Im looking for very cheap (under 80$), extreemely powersavvy pc with AES support. This machine will work 24/7 in my home (i pay the bills).
At first I was thinking about Raspberry Pi 3 or RPi 3 + but i found that its bottleneck is gigabit NIC which is based on usb lane or something like that. In the other hand ODROID C2 has significantly better gigabit NIC and AES support as well.
I did some research in older cpus, most of the are either not power efficient enough or doesn’t have AES (Atoms) or are quite expensive. I found that old AMD E1-2100 has also AES support, are very power efficient and used netbooks with them (like ACER Aspire V5 V5-123) are quite cheap.
Im not interested in PC Engines boards, routerboards or similar things used widely for pfsense as they are quite pricey.
Would go with the Odroid. When it runs hot, you can just point a case fan at it and be done.
The ASRock J5005-ITX has the Pentium J5005 on board, wich has AES-instructions. Power consumption should be the same as the OdroidXU4
Ive seen most of those mainboards with integrated Celeron J series, N series or AMD Kabini CPUs. I was searching for them when i was building my home NAS. The problem is that even though some of them would fit the budget alone, they also require ram, disk and PSU (optimally pico + some laptop power supply) and probably some case. And for price of whole set i could buy something like Intel NUC, Zotac ZBOX or Gigabyte BRIX.
But i dont need such power for home use and i dont want to spend more money that i need.
As for Odroid im concerned about its AES support. Because geekbench shows very poor results for AES single core tests (OpenVPN is single core).
https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?q=S905
And just look at E1-2100
http://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench3/574666
But i hope its just a matter of Android used for benchmarks and some stuff needs to be just compiled-in …
https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=2334
Oh boy, I am blind.
Title says Odroid C2, not Odroid XU4…
My bad.
Edit:
The XU4 has higher Single core and much higher multi-core score.
https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?utf8=✓&q=odroid+xu4
I found another player - Orange Pi One Plus. I saw some crypto tests and it seems like its twice more powerfull in crypto operations than C2.
And costs … 25$ with shipping! For me its a dealbreaker. I will order it tomorrow.
As for those geekbench tests …
AFAIK XU4 is on ARMv7 which doesnt have AES support. So for me those numbers prove that Adroid version on which C2 was tested didnt have crypto modules installed and those crypto tests with AES for it are pure BS . To see the difference in crypto ops speed with and without AES hardware support just take a look Banana PI R2 (at the bottom) and Banana Pi R2 with crypto ON (between OPi PC2 and MiQi) on link above.