Intel N100 based micro ATX boards

[JohH]

Some more interesting boards now exist. CWWK has N100/N305 mini-ITX boards with DDR5 SO-DIMM instead of DDR4, 6 SATA ports (albeit on a JMB585 controller, maybe not the best) and 4x Intel i226V NICs. The price is about $100-120 more than the ASRock/Asus boards too. Heat-sink adapter plate is questionable, who knows how well that transfers heat.

Amazon.com

 

[Igb]

Some more interesting boards now exist. CWWK has N100/N305 mini-ITX boards with DDR5 SO-DIMM instead of DDR4, 6 SATA ports (albeit on a JMB585 controller, maybe not the best) and 4x Intel i226V NICs. The price is about $100-120 more than the ASRock/Asus boards too. Heat-sink adapter plate is questionable, who knows how well that transfers heat.

Amazon.com

Thanks a lot for the information. I am happy about having more products to choose, and to be honest I was about to order one of those N-305 boards from CWWK/Aliexpress for the extra CPU performance and DDR5 support (this a plus here for the power savings in an already very power efficient plataform)

... but I decided not to do it in the end. It seems like finding an "all round best" motherboard is an impossible task in this platform.

For me the part where these CWWK boards fail is in the networking and expandability. I mean, the 4 included NICs are decent 2.5Gbps ones, but I would rather have a 10Gbps card, and not only it is not included (I would happily pay the extra), you cannot add it with a decent performance, since both of the M.2 slots and the PCIe slot are "only" 1x. PCIe 3.0 at 1x gives 8Gbps theoretical bandwidth, but in my own tests with the Asus board mentioned in this topic show about 5-6Gbps with a 10Gbps NIC, the same which gives close to 10Gbps when there are 2 pcie lanes.

So no 10Gbps card, and a bit of a bottleneck for a fast M.2 SSD (specially if used as read cache) as opposed to Asrock/Asus options made me reconsider it and finally not purchase the board. Not having a USB3.0 internal header is also a drawback for me, albeit one I can forgive without much effort.

For the onboard SATA ports, even on a JMB585 are perfectly fine for me, since I use this same controller to expand the conectivity on the Asrock N100M board I am currently using. I think however it is a bad design choice to use 1 native + 5 from JMB585 as opposed to 2 native + 4 from JMB585 (to allow close to full SATA3 bandwidth when all of them are populated with SSDs)

Regards.

 

[csendesmark]

Just found this "gem"
Labelled as N100 NAS Motherboard
This one is looking really great, except why do this have 4×2.5Gbps connector instead of one 10Gbps??
I guess you can truncate them, but I would still prefer a single connector.
I already got my system which is working fine,
Ended up with the Asrock N100M with Asus XG-C100C V2 10G NIC
So it might be useful for someone else

 

[Igb]

Just found this "gem"
Labelled as N100 NAS Motherboard
This one is looking really great, except why do this have 4×2.5Gbps connector instead of one 10Gbps??
I guess you can truncate them, but I would still prefer a single connector.
I already got my system which is working fine,
Ended up with the Asrock N100M with Asus XG-C100C V2 10G NIC
So it might be useful for someone else

I am using asrock N100M too, with an AQC-107 10G card, a pcie sata controller, and a Hynix P31 gold (working at pcie3.0 2x) as a cache drive. I think this is still the best solution for a low power and decent performing NAS. It is a pity though i had to ditch my mini-ITX case for a bulkier one.

Nowadays there are even better boards, similar to the one you linked, based on i3-N305 (same as N100 but with twice the cores) with DDR5 SODIMM slots. These are more capable and efficiency on low loads is similar.

However they maintain the same drawback: poor pcie lanes allocation. Pcie slot is electrically x1 (not enough for 10Gbps) and M.2 slot too. I do not have use for four slower NICs as opposed to a single fast one. So I kept my Asrock N100M until something strictly better is available.

Thank you for the update

 

[csendesmark]

Never even played with the idea of an i3 or low end Ryzen.
Since my plan was to keep power usage down.
And choose the mATX version since it has more PCIe connectors...
It is a shame that the N100M only gives 2 SATA and 1Gbps...

 

[Igb]

Never even played with the idea of an i3 or low end Ryzen.
Since my plan was to keep power usage down.
And choose the mATX version since it has more PCIe connectors...
It is a shame that the N100M only gives 2 SATA and 1Gbps...

Despite its name, i3-N305 is much closer to the N100 than to any other i3. The design philosophy is the same: E-cores only, low power usage over performance, and soldered in motherboard.

The higher TDP can be misleading, of course peak power usage is higher (because it has twice the cores and almost twice the performance), but on low to moderate loads (100% of the time on a NAS) it is as efficient as the N100. Idle power usage can be even a bit lower due to the 1-2W saved using DDR5 instead of DDR4.

I agree on the drawbacks of the Asrock board you point out, however at least it has the connectivity to solve it. On all the chinese boards I have seen, it is just not possible to have true 10Gbps network (on a 2x slot) and a M.2 SSD (also on a 2x slot)

 

[csendesmark]

I understand, that the N100 is basically am i3 or Celeron or whatever.
But it generally using less power than a "regular" CPU, also costs less, since you paying "only" the mobo.
DDR5 is better in that yes, but I running it on a lower Voltage and frequency.