MOGINSOK 4-Port Firewall Appliance

Both chips use four Gracemont efficiency cores with no Hyper-Threading, 6MB of cache and a 6W TDP. The N150 raises the burst clock from 3.4GHz to 3.6GHz and the graphics clock from 750MHz to 1000MHz. Packet filtering, NAT and VPN scale with those cores, so expect the same class of routing throughput with a little extra headroom.

• Unchanged: core count, TDP, memory type, PCIe generation, the four I226 ports.
• Slightly better: burst clock and integrated graphics clock.
• Worth checking: BIOS version, since a new CPU stepping often ships with newer firmware.

The chip-by-chip differences, including benchmarks that are public and repeatable, are set out in N100 vs N150. The short version for firewall duty: nothing you rely on gets worse.

Here the firmware outranks the silicon. An N150 on a board first designed for the N100 needs a BIOS that knows the newer chip, and MOGINSOK hands out BIOS updates on request. Update the BIOS before the first router install, while the box still has a monitor attached.

MOGINSOK spells out the minimum versions it recommends for I226 support. Older installers either miss the ports or behave oddly, so start from a current image.

AES-NI is present, and it helps some VPNs more than others. IPsec and OpenVPN with AES ciphers lean on it heavily. WireGuard uses ChaCha20 instead, which runs fast on these cores anyway, so neither choice is a bad one on this box.

• Assign WAN and LAN to the outer ports and keep the middle two for VLAN trunks or a DMZ.
• If a port drops link intermittently, try disabling Energy Efficient Ethernet on it first; that is a common I226 remedy.
• More firewall-specific setup lives under N100 firewall mini PCs.

Four ports cover the classic layout with room to spare: WAN, LAN, a guest or IoT network, and one spare for a second ISP or a management link. Every port runs at 2.5GbE, so a multi-gig fibre handoff and a 2.5GbE switch both link at full speed. Gigabit devices negotiate down without fuss.

One memory slot sounds stingy, but the N100 and N150 run a single memory channel in any case. A second slot would add capacity, not bandwidth. For a pure firewall, 8GB is generous; for a Proxmox host running a router VM plus a few containers, 16GB or 32GB is the upgrade that matters.

1. Leave it at 8GB for pfSense, OPNsense or OpenWrt with a handful of add-ons.
2. Move to 16GB for Suricata or Zenarmor on several interfaces.
3. Go to 32GB only if the box doubles as a hypervisor for several VMs.

There is one M.2 slot and no second drive bay. That rules out a mirrored boot pool and caps local storage at whatever single NVMe you fit. For log retention and a firewall OS, 128GB covers it; for a router that doubles as an N100 home server, a larger drive comes first.

The always-on features are the ones a router needs. A hardware watchdog reboots the box if the OS hangs. Auto Power On brings it back after an outage without anyone pressing a button. RTC wake, PXE boot and Wake-on-LAN round out a BIOS clearly set up for headless duty.

If you fit your own memory, buy a single DDR5 SO-DIMM rated at 4800MHz or faster; the board runs it at 4800. Laptop sticks work, since SO-DIMM is the laptop format. The first boot after a memory change can sit on a black screen while the board trains the new module, so give it a minute before assuming a fault.

Against its neighbours, this box sits in the middle. The CWWK firewall offers a configured 8GB/128GB version on the same I226 chips and names the N100 plainly. The HEIGAOLAPC also ships configured and fanless, but on Realtek NICs. The Dozlzyp box is barebone, longer, and carries two NVMe slots.

• Pick MOGINSOK for Intel NICs, DDR5 and a ready-to-flash drive in one box.
• Pick CWWK if you want the processor named without caveats.
• Pick Dozlzyp if you want two NVMe slots and will buy your own parts.

Once the router OS is installed, the display outputs rarely matter again. They earn their place when something breaks: a failed update or a lost admin password is fixed faster with a screen and keyboard than over the network. Keep a short HDMI cable near the box for exactly that day.

MOGINSOK covers the box for 12 months and offers BIOS updates on request. Three facts are worth pinning down with MOGINSOK first: the processor inside, whether the 8GB and 128GB are fitted, and which OS sits on the drive. Heat, noise and throttling on passive hardware are covered in more depth under fanless N100 mini PCs.