Tuofudun mini PC - anyone have experience?

[Johno]

I see a lot of posts on the web about folk building PfSense and OPSense with Protectli Vault passively cooled mini PCs, but I've seen another better-specced brand called Tuofudun which are cheaper and better equipped hardware-wise.

Anyone used Tuofudun mini PCs?

 

[Spud]

I see a lot of posts on the web about folk building PfSense and OPSense with Protectli Vault passively cooled mini PCs, but I've seen another better-specced brand called Tuofudun which are cheaper and better equipped hardware-wise.

Anyone used Tuofudun mini PCs?

Tuofudun, Hunsn and Topton are resellers of CWWK products, I believe. There's a lot of discussion about these on the Serve The Home forum.

I brought back a CWWK N305 from Asia recently. It's early days but I'm pleased with it: I'd seen numerous comments about gaps between the CPU and heatsink, where people had to take the board out and use MX6 cooling paste and sometimes also copper shims. I expected to do this, but found the CPU sitting nicely flush to the heatsink with a cooling pad between, and it's been good out of the box.

The case has been at the upper end of warm with Proxmox running OPNsense, Windows 11, Debian with about a dozen Docker containers, plus Home Assistant. I put in 32GB of Crucial DDR5 4800Mhz, which was a good move since it gets picked up no trouble. To keep temps down, I went for the SK Hynix P31 Gold NVMe (great reviews).

I'm getting my head around OPNsense, which I have running on 4/8 cores. NordVPN on Wireguard reaches about 900 Mbit on my 1Gb connection, which is great. Security-wise, I don't expose more than a couple of ports, so I'm interested in a lightweight IPS such as CrowdSec. I've started testing it together with the freebie Zenarmor. If ZA gets too resource-heavy, I might give it the boot.

 

[Johno]

Tuofudun, Hunsn and Topton are resellers of CWWK products, I believe. There's a lot of discussion about these on the Serve The Home forum.

I brought back a CWWK N305 from Asia recently. It's early days but I'm pleased with it: I'd seen numerous comments about gaps between the CPU and heatsink, where people had to take the board out and use MX6 cooling paste and sometimes also copper shims. I expected to do this, but found the CPU sitting nicely flush to the heatsink with a cooling pad between, and it's been good out of the box.

The case has been at the upper end of warm with Proxmox running OPNsense, Windows 11, Debian with about a dozen Docker containers, plus Home Assistant. I put in 32GB of Crucial DDR5 4800Mhz, which was a good move since it gets picked up no trouble. To keep temps down, I went for the SK Hynix P31 Gold NVMe (great reviews).

I'm getting my head around OPNsense, which I have running on 4/8 cores. NordVPN on Wireguard reaches about 900 Mbit on my 1Gb connection, which is great. Security-wise, I don't expose more than a couple of ports, so I'm interested in a lightweight IPS such as CrowdSec. I've started testing it together with the freebie Zenarmor. If ZA gets too resource-heavy, I might give it the boot.

Thanks, the Protectli kit I looked at only seems to work with DDR4 memory so that fact the CWWK kit uses DDR5 at high clock speeds is great. Like you've done, I'm also thinking of installing lots of RAM so as to host VMs in Proxmox. I'll browse the Serve The Home forums for further info.

 

[Spud]

Thanks, the Protectli kit I looked at only seems to work with DDR4 memory so that fact the CWWK kit uses DDR5 at high clock speeds is great. Like you've done, I'm also thinking of installing lots of RAM so as to host VMs in Proxmox. I'll browse the Serve The Home forums for further info.

BTW, they don't ship with manuals, so the forum is a lifeline. For example, I just installed a SATA SSD in addition to my NVMe, but I couldn't get it showing in the bios. After a lot of searching, I found out I had to remove a bracket for a second NVMe install in the WiFi slot. Now the SSD works fine. However, it's better to finalise the hardware before installing Proxmox - adding the SSD bumped my NIC numberings up by 1, which took a bit of effort to sort out.

 

[Cake]

I see a lot of posts on the web about folk building PfSense and OPSense with Protectli Vault passively cooled mini PCs, but I've seen another better-specced brand called Tuofudun which are cheaper and better equipped hardware-wise.

Anyone used Tuofudun mini PCs?

Your going in the right direction regarding mini-pc's from china. I have used qotom in the past, now I upgraded a bit to some other brand from china. These things are way better then the consumer type routers in the retail stores and around the same price. One of 3 things I think happened to my first one after years of trouble free, bad capacitor, lightning strike nearby, or heat finally got to it. It was for sure a hardware failure on the board itself.

 

[coxhaus]

Instead of buying an additional mini-PC I use my older Dell PCs when I buy a new PC. I usually buy PCs with low wattage CPUs now. If I did not then I just replace the CPU with a 35-watt CPU and use it for a router.