7 samples)
Process Creation                              31625.7 lps   (30.0 s, 2 samples)
Shell Scripts (1 concurrent)                  10665.2 lpm   (60.0 s, 2 samples)
Shell Scripts (8 concurrent)                   1553.2 lpm   (60.1 s, 2 samples)
System Call Overhead                        4602072.3 lps   (10.0 s, 7 samples)

System Benchmarks Index Values               BASELINE       RESULT    INDEX
Dhrystone 2 using register variables         116700.0  133599372.3  11448.1
Double-Precision Whetstone                       55.0      26195.5   4762.8
Execl Throughput                                 43.0      15115.9   3515.3
File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks          3960.0    1207122.0   3048.3
File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks            1655.0     337511.7   2039.3
File Copy 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks          5800.0    3982041.8   6865.6
Pipe Throughput                               12440.0    4874841.9   3918.7
Pipe-based Context Switching                   4000.0     752660.2   1881.7
Process Creation                                126.0      31625.7   2510.0
Shell Scripts (1 concurrent)                     42.4      10665.2   2515.4
Shell Scripts (8 concurrent)                      6.0       1553.2   2588.7
System Call Overhead                          15000.0    4602072.3   3068.0
                                                                   ========
System Benchmarks Index Score                                        3467.8

The memory used with all the existing customized service is: 269MB / 15.4GB. I have a lot to explore!