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XG Home + Realtek NICs in 2021?

Jason Adle

Hi everyone,

I'm in the market for a mini PC unit to run XG Home on my network and I've come across a few worthy contenders (in terms of price, having quad-core CPUs, etc.) but they seem to all be running some form of Realtek NIC. One unit in particular I'm interested in (the QOTOM Q160S) appears to be running Realtek 8111E NICs.

A lot of the posts I've seen are at least a year old, if not older, so I want to know definitively; will using XG Home with Realtek NICs result in a bad time? If the choice is between dual-core Core i3 with Intel NICs vs a quad-core Celeron N1360 with Realtek NICs, which one would be the "better" choice?



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  • +1

    Hi,

    the issue with the realtek NICs is they offload processing to the CPU which then becomes a bottleneck for throughput. If your internet connection is say 100/40 or smaller and your number of connected devices is quite small then the realteks will be okay otherwise you need to consider intel or broadcom. CPU should be the fastest you can get, though not the highest performance. 

    None of the devices I reviewed actually talk about NIC types and some of the descriptions are a little strange same box with an i3 and a celeron, not different model same  box.

    ian

  • 0 in reply to rfcat_vk

    Ok gotcha. I'm moving soon and I'm probably going to get 150/15 min and 150/150 max, with about 15 devices (5 of which will need to stream or video call), but I do quite a lot of streaming video and video calling. Based on that, would I run into issues?

    Would you say if I had to choose should the priority be a faster processor or an Intel NIC? (Both would be possible but out of my budget)

    Since it's mostly me anyway I'd mostly be using XG to separate my trusted devices, IoT devices, and guest devices across VLANs, with web filtering and ATP on all networks, and IPS on the IoT and guest network.

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  • 0 in reply to rfcat_vk

    Ok gotcha. I'm moving soon and I'm probably going to get 150/15 min and 150/150 max, with about 15 devices (5 of which will need to stream or video call), but I do quite a lot of streaming video and video calling. Based on that, would I run into issues?

    Would you say if I had to choose should the priority be a faster processor or an Intel NIC? (Both would be possible but out of my budget)

    Since it's mostly me anyway I'd mostly be using XG to separate my trusted devices, IoT devices, and guest devices across VLANs, with web filtering and ATP on all networks, and IPS on the IoT and guest network.

Children
  • 0 in reply to Jason Adle

    Hi Jason,

    video and audio calling do not need much overhead once the connection is established. I would go for the intel NICs, 8gb of ram (XG will only use 6gb) and a 128gb disk.

    Also the XG only does L3 VLANs at this stage.

    Ian

  • 0 in reply to rfcat_vk

    Hi Ian,

    Got it. In terms of processor, would a processor like the i3-4010Y or a Celeron 3855U be enough (both dual-core, the i3 is 4 threads though) be enough or would I need to step up to a quad-core processor?

    J

  • 0 in reply to Jason Adle

    A quad core is nice, but not essential, the dual core with hyper threading will work with capacity to spare and is not the preferred processor but if that is what you can get on your budget then that is it. The only issue really is the GUI update performance that is why I have an e3 up from a fast atom because I like to fiddle and try various issues posed in these forums.

    ian