This Topton-brand mini-ITX motherboard on AliExpress seems like a pretty decent choice for an Opnsense/Pfsense-based home router setup. It has four Intel 2.5gbe ports, an integrated 10W TDP CPU, and way more storage options than necessary for my use case.
However, I’m leery of just about everything from AliExpress. In this case, I assume security is probably a distant consideration after function and price point.
Am I being overly paranoid? Are products like this riddled with back doors and other exploitable components? Has anyone else out there built a router using this board?
I bought that tiger lake motherboard with the laptop i7 on an ITX motherboard and the bios sucks. They left a lot of debug settings, there are a lot of options. Like 4 pages of settings that only make sense for the engineers who developed this. It’s not stable, sometimes doesn’t wake up from sleep, sometimes it hangs.
From now on I will only buy motherboards from reputable OEMs and not unknown ones operating from a 15 square meters room in Shenzhen with no extensive testing or future support
That’s too bad. On paper, these boards seem to check all the boxes. It seems like the reality is that they lack quality-of-life features like general reliability. Probably not a great quality in router hardware…