CompuLab fitlet (XA10 LAN)

My first one was DOA with bent RAM slot pins. CompuLab/Fitlet didn't reply to my RMA request, so I did a return with Amazon. New one works great and has zero manufacturing flaws.You MUST use 1.35V LOW VOLTAGE RAM / DDR3L. Regular DDR3 will fit but will not work. Fitment in the RAM slot is awkward, you must find the correct angle and it should slide in easily. I'm using Kingston 8GB PC3L part# KVR16LS11/8 with zero issues. I'm not sure how much is supported, but reports say upwards of 32GB.Includes an American Megatrends BIOS, hit DEL to get into the settings pre-boot.These run a little HOT but that's totally normal for a passively-cooled CPU (they rarely have failure risks with high heat). Make sure you use the heat spreader plate for the mSATA SSD card. It bolts down between the mSATA card and WIFI card using one of the mSATA mounting screws. The included instruction guide (10 pages) does not mention it at all. Also not mentioned is the BIOS reset button, which can be found on the board near the corner opposite the SIM card slot. Hold for 5 seconds to reset the BIOS to defaults.Fitlet has a Wiki with lots of information not included in the manual!UPDATE: About a week into it running 24/7; the heat caused the plastic "lens" in the power button (the part that refracts the green/orange light) to literally pop out. Only cosmetic but wacky either way.I purchased a 3rd party heatsink cover with large fins to replace the stock aluminum cover and lower temperatures by 10+ degrees F.

Once again, ordered from CompuLab and once again, they shipped immediately. The fitlet-X A4-6400T serves as my router and firewall, running pfsense. Paired with 8GB RAM and 2x16GB USB drives for the operating system (having two drives allows backup of known good configs with dd). BIOS is from AMI; I never went into it.I also got the larger heat-sink based on recommendations of another reviewer. That immediately went on when I installed the RAM. The printed instructions for opening the fitlet-X were not clear, but there are official YouTube videos which show how to open the case and install RAM.pfSense installed as a breeze; 8GB UFS partition and 8GB for swap to match the memory size for coredumps I guess. Side ethernet port is set up as WAN; one management port, and two bridged LAN ports. OpenVPN supports hardware acceleration through the cryptodev interface. Under a heavy load, I haven't seen the CPU go past ~25% usage, so this should last a very long time.My only gripes are 1) the fitlet-X runs very warm, even with the larger heatsink; I will attempt later to use Arctic Silver between the external heatsink to see if this rectifies things, and 2) FreeBSD doesn't assign the ethernet ports in any logical order (example: the middle port on the left side is igb0, they are numbered 0-4), which could be a FreeBSD issue or a hardware controller issue. I haven't figured it out, and I don't really care. It was just frustrating a bit at first to figure out which port I was talking to. That's not really a knock against the fitlet-X at all, just a forewarning.*** UPDATE *** just wanted to say that one year later, this is still working perfectly as a pfsense router. We push several hundred gigs a month over our vpn and the fitler hasn't let us down.Out of curiosity, I hooked up my monitor to the HDMI port and booted Linux. Although its not an officially supported resolution, I got full 2560x1440 output. When they are in stock again, I am going to buy another for a lightweight desktop.

I've used the filtet-XA10-LAN for over a year now as my home router/firewall running pfSense. The uptime is over 300 days now. pfSense runs very well on this box. This box will provide a maximum of 700 Mbps symmetric throuput with NAT and firewall enabled with pfSense. For encrypted symmetric throughput you can get about 160 Mbps with IPSec.I bought the heat sync offered separately for this box for $15. Having a 4 GB RAM and a 32 GB m.SATA drive is all you need for this box to be used with pfSense.If you buy this box for running pfSense, read the pfSense forum for instructions on how to tune the hardware and software on this box to get the throughput that I quoted above.The box does get hot, but the manufacturer assured me it was designed this way, and the heat won't damage the equipment. I bought a larger heat sync to make it run a little cooler, but the manufacturer told me I could have used the original heat sync that came with it. The heat sync is the top cover of the case.

I bought this (along with a 120GB mSATA drive + 8GB RAM) for use as a bare-metal pfSense box and couldn't be happier. Really the only complaint I have so far is that it runs quite hot (as others in reviews have also said), and enough that once it's been running for a couple hours it it too hot to hold for more than 5+ seconds. I'd highly recommend if you get this also get the passive heatsink case along with it.Installation of pfSense was a breeze with no problems detecting hardware or any of the NIC ports. PfSense lets you auto-detect interfaces that you're plugged into so no worries trying to figure out which port # is which.If you're curious I'm running the following services currently:DHCPPfBlocker (several block lists as well as geo-ip ranges + DNSBL)Squid for Web Caching (60GB allocated) + Squid LiteSnortUnbound for Local DNS ResolverOpenVPNSnort running in "balanced" policy by far probably uses up the most CPU. I also have reporting running for most services where available. If I run close to the max my internet connection allows I will see CPU spikes of up to 50-70% occasionally, but generally closer to the 0-10% range. RAM I haven't seen above 10% yet but I have allocated some to the Squid Web Cache so I expect that to pick up a bit with time.