This tiny computer packs a punch.
It was designed to be a HomeLab you can fit in your pocket;
and with 10 Gbps of networking
spread across four ports,
it might just be a contender for your next router.
Welcome back to the Pro Tech Show.
The device I have today is the iKOOLCORE R1,
and it is ridiculously small
considering what it manages to pack inside.
They sent this over for review;
and as with any review in this channel
there was no payment involved,
and no obligation on my part to even make a video,
let alone say nice things about it.
Because that would be a sponsorship, not a review.
To give you a sense of scale:
here are a couple of laptops,
the R1, and the internet standard unit of measurement.
By the way, it outperforms all of these. Even the banana!
But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Let's take a look at the hardware
before we talk about performance...
and software.
We need to talk about the software.
On the front we have two USB 3.0 Type-A ports
and a power button.
On the side we have a USB Type-C port
and a microSD card slot.
Booting from SD card is an option here.
On the back we see its real talking point:
four 2.5 Gbps network ports.
That's a lot of connectivity for a device this size!
There's a full-size HDMI port for a TV or monitor,
and a port for power.
Note I said "power" and not "USB".
It looks like a USB-C port and has the letters "PD" next to it,
which may lead you to assume it's powered
using the USB power delivery standard.
That's half right.
The R1 can indeed be powered using USB-PD.
However, the power adapter that comes in the box
is not USB PD.
I'm making a point of this because I think iKOOLCORE
could be a bit clearer about it.
The R1 accepts USB-PD,
its power adapter has a USB-C connector,
but the USB-PD standard requires some back and forth
communication between the power supply
and the device to negotiate power requirements
and the included adapter doesn't do that.
It just spurts out 12 volts.
Take a standard DC adapter,
cut off the barrel connector,
solder on a USB-C connector instead,
and that's pretty much what you've got here.
The R1 doesn't care.
It'll take raw voltage or it will talk USB-PD.
If you connect the power supply to the wrong USB port
by mistake it won't power up,
but it has hardware protection to ensure
it won't be damaged either.
The same cannot necessarily be said for other devices.
If you were to plug something else into this power supply
that's expecting USB, bad things could happen.
Don't try to charge your phone off it!
A nice touch is they included a barrel jack
to USB-C adaptor in the box.
This doesn't make it USB-PD compatible.
It's still just 12 volts.
But it does mean you don't have to use their power supply.
If it breaks or you lose it,
a regular barrel connector can be used.
They also sell a power brick
with a bunch of barrel connectors coming out of it.
So if you had a bunch of R1s
you could build a little cluster of them
running off a single power supply.
That's it for external connectivity,
let's have a look inside.
There are multiple configuration options.
This device has the Intel Celeron N5105.
There's also an upgraded processor available
in the form of the Pentium Silver N6005.
Memory options come in 8 GB or 16 GB,
and you can get it with a 128 GB or 512 GB hard drive,
or none at all.
Speaking of the hard drive,
it's a standard 42mm M.2 drive,
and it is upgradable up - to 2 TB,
which I think is a current limitation
of the drive's form factor rather than of the R1 itself.
If you need more space
they did also send over this USB-C M.2 enclosure
that you can buy as an accessory.
It apparently supports up to 10 Gbps
of transfer. I guess that's what they expect
the USB-C data port to be used for.
It's really easy to get to the internal NVMe drive.
The top here just pops off,
and the drive is accessible through this cutout.
The lid doubles as a heat sink,
with the thermal pad making contact here.
It also came with an alternative plastic lid in the box.
Apparently that's an older design,
and it's still used on their other "NUC" model
because a fully metal case
interferes with its wireless connectivity.
The R1 doesn't have wireless,
focusing instead on its 10 Gbps of wired networking;
so they've upgraded the lid to milled aluminium
and that's now shipping as standard for better cooling.
It seems to be working
because you can feel it getting quite warm under load.
Once the lid is off
you can remove these four screws
and the rest of the chassis slides off
to give you a look at the internals.
The components are arranged across two stacked boards.
Most are soldered in place because of its diminutive size.
It's not like you can fit a regular stick of RAM in it.
You can easily enough replace the SSD,
the BIOS battery, and the cooler.
They sell a replacement for that,
so at least you're not stuck if the fan dies.
But how does it perform?
The size of this thing and its focus in HomeLabs
invites comparisons with the Zimaboard I reviewed recently,
so I'm going to put it through the same tests.
I'll run Cinebench to assess its performance
and measure the power it consumes in the process,
then divide the two to arrive at an efficiency score.
With small form factors like this,
the emphasis is more on efficiency than raw performance.
You don't buy a Celeron for performance.
You buy it for low running costs,
especially in a HomeLab that's likely to be powered 24/7.
As before, I've included scores for my desktop
and my laptop for context.
The desktop is there as a bigger picture thing.
The laptop and the Zimaboard
are the real points of comparison,
because like the R1
they're both designed for low power consumption.
In Cinebench, the R1 outperforms both the laptop
and the Zimaboard:
managing more than double the performance
of its passively cooled HomeLab competitor.
Both the laptop and the Zimaboard
are using old processors from late 2016.
The laptop because, well, it's old;
and the Zimaboard as a design choice.
One of the questions I posed about the Zimaboard
was how well performance and efficiency might benefit
from a more modern architecture,
And the R1's processor from early 2021
shows what four and a half years can do
as the newer Celeron outperforms the older i5 in my laptop.
Now let's take a look at power efficiency,
and this is a bit of a mixed bag.
Idle power consumption was around 11 watts;
which is three times what the laptop
and the Zimaboard sucked down,
and more than the Zimaboard consumed under load.
Under load is where the R1 shines though,
as it consumes less power than the same laptop
it already beat in Cinebench.
In fact, not only is the R1 the highest performing
out of our low power devices,
it also scores the best efficiency under load.
Achieving both the highest outright performance
and the highest performance per watt
would be quite the win if it weren't
for its idle power consumption.
Comparing the R1 with the Zimaboard:
which is better really comes down to your use case.
The Zimaboard is incredibly flexible
due to its external SATA and PCI Express ports.
Basically, it's a platform to build things with
using additional hardware.
The R1, by comparison, is more complete as-is
and more focused.
You can attach a SATA card to the Zimaboard
and hook up seven different hard drives to build a NAS,
or you could attach a quad-port 2.5 Gbps network card instead
and build a router.
You can't plug random PCI Express cards into the R1
to turn it into a NAS, but if you want a router
it doesn't need to be adapted. It was built for this,
and it does it without hanging PCI Express cards
off the side.
So if you're comparing the two:
consider whether you desire more adaptability
and lower power, or more focus and more performance.
Another consideration is that the Zimaboard,
being passively cooled, is completely silent;
whereas the R1 is actively cooled -
allowing it to reach higher performance in a smaller package
at the cost of some noise.
Since its initial release the R1's cooling solution
has been upgraded to be quieter,
but it's definitely not silent,
and the fan seems to be running all of the time.
It doesn't really bother me personally,
but noise is a very subjective thing.
There are far too many variables between my microphone
and your speakers to give you an accurate sense
of volume by itself, so I'm going to pit it against
a couple of laptops I have to hand
so you can assess it comparatively.
One thing I have noticed is that if I put the R1
on a hard surface it can resonate
and that resonant frequency is quite distracting.
I think this could be solved by putting rubber feet
on the bottom, and that would also improve air flow
to the downward-facing intake.
Something for the R2, perhaps?
Here are the comparisons. You might want headphones.
That's the hardware covered. Now what can you actually run on this thing?
If you get one of these with the hard drive pre-installed, then the very first thing you
need to do is wipe it. That probably sounds ominous. It is. More later. I tried a mixture of
Windows, Linux, BSD, and virtualisation on this. Fedora, Ubuntu, and Rocky Linux all installed fine
and just worked, as did TrueNAS Core. Proxmox came pre-installed, so clearly that works,
and I was even able to install VMware ESXi8 with no trouble at all. I even installed it on a
microSD card to test if it would be bootable, and it was fine, although VMware don't recommend
using SD cards as a boot drive anymore. This is in large part thanks to its Intel networking.
One of the points for improvement I noted about the Zimaboard was its use of Realtek rather than
Intel. Realtek is cheaper and often used in consumer-grade equipment as a result. Intel has
a better reputation for performance and reliability. For consumer kits, honestly,
Realtek is fine. It's never been a problem for me unless I try to do something a little less
home-usery like install VMware ESXi. Intel is a bigger player in the server market where reliability
and performance are worth paying a premium for, and typically has better driver support for server
applications as a result. This is a definite advantage for the R1 in a HomeLab capacity,
but unfortunately the Intel i226-V it uses is not without its problems. I haven't encountered any
issues myself, but it has been reported to suffer from unplanned disconnections. Intel are aware of
the problem and I think the latest drivers are supposed to resolve it. Maybe that's why I didn't
have any problems, or maybe I just got lucky. There is also an official workaround by disabling
the Energy Efficient Ethernet mode in the advanced driver settings, in either Windows or Linux.
Where I did encounter a problem with the Intel NIC was pfSense. The current version of pfSense
doesn't support it, so that was a bust. OPNsense, on the other hand, worked just fine.
The number of ports this thing has, using it as a router seems like an obvious fit.
I've heard that pfSense 2.7 should add driver support, but the dev build I downloaded wouldn't
even boot without crashing. Surprisingly, Windows also failed to support the Intel NIC out of the box.
In most cases this wouldn't be an issue - the drivers are readily available online. It means
you'll need to load the drivers onto USB drive first. Beyond that, Windows 11 was spot on.
It has Secure Boot, it has a TPM, and the processor is fully supported; so there are no kludges
required to run Windows. In fact, it ran much better on the R1 than it does on my laptop!
There are a few Intel drivers that won't be installed automatically, so I'll make a note of what
you need in the video description for you. iKOOLCORE's wiki does have a section where
you can download the drivers; but I'm going to recommend you don't do that, and instead grab them
from Intel directly. iKOOLCORE is a small company and they're obviously trying to keep costs low,
because the drivers are hosted in a personal Google Drive. Now, I did spot check a couple. I
downloaded theirs, and the official copy directly from Intel, ran the hashes, and they matched;
so I'm not suggesting foul play. For me though, this is not a good way to maintain a secure
supply chain. If that Google Drive got compromised, it would be bad news for their customers.
My recommendation is simple: if you're a customer, get the drivers from Intel directly.
If you work at iKOOLCORE, don't even bother to host your own copy. Just link the official downloads
at Intel. Keep it simple, avoid the hosting costs, and avoid any concerns about security.
While we're on the topic of things that look a little sketchy, let's talk about the pre-installed
software. Mine came running Proxmox with some virtual machines and containers already deployed.
That in itself is ok, assuming they're correctly licensed. They weren't.
One of the virtual machines was running Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC. If you're not familiar with the
Windows 10 Enterprise Edition, that's because it's not sold to consumers. It is only sold to
businesses under volume licensing agreements. You shouldn't be able to buy it and there is no
standalone version of it. It only exists as a volume-licensed upgrade that you apply to an
already licensed Pro Edition machine. There is no legitimate reason I can think of for this to have
been included. Furthermore, Proxmox was also running a copy of OpenWrt. That's fine, it's
open source. The R1 has lots of network ports so this seems like a
natural pairing. But OpenWrt had a third-party KMS server installed. A KMS server is a Microsoft
tool used by businesses to automatically activate Microsoft products within their network. The
third-party one replicates the same behaviour but doesn't require you to register it with Microsoft,
which means you can activate products you haven't purchased and Microsoft will never know.
There can be legitimate uses for this, but they're not usually why people install it;
and taken alongside the suspicious copy of Windows, this doesn't look good.
I contacted iKOOLCORE and their explanation was that this was an accident, and wasn't supposed
to be shipped outside of China. International units should come with a vanilla installation of
Proxmox and nothing else. That may be true because most of it was in Chinese, and I can't read Chinese
so it doesn't make sense to ship it to me. The explanation isn't good enough, though.
Perhaps they didn't mean to send this to me, but they did mean to create it.
The other problem with this explanation is that their wiki has instructions in English
for how to download new copies of the included software, and they have links to both Chinese
and English versions of Windows 10 Enterprise. How do you download Windows 10 Enterprise you
might ask? It's an eDonkey link.
eDonkey was how people used to do piracy back in the days when the internet sounded like this.
I had no idea it was still going. Look, if you buy one of these, either buy it without a hard drive
or wipe it as soon as it arrives because it could get you in trouble. Now assuming you've done that,
what are some of the things you might use an R1 for? Without looking too far, there are some obvious
hints. That number of 2.5 Gbps Ethernet ports means it's practically begging to be a router. As
OPNsense installed without a hitch, that's a good use right there. It comes running
Proxmox, it works with VMware ESXi, and with 16 GB of memory you can fit a handful of virtual
machines on there. There's enough network connectivity that you could have a small boot
drive and dedicate a couple of ports to iSCSI, then run a little cluster of them. They also
include a VESA mount in the box so you can mount this to the back of a monitor as a compact desktop
PC. That's a nice value-add, but I don't think it plays to R1's strengths. This is insanely small.
That and its networking are the big talking points. You don't need all these ports on a desktop,
and it wouldn't need to be this small to hide it behind a monitor. A device this size has to make
a few compromises due to its size, like non-upgradable memory. You could hide something
much bigger behind a monitor if that's your goal. At the end of the day: if it's hidden, it's hidden.
It wouldn't need to be this tiny; so stuffing it behind a monitor, whilst useful, feels like it's
wasting the R1's potential. For me, the three standout reasons to use this are as a next-gen
firewall and router, a beginner's virtualisation platform, or as a portable lab. Now the last
deserves a bit of an explanation. Why would you need a portable lab when the internet exists?
In a word: reliability. I have sat through many a vendor presentation in my career. Part of my
position as decision-maker within a consultancy is that if anyone successfully pitches me a product,
it's not just me who's going to buy it. Realistically, if they do a good job
they're going to get sales at a bunch of other companies as well, based on my recommendation.
So you can imagine, I get pitched fairly often; and on the rare occasion something looks genuinely
interesting, I'll want to see a demo. You know what they say about live demos... Honestly, it's
amazing how often these things fall over because of wireless issues, server problems, the VPN being
down, you name it. If I was in that technical sales role I'd be loading this up with a demo
platform and chucking it in my bag in case cloudland failed me. That's an obscure use case,
but for the right person I think it's a good one.
Now the big question: does this get my recommendation? There's a lot to like about it.
It's a very tidy bit of kit, and it's good to see that iKOOLCORE have made a few updates since
the initial release, based on user feedback. The impression I got in my communication with them
is that they're genuinely passionate about making a good product. There's definitely potential here,
but right now I can't give it my recommendation because of the software. That needs to be resolved.
They're a small company trying to get off the ground, and it smacks of immaturity rather than
malice. Unlicensed software, an unfinished wiki, rude words in an article URL, eDonkey links,
using a personal Google Drive to distribute software... It's not a professional picture,
and if iKOOLCORE wants to achieve more success internationally, it needs to be cleaned up.
Right now I could format this drive and use it at home without any great concern;
but if I bought this to use at work, an auditor would have my balls. That's a shame to end on that
note, but it is fixable. The next move belongs to iKOOLCORE. Let's see what they do!