CWWK Mini PC Intel N Series 4 Core N100 Fanless Mini Host Soft Route (Barebone)

Purchased the barebone kit with my own memory and NVMe drive (Silicon Power 256GB NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen3x4 2280 SSD and Crucial RAM 8GB DDR5 4800MHz CL40 Laptop Memory). The mini pc was packaged well and plastic wrapped. I have installed opnsense and am using it as a firewall/router. The memory and ssd were very easy to install, just unscrew the bottom cover. Installation of opnsense went smoothly. It detected the USB boot drive right away, I didn't even have to go into the bios. Everything has been running smoothly. It feels a little warm, but not hot. I would definitely recommend it.

Bought the bare bones version to run a home installation of pfsense. The box works well with pfsense and several of the pfsense cpu intensive add on packages. Plenty of cpu and it runs cool. Good mechanical design, easy to take apart and has a substantial heatsink case design. Did have a problem with Corsair memory getting sporadic errors. Ordered Crucial memory replacement and the errors disappeared. Did not seriously troubleshoot the memory errors but theory is that it was a timing issue and not a real memory problem. It has been my experience that Crucial is more conservative than Corsair is with timing parameters.

It would be great if all the NICs work. the 3rd NIC was dead from the start, the forth one gives lights but can’t be configured. So it is dead and does not get recognized by OS. I guess 2 out of 4 is the quality I bought. Correction. They are all dead. “No carrier”. Wish I could return it. But I had it too long before I could configure it as a firewall.

I bought the barebones kit and ddr5 ram separately. Extremely easy to open (4 screws) and install. If you have never installed sodimms you have to put the ram in at an angle like nvme and then push it down. 16g crucial ddr5 5600 cas 46 actually runs at 5600 cas 40 so that was a nice little boost. No memory errors. System booted right into bios no issues. There are a lot of options in the bios which is nice. Installing proxmox was easy. The only thing I got was acpi errors at boot, but it didn’t effect proxmox from starting up and running normally. I think the Linux kernel might not have the updated intel n100 hardware accounted for yet, but it didn’t have any actual effect on proxmox running without issue. Bios is from April of this year out of the box. Had some questions and the seller responded in a few hours, really responsive and knowledgeable. If you buy one of these mini pc’s CWWK is the way to go. I think they are actually the manufacturer of the hardware. Prices were great too compared to the other companies that clone their stuff and resell like Maginsok and Kingnovy. Overall would recommend the entire experience and hardware.

I bought this and also one of those little mini cubes with 4x 2.5g Intel nics as well at the same time, this one had the N100 (only avail at the time) and the mini cube I got with the N305 cpu. The BIOS in both are a "hot mess" so to speak but I was easily able to update the cube while this one was outdated and couldn't really find a "new" version. My plan was to run Proxmox on both with either pfSense or OPNsense (i'm running OPN now)... and the cube has 16gb of ram built on while I got ""Crucial RAM 16GB DDR5 4800MHz'' for this unit. It runs fine, don't get me wrong but there's a bug or glitch in the BIOS that throttles the CPU speed and you have to DIG.. and DIG, and reboot and test to get the CPU/ cores to boost to regular speed. Also, in Proxmox and other OS's there's ALOT of memory and IO latency while on the N305 its fast 0% issues. I tried it for weeks and tested under different enviroments plus the problem is, there's only 3 TRUE hardware NICs, while the 4th is USB tied... So in my opinion, go for something else or one of the many little mini cubes out there (they seem to draw less power too).. Also, i did do the removal/ heat sink compound on this one and it does make it run cooler, the junk they use is like a putty and useless so if you get one and plan to keep it, def take it apart and put something else on there. One thing I do like about it is the size and how you can stuff it full of drives and expansion, etc.. something you can't do on a mini cube.