Disassembly

Well then! It's not often I get to do this for a router, and only my second time so far for a router review. Disassembly of the Vilfo router is not recommended at all and will likely void the warranty, so keep that in mind. That having been said, when I see screws on an object, something in me just takes over—I suddenly want to take things apart to see what's inside after all testing has been completed. Accessing the screws here is probably the biggest challenge since they are quite deeply recessed and require an abnormally long and thin Phillips screwdriver. There are four screws on the back. Once removed, the top panel may be taken off by carefully prying apart the locking pieces at the corners as seen above. This gives us a good look at the front of the internal PCB, which four more screws at the corners keep in place on the bottom plastic panel. Removing this second set of screws allows us to lift the PCB up and turn it around to where we can dislodge the antenna connectors from the PCB to fully separate them.


The plastic panels are nice to look at no doubt, but the star of the show is the mini PC that is the motherboard itself. The PCB is the classic green in color and chock-full of components front and back to run the x86 system that is the Vilfo router. We even see a CMOS battery here, and there are SODIMM RAM slots as well as an mSATA SSD slot all filled in a way that is no doubt relatable to the average TPU reader.


The components onboard are an interesting mix. There is, for whatever reason, a Realtek ACL662 5.1 channel audio hardware codec driver, as well as dedicated Intel I211 Gigabit Ethernet controllers for every single WAN and LAN port. The massive aluminium heatsink passively cools the x86 processor, which is an Intel Celeron 2955U 2C/2T CPU used for the real-time VPN and encryption features supported by the Vilfo router. Thermal paste application was well done, and unfortunately, my image of the CPU die itself was lost somehow, but it is a standard Intel die setup that is anything but standard in a router. It is an older, discontinued CPU, but quite capable enough for the router, and helps reduce the bill of materials for Vilfo.


On the other side, we have a 2 GB DDR3 1600 MHz RAM stick from Tigo, and storage is rounded off by a 16 GB HOODISK Industrial mSATA SSD paired with a Phison PS311-S11 SATA SSD controller. The WiFi solution is a Mediatek MT7612E chip which has an RF shield glued on, and then we see a bunch of Fintek F81213R transceivers as well. This hardware configuration is not out of place in custom router builds, but well beyond the typical retail networking solution.