Nanopi R5C Wireless Mini WiFi Router OpenWRT with Rockchip RK3568B2 Soc 0.8T NPU 4GB LPDDR4X RAM 32GB eMMC Onboard Dual PCIe 2.5Gbps Ethernet Ports M.2 BT WiFi Module Slot Support Debian Ubuntu

I was looking for a solution to distribute my 2Gbps internet connection through my home wired network. It appears that it is not so easy to find a 2.5 WAN / 2.5 LAN router for a reasonable price. Then I found this R5C and combined it with 2.5Gbps unmanaged switch (WiFi APs installed additionally). The result exceeds my expectations, I’m able reach 2Gbps from my wire-connected PCs. I decided to keep the pre-installed OpenWRT software. At the maximum network speed CPU reaches 80% load and works well. Not bad for a low-end device.One note about the temperature. R5C has a solid metal case that allows it to keep stable temperature at 50 degrees Celsius without any additional cooler. I decided it is a bit too much for a 7/24 device and installed a low-rpm fan. Now temperature dropped down to 37 degrees and I’m happy with the result.Summary: a great option if you’re ready to consider your home network as a DYI project.

I really like this little router. It's tiny, has two Gb ethernets, is well made, and is well supported.The hardware is great - it's tiny (roughly 2"x2"x1"), and solid. The metal case doubles as the fanless heatsink, and it does a good job of passive cooling, even while stress testing the throughput performance.The four status LEDs are well placed on the front, and the power and ethernets out the back. It also has hdmi and USB so you can connect it to display and keyboard, but normally I use it as a headless router.Friendlyelec provides excellent OS images. I have tried their openWRT and buildroot images, and they both installed from microsd to the embedded emmc perfectly. So simple and fast. The openwrt is a wonderful router - I had two ethernets routed with firewall rules in no time, and the web management is really nice. The buildroot image is a bit more basic, but it offers a powerful development/customization base. The kernel and u-boot are not the latest upstream (the kernel is 5.10), but they work well, and are better than some of the competition that is still stuck on 9.x.I have the 4GB/32GB version without wireless, so I can't comment on the wireless performance. Since the wireless plugs into a standard m.2 slot, you can always put in a decent card, and the case has mounting holes for two external antennas.Overall the nicest small dual ethernet router I have tested.

I want to implement a NAS (network attached storage) with multi-Gig ethernet support. I picked this ARM-Linux box because it has two 2.5G ethernet ports. After receiving the shipment from Amazon, I found its case is made of aluminum, which serves as a large heatsink. Thus, no fan is needed for cooling. As a result, it makes no noise and is suitable for home office and entertainment environments. Based on the information provided, I opened its wiki page and downloaded the firmware provided there. Everything worked pretty well. No issue was encountered at this stage.I installed the Debian 11 (bullseye) core as its OS. It booted smoothly after burning the rootfs image to a micro SD card, plugged in and powered on. However, the rootfs image is a little bit weird. As far as I know, most of such image for ARM single board computer (SBC) contains one partition (rootfs) or two partitions with a separate boot partition. However, this image contains many small partitions. Not sure what are those partitions for. I then checked the network speed. By using a 2.5G ethernet switch and an USB3.0 to 2.5G ethernet adapter on my Windows 11 PC, my iperf3 test showed that its speeds on both directions were about 2.35 Gbps. Which is not bad.In order to set up a NAS, I installed OpenMediaVault 6 (OMV6) on the Nanopi R5C with Bullseye Debian Linux. A 2.5" hard disk (hdd) with a USB3 interface was used as the storage. Installation carried out smoothly with no problem. When I used it as the fileserver, I found the read speed (NAS to Windows PC) could reach over 200MB/s, which should be satisfactory. However, the write speed (PC to NAS) was only somewhat over 10MB/s. This is essentially ethernet 100M speed.(Update: I noticed that the vendor just updated the OS firmware provided. In particular, the new firmware includes an OVM6 implementation. I tried their implemented OVM6. Both the write and read speeds were higher than 200 MBytes/s at start, then they reduced to about 100 MB/s and 60 MB/s, respectively. I think the speed reductions were due to the write and read speeds limitation of the hdd used in the NAS. However, when I used their new Bullseye firmware and implemented OMV6 from scratch, the write speed is still about 10 MB/s. I am not sure why. I contacted them but no reply was received.)One warning I want to make is that if you decide to buy this SBC, don't expect community and/or the vendor's supports like you would get for the Raspberry Pi's. However, if you want to take the adventure of utilizing its fast ethernet speed or other features that are not provided by Raspberry Pi's, this unit may not be a bad choice.

Took a lot of fiddling to get a different image loaded. Despite numerous attempts and multiple reads of various instructions. Then, once I got Debian and Docker installed, the device was not powerful enuff to run home assistant and pi hole simultaneously.I'll find some other use for this little computer. But running containers isn't one of them.

This is an enthusiast grade hobby device that works wonders for experimentation. It doesn't hold up for real world use as a Zero Trust edge firewall for SOHO & SMB that I was evaluating it for. The case could use taller fins to dissapate the heat that is generated at idle as it gets hot durring use. If you wan't to learn the ARM ecosystem this is a great little device. After evaluating the implementation for my needs I wound up going with an x86 solution.

Worst junk I’ve ever bought off this website.