As ever, highly informative and very useful.

Thanks for all the reviews of these boards. Very helpful. I am considering making a cluster, and searching to buy about 15 of boards (probably only 2 SATA drives will be used by each, but option for 4+ is good to have), so all small details are kind of important in making decisions. Wish there were some with only 2 NICs, and remaining PCIe lanes passed to M.2 instead. Should be both faster, and a few bucks cheaper. I understand most of these boards are for small network appliances (router, firewall, small NVR, etc), but for NAS, 2 ports is max one will ever use. (In practice most people will use 1), and even with 2 one can do some routing. Still some of these N100 boards are very tempting. Do they come with IO shield for ATX?

@htwingnut

2 ай бұрын

Yes, it would be nice to swap M.2 instead of 2.5GbE. I should have mentioned that yes the ones I purchased came with an IO shield.

@movax20h

2 ай бұрын

@@htwingnut Thank you. Have a nice day.

My x570 with 5650PRO two m.2 SDD and 32Gb 3200Mhz DDR4 ECC takes 28W at idle in Truenas Scale. And like u i saw lower power at idle in windows 11 :P I use a 350W 80 Gold from Suipermicro that came with my Supermicro CSE-721TQ-350B2 case Oh it does use a "little" more running cine bench :P

Great video as per usual. It is very hard to decide if to choose these Chinese no-name / BKHD boards vs the N100 boards offered by Asus and ASROCK which have far less IO but better QA. x6 onboard sata is the biggest difference in comparison to the ASUS with x1 and the ASROCK with x2 (both N100). Probably the ASROCK and ASUS due to the power consumption of these boards.

@htwingnut

2 ай бұрын

Yeah. It's quite unfortunate that the power consumption is so high, and their support and endurance is questionable. There are other name brand boards with similar IO, but they usually cost $350+.

@simplexicated

2 ай бұрын

​@@htwingnutYeah, I looked at asrock industrial stuff too but the prices are by enquiry only so I'll likely go with the N100m. This is a totally different beast but I just checked and BKHD does a board of this form form factor (I think) with 10 sata ports x4 ethernet and a xeon socket with ECC support. Such a curiosity to have such a huge processor on a tiny board. If you didn't have power costs to consider its probably easy to pick up an older xeon. Search BKHD C612.

@simplexicated

2 ай бұрын

​@@htwingnutBKHD makes some really interesting boards, the BKHD C612 looks wild. Not much use for low power application but the IO is impressive.

Very good reviews. I also have this board, and I would like to change the CPU fan because it makes a lot of noise. Does anyone know of a model or what family can be installed?

11:11 I think you can adjust the C-states to go higher than [C1], to reduce idle power consumption.

@htwingnut

25 күн бұрын

Thanks, yeah, I've messed with those settings and nothing changes unfortunately.

you mean x2/x4 lanes that confused me before playing the video. so x2 lanes in an x4 slot is good for the current 5Gb/s & 10Gb/s x4 slot Ethernet cards ,I'm not sure about any new sas/sata cards that have x4 lane connectors other than the m.2 variants that will need an x4 pcie slot adaptor. -as can be seen [in the bios], all the Celeron chip motherboards are crippled by old x1/x2 Lane speed connections, but at least they are mostly using the pcie3 variants-

@htwingnut

2 ай бұрын

Yeah, it's a bit disappointing. All they had to do was open up the end of the slot to make it more compatible. x4 cards aren't all that common. Most SAS adapters I've seen are at least 8x.

@BrunodeSouzaLino

2 ай бұрын

This CPU only has 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes. The N100 and N305 don't fare much better than that with 9. I couldn't find any technical specifications on how the PCIe lanes are distributed, so the best bet would be using the 2.5 GbE ports and maybe adding a single port SFP card, which should be enough even if the slot is PCIe 1.0. x2 or x4

Is there a LSI HBA card that will work with the x4 slot?

@htwingnut

2 ай бұрын

Only ones I'm aware of have a single SAS port like the 9211-4i. It isn't a huge deal to cut the end off the port, but it's definitely a risk.

Bought this motherboard and it died two months after purchase. No post. No fan spin. I can't get any response for warranty coverage.

@htwingnut

2 ай бұрын

Thank you for the feedback. That's one thing that's hard to test is longevity. I do wonder about these third party boards at times. But part of me thinks it should be pretty solid because it's all solid state. Unless they do a horrible job with soldering or just use substandard solder all around.

@madrian_hello

Ай бұрын

Buy another one, open claim for old one.

Thanks for the great informative videos. I bought the same mobo from Aliexpress just before your video published. I chose this because both NVME and PCI Express fit my needs more flexibility rather than dual NVMEs. I also bought an Orico NVME to 6 port SATA adapter. However I can not make it work on NVME port. I also have an PCIe to NVME adapter. It doesn't work as PCI -> NVME -> SATA either. I asked the seller and their response is like below. "NVMe does not support conversion to SATA. Because the processor does not have enough pcie lanes to handle these hard drives. You can convert it through the pcie slot on the motherboard, but it only supports 1 expansion hdd/ssd" Do you or anyone else have any chance to test this?

@movax20h

2 ай бұрын

Their explanation is really weird. While I do not have any of these NVME to SATA adapters, for sure the chip on them should work with even a single PCIe lane. (it will not be full speed, but it should work). I think HTWingNut has some of these boards (I seen it in the background in some other video), and should be able to test. I think I am pretty sure he already tested these boards with this mobos, because he said, he was able to do 12 drives with this board (6 onboard SATA + 6 via M.2 card)

@alimli

2 ай бұрын

​@@movax20h I found a pci expansion card with 2 sata ports lying around. I connected 2 of my disks and Unraid recognizes both of them. So their answer is absolutely bullshit. I'll test Orico sata card on another system.

Who the hell wants 4*2,5GBE instead of 1*1GBE and 2*10GBE capable of auto-negotiating down??

@htwingnut

2 ай бұрын

Agreed. I'd rather see two 10GbE ports. Maybe one as an RJ45 for 1/2.5/5/10G speeds and one SFP+ port. They could still do that with two M.2 NVMe slots @ PCIe 1x and two 10G network ports each with their own PCIe lane.

@paulmaydaynight9925

2 ай бұрын

in 2024... plenty of people. remember 1Gb/s is 1999 tech, 2.5Gb/s Ethernet & 5Gb/s -shame about no availability of 5Gb Ethernet routers/switchs yet- are available now in usb3 & pcie3 versions for retail. even the arm pi5 -[omv NAS etc ]- can provide true 2.5Gb/s at 2.3Gb/s average Ethernet writes now -3.13Gb/s writes for the 5Gb variant, a limitation of the pi5 pseudo pcie3 implementation-

@paulmaydaynight9925

2 ай бұрын

@@htwingnut I prefer 3+ ports as 2 only make it just chainable without extra ports expansion.

@TayschrennSedai

2 ай бұрын

10gbe pretty power hungry

@BrunodeSouzaLino

2 ай бұрын

@@paulmaydaynight9925 The main issue with 2.5 GbE and 5 GbE is that they're not compatible with 10GbE in general, meaning you might be trapped into 1GbE speeds or won't have a connection at all. Since the vast majority of servers use either 10/100/1000 or 10 GbE, you run the risk of having to troubleshoot your structure because of this weird consumer standard.

For a nas board it has too many ethernet ports if you ask me it could be also a home router board IF that would have more CPU power, you could make asingle vm host for both your router and nas but as what it is - it is an NAS kinda board that wannabe router xd