What’s your opinion on this board? Is it worthwhile to use as a home server?
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- outdated SATA controllers that don’t let your computer reach higher C-states, and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.
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.
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 it is Topton 12th Gen Intel N100 NAS Motherboard
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.
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.
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.
https://www.servethehome.com/everything-homelab-node-goes-1u-rackmount-qotom-intel-review/ would probably be a better bet for a router
Could be an edge device, but not for inference. Could a storage device carrier board I guess.
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.
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
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