Kettop Barebones Desktop PC Mi5105L4 with Intel Celeron N5105 Quad-Core 2.9GHz, 4x 2.5G LAN, WiFi, Fanless Mini PC - Perfect for Home Office, Network Gateway, and Lightweight Computing

This device came yesterday so just about 2 weeks after ordering. It came about a week earlier than expected. It was well packaged and all perfectly intact. I decided to plug it in immediately just to ensure it was ‘alive’ and wow! It let out what I can only describe as an almighty scream that would wake the dead. Even had the cat meowing and running upstairs into my office to find out what the commotion was. After my heart attack I composed myself and unplugged it.Now you may want to bare in mind that this thing comes with no literature and is not a standard PC so there is no telling what that sound may mean. Though it was a long way from the docile beeps of a more familiar motherboards, I’m well aware booting without memory is always going to give a warning tone of some kind so put it down to this.I installed memory and booted and it came up much more favourably with a single deafening beep, display on screen and everything apparently fine… but wait! It went into a UEFI Shell! Now a UEFI shell prompt is (for the most part) outside my field of expertise and my heart sank when I saw this especially since the normal ‘exit’ command which should take you back to the UEFI GUI, didn’t work. Long story short; after a bit of googling which didn’t pay off, I just started randomly trying different escape sequences at boot, and ‘ESC’ (who knew) was the correct one and into the standard UEFI I went.The BIOS has more Menus and configurations options than I have ever seen, some of them I’ve never encountered in a standard PC BIOS nor do I know what they do. This wasn’t a mission on configuration research so I simply moved on since, all those you’d normally encounter are for the most part there. After taking a few minutes to go through it, I saved and exited. Before I go further I will outline the problems I came across since I’d rather get them out the way.The cable supplied has the right angle bend in the wrong direction. This isn't the cable listed show with the stock photos that shows the item, which has the bend in the opposite and correct direction. At any rate this came already plugged in and you can see from the photo that is leaning inward because of the pressure the chassis is exerting on the connected SATA cable. This is definitely NOT acceptable. I simply could not leave it like this knowing there is a distinct likelihood the strain would eventually cause the port to fail and thus take my firewall offline. I managed to find an alternate SATA cable (blue in the picture) I’d taken out of a Dell PC that had the right angle bend in the correct direction, but it didn’t have an integrated power cable like the one supplied so I would have had to jig a power connector to make it work. The Sellers really should have supplied the same one as show in the photo which has the correct bend orientation, as the one supplied is unusable. Additionally if the SSD is mounted with the on the back plate in the position provided by the pre drilled holes, the plate cannot be fitted as there isn't enough space between the onboard SATA connector and the plug for the SSD. This is a bit of a design flaw. you can either drill new holes or use double sided tape to relocate the SSD, but because the cable is so short you don't really have much play on where to seat it. What you really need is a slight longer cable and holes predrilled in the correct mounting position. It’s quite a significant layout oversight if you intend to use an SSD.The other obvious issue is the beeper/sounder on it is just way too loud. It’s like an air-raid siren. Also it comes without any documentation or certifications, so you totally on your own with support. Even a BIOS update isn’t possible.As always I loaded Windows first. It’s generally gives me a much better Idea of performance, compatibility and stability. I did the Windows install with the SSD hanging outside the case, just so you know. It installed really quickly, about 5 minutes even with the stupid Windows questions, and unlike my first unit all the network ports worked. I then wiped it and loaded Pfsense without issue and ran a few checks. After this initial testing (and a lot of searching) I dug out an M.2 drive I initially couldn’t find and used that instead since the SSD option was completely out. The install was quite a bit faster and PfSense was installed in less than 2 minutes.This unit has a much better thermal orientation than my first one. The heatsink design is far superior, with a larger surface area and far greater heat dissipation. The unit never got past slightly warm but also the CPU temp is still only 36 degrees. I turned off two of the four CPU cores in the BIOS since there simply isn’t the need for this amount of processing horsepower, but even so this is a far cooler unit.I’ve now replaced my BT Smart Hub 2 and this thing is just working happily. I’d dropped my BT fibre Connection speed to 150mbps a while back to save money, so I can’t exactly stress it with gigabit throughput test, but I’ve done some initial testing with a variety of connections from my phone, 3 PC’s, 3 TV’s streaming, all connected simultaneously using a variety of connections (two via Warzone from PC’s) though no VPN it must be said. CPU has been below 6%. I’m currently using it as I normally would and CPU is at 1%.This is day one, and I’ll do some more testing during the week since I need to make some policy and config changes which will have it working somewhat harder, and this was the main reason for the purchase, but so far this unit seems just fine.I will update I a week or so, but aside from the issues I’ve already highlighted, I’m quite pleased.Been running this for just under two weeks without issue. Have put installed PFBlockerNG added some access rules etc and its been fine. Since I don't have a gigabit internet connection I setup a subnet on int Eth2 and did some testing over Gigabit that way. Ran five simultaneous VPN connections and maxed out the Gigabit link through it with various hosts and it never faltered. This is of course pfsense doing all the routing and firewalling, but the device was fine even without the pppoe overhead. It got to about 38 degrees on CPU and 27% utilisation. Its a great little box. I won't be installing the WiFi module though it has an available slot and holes predrilled for two aerials. I just want it as a wired router/firewall and it does exactly what it says on the tin and has a lot of headroom to boot.