I think I will grow very fond of this channel of yours. I really appreciate your honest and no nonsens reviews.

Great review. It's unfortunate your board is obviously defective (fingers crossed CWWK will RMA, please do let us know how that turns out), this is a pretty impressive motherboard.

Your videos are exactly feeding the audience what they want to know, the connections, performances, tempeartures, power consumptions, options for extra board connections, transfer byte rates etc etc etc. not much speech but precise. Thanks mate.

I would definitely avoid any purchase from this company until and unless they show good customer service with respect to a warranty return.

Thanks, very useful review. Let us know how CWWK handles the problem, I think the N305 is a great choice. I have been impressed with my GMKtec N100 NUC.

In your description you said the motherboard has x4 pcie slot. The first video card (Nvidia 710) graphics card is a x1 pcie video card and only requires 1 pcie lane. The msi video card is a x16 video card which requires 16x pcie lanes to work. The NVME adapter also looks like a x16 device which would require 16 pciei lanes to work. The LSI is a x8 device and requires 8 pcie lanes to work.

@htwingnut

9 күн бұрын

Thanks for the feedback. However, all the power comes from the front 11 pins, up to 75W, and then the data lanes are everything behind it. A 16x card can run perfectly fine in a 1x slot, just with reduced performance. I think I have a video somewhere showing this.

at 5:16 you mentioned taking off the metal shroud from the cpu, but never did; it got planned for a future video perhaps? Since I'm eyeballin' their 8845HS-board, I'm kind of curios to see if it's hack job or not.

@htwingnut

21 күн бұрын

Yeah, sorry. I started filming this in the beginning not with the expectation that it would be a problematic board. I didn't want to remove the copper plate for fear of not getting an RMA. I am hoping to get a resolution soon, and will gladly remove the copper plate if/when I get a good unit.

Thanks for taking one (big one) for the team! youch

@htwingnut

21 күн бұрын

LOL. Yeah. If any one wants something similar, I'd recommend their purple board. Hoping to get my hands on one in the near future.

What did CWWK say about the heatsink touching the capacitors? Also when I ordered the purple board they said I should use Samsung or SK Hynix RAM. I already have 32GB of crucial so hoping it’s not a compatibility issue. Still waiting on delivery 😅

28:01 If you use google translate on bilibili (their version of youtube), it seems the purple board's features were made by "viewer's" requests. Its very telling that they needed a reality check from "viewers", probably bad engineers (doubt) or bad management (most likely, trying to scramble cheapest available parts asap)

Were you able to get different board or a refund from them? I thinking about buying a Mini PC from CWWK and now I'm concerned about their customer support in case something's wrong with it.

@htwingnut

Күн бұрын

They have been very good so far. They are allowing me to exchange it for their "purple" board CW-NAS-ADLK-K. My return board hasn't reached their facility yet, but they said once they receive it, they will ship out the replacement right away. All their other products so far that I have checked out seem to work perfectly fine.

@olokelo

Күн бұрын

Okay, thank you :)

Amazing videos, exactly what we need. Thx! Can I pull a request? Throw in a PCI 10gbps NIC for the tests (speed, etc) Thinking in one of these boards with x5 hdds and xpenology for main synology backup.

@htwingnut

20 күн бұрын

Thanks for the kind words. Sure, I can do that.

The issue with these Chinese boards is unstable BIOS, and no BIOS updates.

@tendosingh5682

Күн бұрын

Its a Frankenstein combination of components which is why they can't fix it all. The BIOS is not natively created it is modded from another.

I have some story with this boards too. I bought n305 mb with 32gb ram and 1tb nvme, but received N100. Now I'm in the process of the return. The N100 mb is flawless, my system is running for 2 days without a hickup, but I do not use any pci-e card, just a second nvme drive. The only thing I'm not happy with is the Jonsbo radiator, which is a little bit noisy. I'm wondering if any standard radiator (ex. Noctua NH-L9i ) would fit this mainboard and if I could remove completely this copper block and use the radiator without it. Nevertheless even N100 is not that bad in term's of CPU, but since I'm using Proxmox (Unraid + Docker VM), I need 8 cores from N305. You can find some information that N100 won't be reliable with Proxmox, but that's not true, It's working flawlessly, keeping in mind there are only 4 cores to allocate. The second thing that made me a little bit worried is that when I placed the radiator, I screwed it to the end, which caused the whole mainboard to bend and I realize that when I screwed the mainboard to the chase. I loose them to a a more comfort bend, but that's a shitty design. The copper block is few mm higher than standard CPU IHS and the lack of backplate element does not help. Do you still have this board?

@htwingnut

15 күн бұрын

If you ordered an N305 they should provide an N305, sorry that happened. The Jonsbo radiator seems to touch down to the capacitors just next tot the CPU. This has me concerned. I still have the board and am trying to get it replaced with the newer CW-NAS-ADLN-K board.

@HighFlyD

10 күн бұрын

@@htwingnut Well, I'm currently waiting for N305 from your video, hope it will do same as N100 I've returned :) I've replaced the fan from the Jonsbo radiator to MUCH silent, a little bit thicker Noctua Redux fan, which has the same airflow, but it's like 17dB comparing to 27dB. It was day and night.

@HighFlyD

3 сағат бұрын

Hi, I’m currently running n305 board that you’ve reviewed, with no issue (without pcie card). Enabled cstates in bios. The CPU is much more efficient than n100 :)

@htwingnut

Сағат бұрын

@@HighFlyD What kind of RAM are you using? It seems that this board for whatever reason is sensitive to RAM. Some have stated to drop the RAM speeds to 4400, others have swapped RAM altogether and had better improvements. I'm just not fond of a board that's that sensitive to RAM, not to mention the limits of the PCIe slot. Thankfully CWWK are exchanging the board for their "purple" board which seems much more competent.

I got the topton version of this and im also having issues with system hang as well as hdd failing to move data after certain amount of time. At first i thought it was a ram issue as my crucial ram failed memtest, but my replacement ram also failed.... 2 bad rams could be a thing but I've been building computers for over 10 years where this is the first time I'm having memtest fails. Not only that, this board showed up way later than promised which delayed my build for 3 weeks.

@htwingnut

19 күн бұрын

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah something doesn't seem right with this motherboard. Maybe a BIOS update will fix it. It could also be a manufacturing defect or design error too. Curious that you're seeing the same issue. No way I will be using this or recommending it for any project. I can live with the PCIe slot quirkiness, although it's not right. But lockups should not be tolerated. Good luck. I'm hoping to get this swapped for their newer "K" purple board. Hoping it's better equipped.

@AxiosTK

19 күн бұрын

​@htwingnut just wanted to update you after doing some digging... apparently, these boards are very sensitive with ram. Someone had success with lowering the ram speed from 4800 to 4400 so I tried that just now. About to complete one pass of memtest with 0 errors, while at 4800mhz it threw out about 75 errors. Give that a shot and run memtest to see if that will resolve the system from crashing. Once I get through 2+ passes, I'll fire up the unraid server and validate.

@AxiosTK

16 күн бұрын

@htwingnut wanted to update you that the memory timing declock has made my system stable and haven't had a crash since. It completed 4 passes of memtest with flying colors. Completed a 12TB parity check and is humming along now.

I would love to buy this motherboard but without the issues...😉

One of the m2 slot is shared lanes with the pcie slot so it can only use one of them at a time 1 PCle x1 slot supports expansion cards (shares signal with the second M.2

@htwingnut

21 күн бұрын

Yes, thanks, I am aware. The second M.2 slot was not utilized when using the PCIe slot.

Yes your data is not valuable. Please risk it on questionable motherboards.