dom (EYY N100 Mini PC)
Table of Contents
Summary
A plastic mini PC with N100 CPU, upside down ports, two NICs, and a whiny fan.
Notes
- Something causes the 2.5GbE PCIE link to be set to PCIE 1.0. Possibly BIOS related. Happens in Windows too.
- Can power from USB C port
Hardware
| Make | EYY |
| Year | 2024 |
| Model | EYY-MINIPC-001 |
| Chassis | Mini PC |
| Power Supply | 12V 3A |
| Processor | Intel N100 |
| Memory | 16GB LPDDR5 (Micron) |
| Ports | 2x RJ-45 LAN |
| HDMI 2.1 | |
| DisplayPort 1.4 | |
| 2x USB A 2.0 | |
| 2x USB A 3.2 gen 2 | |
| USB C 3.2 gen 2 | |
| 3.5mm Audio Jack | |
| Graphics | Intel UHD Graphics |
| Storage | 256GB AirDisk M.2 SATA SSD |
| Display | - |
| Int. Peripherals | Realtek RTL8111H Gigabit Ethernet |
| Realtek RTL8125BG 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet | |
| Intel AX201NGW 802.11ax Wi-Fi | |
| Ext. Peripherals | |
| Dimensions | |
| Length/Depth | 12.8 cm |
| Width | 12.8 cm |
| Height/Thickness | 4.5 cm |
| Weight | 0.39 kg (13.8 oz) |
Software
| Operating System | |
| Unique applications |
Links
Log
Some more N100 hardware
I got this Mini PC as a review unit. At the time I was looking for some Frigate NVR hardware and this fit the bill pretty close except for being tiny and having a whiny fan.
It came with Windows 10. Since then I put Debian on it, and traded the Realtek RTL8852BE Wifi/Bluetooth card, which lacks mainline drivers, for an Intel AX201 (CNVio2, Intel proprietary).
PCIe Speed issues
When I first tried testing the 2.5GbE interface I ran into some poor throughput (1.6-1.7 Gb/s), but I was trying it against another untested card. I came back to it and verified that this card was the problem, but it wasn't obvious why.
Eventually I started looking at dmesg or lspci -vv output and I noticed the PCIe link was downgraded. It looks like:
[ 0.284425] pci 0000:02:00.0: 2.000 Gb/s available PCIe bandwidth, limited by 2.5 GT/s PCIe x1 link at 0000:00:1c.3 (capable of 4.000 Gb/s with 5.0 GT/s PCIe x1 link)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8125 2.5GbE Controller (rev 05) LnkSta: Speed 2.5GT/s (downgraded), Width x1
Later I came across a person testing a 10GbE adapter at various PCIe link speeds, and their PCIe Gen 1 speeds were similar to what I achieved. This helped confirm my performance was due to the PCIe speed, since the 1.7 Gb/s didn't quite line up with the 2.0 Gb/s of PCIe bandwidth.
The internet said to check BIOS settings, but the BIOS on this thing is sparse. I decided to put Windows 11 back on it, and see what it did. Windows has a nice command , Get-NetAdapterHardwareInfo that curiously just checks PCIe link speed of network cards. I don't get why there isn't a more general command.
Name Segment Bus Device Function Slot NumaNode PcieLinkSpeed PcieLinkWidth Version ---- ------- --- ------ -------- ---- -------- ------------- ------------- ------- Wi-Fi 0 2 0 0 4 2.5 GT/s 1 1.1 Ethernet 0 3 0 0 5 2.5 GT/s 1 1.1
Now that it was starting to look like a hardware issue I started looking for a solution. Can I manually set the link speed?
I found this PCIe Set Speed script which relies on pciutils' setpci. It was enough to pass my PCIe device id, and it ran the magic command to change the link speed.
sudo ./pcie_set_speed.sh 0000:02:00.0
Link capabilities: 04724013 Max link speed: 3 Link status: 7011 Current link speed: 1 Configuring 0000:00:1c.3... Original link control 2: 00010001 Original link target speed: 1 New target link speed: 3 New link control 2: 00010003 Triggering link retraining... Original link control: 70110040 New link control: 70110060 Link status: 7012 Current link speed: 2
In my case, the magic command was:
setpci -s 0000:00:1c.3 CAP_EXP+10.L=70110060
At some point it traded my device number for the parent PCIe bridge.
So now I have a kind of stinky solution on Linux. The correct fix is probably to try to get in touch with the OEM, and hope for a firmware fix, but I don't have much hope.