What's new

New hEX

  • SNBForums Code of Conduct

    SNBForums is a community for everyone, no matter what their level of experience.

    Please be tolerant and patient of others, especially newcomers. We are all here to share and learn!

    The rules are simple: Be patient, be nice, be helpful or be gone!

kvic

Part of the Furniture
Apparently Edgerouter X selling very well since launch is not without ground. MikroTik just launched an update to its good old hEX, called hEX r3.

For people who prefer RouterOS to EdgeOS, this sounds like a very good alternative. From the official benchmark numbers, MikroTik seems not having made the same "mistake" that Ubiquiti did (which I haven't got the time to write about...yet).

hEX r3 also comes with a SD card slot, a nice addition.

The big winner is MediaTek as hEX r3 also uses the same excellent MT7621A. Official benchmark numbers from Tik:

SS.png


http://www.mikrotik.com/download/share/hexr3.pdf
 
Is this one better than the one i bought "Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X SFP"?

RouterBOARD RB750Gr3 with a 880MHz CPU MIPS 1004Kc V2.15 (Quad Core), 256MB RAM, 5 Gigabit LAN ports, microSD port, RouterOS L4, plastic case, power supply, in a retail box, seem to me very impressive one little devil.
 
Last edited:
M'tok product page hasn't been updated yet. 720MHz single core is the previous r2 model. The new r3 has the exactly same SoC in Edgerouter X.

From M'tik's benchmark numbers, seems to me they have done a better job in both system design and RouterOS..

Hopefully ER-X users can leverage the new competition to drive Ubnt improving upon EdgeOS in next releases.
 
It's still 32bit MIPS.

The performance mostly reflects a different design decision. Two companies had different consideration in their product line up. Also one year after Edgerouter X's launch, it makes sense for Mikrotik to take a different decision and beat Ubiquiti at its weakest point.

Don't hold your breath. Ubnt could silently update its board design in next revision.

RouterOS perhaps marginally more optimized than EdgeOS. I won't go as far as claiming it's better than EdgeOS.
 
Interesting in the sub-$100 range, things are heating up - and getting bigger numbers than the AC5300 class BigHonkingRouters (BHR's)...

Between this, and the MESH evolution in the home-space - 2016 has been very interesting...
 
All those lower-end premium brand "VPN routers" offering a few hundred or less megabits per second shall be trashed.

Mikrotik did a good job in RouterOS. 472Mbit/s for AES-128 is near the maximum achievable on the EIP-93 crypto core.

Ubiquiti ER-X achieves the same in one direction but gets one third in the other. Not sure what went wrong in my test or EdgeOS.
 
Very impressive. Looks like the competition for the ERL line just arrived. It will be interesting to see the battle (and innovations) continue.

At some point these are going have UIs that are easy enough that they'll take over the consumer market completely.
 
Very impressive. Looks like the competition for the ERL line just arrived. It will be interesting to see the battle (and innovations) continue.

At some point these are going have UIs that are easy enough that they'll take over the consumer market completely.

A lot of the BHR's are running on a code base that goes back to the Linksys WRT-54G code base - they've grown bigger since then, obviously...

But they're akin to dinosaurs....

And these "little" 50-80 dollar boxes are the mammals - newer code, similar HW actually, but newer code - they're faster, cheaper, and in many cases better...

I think it's fun to watch both what's happening here on the dedicate router box thing, along with what is happening over on the wireless side - 2016 has been interesting, that much is certain...

If one has an AC1900 class device at the moment - hang on to it, and see where things go - I think the days of the BHR's are coming to an end, unless they can adapt...
 
Very impressive. Looks like the competition for the ERL line just arrived. It will be interesting to see the battle (and innovations) continue.

At some point these are going have UIs that are easy enough that they'll take over the consumer market completely.

ER-X has been a competitor to ERL to some extent. Ubiquiti was fully aware of that in my hindsight. I think they crippled ER-X a bit..with intention or not only they can tell.

ER-X might be able to get back its full power like the new hEX..with a FW update. I think ER-X-SFP has little luck.

Good to see competitions which make the world a more interesting place.
 
And these "little" 50-80 dollar boxes are the mammals - newer code, similar HW actually, but newer code - they're faster, cheaper, and in many cases better...

Agree mostly what you said in general. On this specific one except the "similar HW" bit. Broadcom SoC is okay until it faces competitions.

On the mesh thing, I think stevech said it all and best in an old thread from last year. But good that people keep revisiting the topic and see if there are true innovation.
 
Any idea what's the WAN/LAN performance with PPPoE?
I keep wondering why these companies are not reaching out to folks like Padavan - his firmware (for MediaTek SoCs) not only has a pretty spiffy GUI but it also rocks in terms of performance.
 
not that great, although you can actually do more with mikrotik's hardware acceleration than hardware acceleration on any other brand. This is because you can accelerate some traffic, or all traffic or use it as part of some sort of QoS (not directly but as a way of giving priority to some traffic). On ubiquiti once you start using QoS hardware acceleration goes out the window, you cant accelerate selected traffic.

Speed wise with PPPOE I would expect performance to be below gigabit on all brands with hardware acceleration but there are a few exceptions. ERPRO can do gigabit with PPPOE as it is twice as fast as the ERL but once you start using QoS on it it becomes slower than the RB3011. Mikrotik's advantage is mainly to do with routing whereas ubiquiti's edgerouter advantage is that it is more versatile in that you can install debian programs compiled for 64 bit MIPS but they dont work as well as doing it on pfsense.

The mikrotik hEX is actually 64 bit, older versions are 32 bit. @kvic i wouldnt have said 64 bit without first looking at routerboard.com and some specsheets.
 
I'm asking since ER-X, hEXr3 and RT-N56U-B1 have the same SoC (the first with the dual core version, the third it's single core) yet the B1 has no issues with Gigabit over PPPoE as it delegates a lot of the work to the hardware. In fact even the older N56U (5 years older SoC, only 500Mhz) can almost handle the traffic (800-900 Mbps range) without QoS but doing NAT and firewall and without breaking a sweat (the CPU load is fairly low).
 
Any idea what's the WAN/LAN performance with PPPoE?

Overhead in PPPoE is minimal. So the new hEX can achieve near 1000/1000 while Edgerouter X can do 500/500.

The mikrotik hEX is actually 64 bit, older versions are 32 bit. @kvic i wouldnt have said 64 bit without first looking at routerboard.com and some specsheets.

MT7621A used in both Edgerouter X and the new hEX is 32-bit mips.
 
Running the new Hex3 a couple of hours now. Performance wise works great similar to CCR. Seeing bursts to 800mbps while settling down to 500 mbps up and down, which fits my 500/500 ISP subscription.
Using wan pppoe and a couple of local vlans, with about 25 firewall rules and no mangling/queuing. WAN mtu set to 1508 to allow a normal 1500 mtu pppoe connection.

Still have to check the IPSec VPN performance.

In addition: device is very cool on temperature. Uses only about 3 watts. Exactly the same interface as CCR, and is extremely small.
But time will tell if this is the killing router for 500/500 subscriptions. So far; working perfectly fine.

@tim; consider reviewing this wonderful cheap device.
 
MT7621A used in both Edgerouter X and the new hEX is 32-bit mips.

This is a chip developed by Ralink - the MIPS 1004K is 32-bit, and in the dual-core implementation, it can run 4 hardware threads...

It's an ok chip, and this is the big reason why the hEX is as affordable as it is...
 
Running the new Hex3 a couple of hours now. Performance wise works great similar to CCR. Seeing bursts to 800mbps while settling down to 500 mbps up and down, which fits my 500/500 ISP subscription.
Using wan pppoe and a couple of local vlans, with about 25 firewall rules and no mangling/queuing. WAN mtu set to 1508 to allow a normal 1500 mtu pppoe connection.

Still have to check the IPSec VPN performance.

In addition: device is very cool on temperature. Uses only about 3 watts. Exactly the same interface as CCR, and is extremely small.
But time will tell if this is the killing router for 500/500 subscriptions. So far; working perfectly fine.

@tim; consider reviewing this wonderful cheap device.
The performance is actually very different, When you start doing heavy QoS for instance or VPNs. However for most the hEX gives you the performance of the ERL for less as far as hardware acceleration is concerned and perhaps even QoS.

The hEX also has a switch chip so throughput is limited. The CCR has CPU connected ports and the CCR is actually slightly (probably by 1ms) faster. When it comes to multi gigabit the hEX wont cut it. Still it would be nice to have multi gigabit internet.

To get mikrotik routerOS at a low price and a capable platform is the advantage of the hEX
 

Sign Up For SNBForums Daily Digest

Get an update of what's new every day delivered to your mailbox. Sign up here!
Top