This is called Part 1 because the final test results did not meet my expectations. I spent several hours until late at night and did not want to spend too much time on this right now, so I temporarily stopped the testing and will continue to find the cause later when I have more time, even considering changing the system, motherboard, or adding network cards. The idea of setting up a soft router came from two thoughts:
1. A friend once asked on my public account how to maximize three broadband connections of 500M, 500M, and 300M. When the total of multiple broadband connections exceeds 1G, having a router with a 10G LAN port would be incredibly smooth.
2. Recently, I have been frequently checking switches with 10G Ethernet ports, such as ASUS XG-U2008 and NETGEAR GS110MX, while I dare not look at the price of NETGEAR XS708T. The second-hand prices of the first two are around 2000 yuan, with 2 10G Ethernet ports and 8 Gigabit ports. So, can I configure a soft router with a similar number of ports for about the same price? Perhaps even with more 10G ports?
Thus, this test was initiated. Why not consider fiber ports? Because Cat 5e and Cat 6 cables are very commonly available. What? You think Cat 5e cables can run 10G? Don’t ask me that; just look at this article: Testing the Transmission Speed of Cat 5e Cables with 10G Network Cards Will Change Your Perception.
The small host configuration used for this soft router installation is: H81 + G1840 + 4G memory, with an Intel X520-T2 10G network card installed. The network card in the upper left corner was just bought last week (brand new for less than 400 yuan). The purpose of buying it was simple: I had two 10G network cards that did not support 2.5G and 5G rates, and this one supports 10G/5G/2.5G/1G/100M. However, 2.5G and 5G rates are not mainstream and are commonly found in some home routers, such as ASUS AX11000 and NETGEAR RAX120. This network card does not have a fan, and when it works, you cannot touch it with your finger for more than 3 seconds; otherwise, you will get a blister. If you have thick skin, you can try. The network card chip might be TN4010 + AQR105; the label on the back of the card indicates TN4010, but this is just a guess and not certain. The soft router has a dual-port network card, and there are two single-port network cards installed in two other computers, making it just right for testing.
I downloaded the openwrt-koolshare-mod-v2.30-r10402-51ad900e2c-x86-64-combined-squashfs.img.gz from koolshare, extracted it, and used the Win32DiskImager tool to write it to a USB drive. Then I inserted the USB drive into the computer, booted, and selected to start from this USB drive, and it was OK. In short, installing a soft router from a USB drive is very simple. The computer directly installs LEDE (not installing the soft router in a virtual machine).
The motherboard has a built-in Gigabit port, and with the two 10G ports from X520-T2, there are three network ports. After the USB boot is complete, the other computer connects the network cable sequentially to these three network ports. If it obtains an IP, it confirms that it is the LAN port, and I can enter the LEDE settings. First, set the onboard port as the WAN port and the two 10G ports as the LAN ports. The status information of the soft router is as follows:
Fortunately, this network card can be recognized. I wonder if the X540-T2 (power 13W) can be recognized. This card consumes 6W less power than X520-T2. In fact, once you install a 10G network card, you should not think about low power consumption. It is impossible to be low; it is even hotter than the CPU.
With the two 10G LAN ports ready, the next step is to test how much the LAN to LAN can achieve. I hope it can reach the level of a 10G switch. Both computers are running Windows 10, and I used IxChariot software to test the LAN to LAN throughput, with the script Ultra_High_Performance_Throughput.scr, ten threads, and the results are as follows:
Only 6G; I have tested many times, and it is always around 6G. Since I replaced the Cat 5e cable with the following Cat 6a (super six categories), the result is the same. Buying these two cables was completely a waste of money; they are thick and hard and provide no help at all.
Testing the WAN port, I went into the settings and set one of the 10G ports as WAN, and the other as LAN, so I can test the performance of WAN to LAN and LAN to WAN.
WAN to LAN is also less than 6G,
LAN to WAN is also only 5G.
During the above tests, I observed the CPU usage, which was around 50%. I didn’t see it exceed 60%. The speed above is definitely not caused by the CPU being fully loaded because the CPU hasn’t reached full load yet.
Finally, when I directly connected the two computers with a single cable, the measured speed was only over 6G, while my previous test using Cat 5e cables could easily achieve over 9G, regardless of whether the length was over 20 meters or over 60 meters. Could it be related to both computers running Windows 10? During the cable test, one computer was running Windows 7, and now both are on Windows 10; could that be the issue?
However, at this point, I need to solve the issue of two computers being directly connected and being able to exceed 9G; otherwise, the testing of the 10G soft router would not be accurate at all. The test ends here! The next test will be left for Part 2 or Part 3 or the concluding part.
I would like to ask, is there a second-hand motherboard available for a few hundred yuan that can have PCI-E 8x + 8x + 4x + 4x? This would allow me to install 2 X520-T2s, one TN4010, and one four-port Intel Gigabit network card, which should provide enough ports (5 10G Ethernet ports + 7 Gigabit ports for the soft router). For now, I have only found an 8x + 8x + 4x + 1x + 1x + 1x Z270 motherboard.
So tired!