1y ago

This mini ITX board combines Alder Lake-N processor with 10 Gb and 2.5 GbE networking and up to 8 storage devices (2 x NVMe + 6 x SATA) - Liliputing

What's your opinion on this board? Is it worthwhile to use as a home server?

15 comments

Pretty killer specs on paper. In my experience, these AliExpress boards have a bunch of minor annoyances that add up. Examples of those annoyances from my experience include:
a complete lack of support after the sale (you’ll never get a BIOS update, or if you do, you have to get it from some dodgy Chinese Dropbox-equivalent),
a lack of 4-pin chassis fan headers,
outdated SATA controllers that don’t let your computer reach higher C-states, and
non-standard CPU coolers that you’ll never be able to replace if they fail.
- So true. I'd complement the first point to include a general lack of documentation. Sometimes, we can't even know some pinout schema without trial and error.
- I own a Chuwi Larkbox X (another N100 device) and I can't tell it to boot up after a power failure in the BIOS. So that is another thing to keep in mind.
  
  It might be 'state after G3'
- I see one 4-pin, a 3-pin(?), a 8-pin and multiple 9-pin connectors.
  
  Looks like 2x 4 pin fan headers:
  But yeah I've got an AliExpress X99 board, which threw all sorts of hardware errors, had no fan speed control (100% all the time), no working hwmon sensors, and I ended up buying a used Supermicro board instead.
The features sounded good enough for me to click with intent to buy (as a firewall/router), but no SFP and no PCIe expansion slot means I can't use it with fiber. And with just one 10Gb port, the maximum it will be able to pass through is 2.5Gb/s (assuming the rest of the board is up to the task).
Looks like it would be nice for a small home server.
- https://www.servethehome.com/everything-homelab-node-goes-1u-rackmount-qotom-intel-review/ would probably be a better bet for a router
- Could be good as a firewall with PFSense or something. 2.5gb to the ISP and a 10gb trunk port. Would be an upgrade for me. All I would use is a drive in it though.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
NVMe	Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage
PCIe	Peripheral Component Interconnect Express
SATA	Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.

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That looks interesting. Does anyone have a link to it? The only thing that comes up in the search results is the liliputing article.
- I think you can find it for sale on AliExpress by searching for 'Topton N100 NAS motherboard.'
  
  If you simply search for "N100", sort by price and scroll down a bit, you will find quite a lot of entries for that board.
I just got a standard Mini-ITX board with overspecced VRMs and a PCIe slot in the end. Good enough. At least it can sleep and behaves as expected.
Could be an edge device, but not for inference. Could be a storage device carrier board I guess.

15 comments