$140 NAS Motherboard from AliExpress Review | Is it worth it?

The board is manufactured by a Chinese company called CWWK. The thermal paste application on these Chinese boards from all vendors have been found wanting. Remove the heatsink and re-apply some MX-4 or better still, some Kryonaut thermal paste, and you ought to take a minimum of 10deg of your temps. 1 SATA port comes from the CPU / Chipset, the remaining 5 from the JMB SATA controller chip on the board. The internal USB ports aren't really intended for direct-attach dongles as far as I understand it, but rather to connect expansion USB cables, (It's an internal hub) etc. The second NVMe slot is for WiFi adapters I think. Either way, your only going to get PCIe Gen3x1 speeds from either NVMe slot due to the small number of PCIe lanes available to the N5105 (8). A second limitation is the fact that 'officially', the N5105 only supports 16GB of memory. Some people have had success with 32GB on these boards, but the memory-training delay on 1st boot can last anything up to 2 minutes. Why they supplied it on a single SODIMM is confusing, as it'll only be in single channel mode. A kit of 2x8GB SODIMMS would make more sense, and might also increase performance. I don't have this particular board, I have (2x) of the BKHD variant of the N5105 equipped NAS board (Part No.: BKHD-N5105-NAS-I226), but I am waiting to get some additional parts before doing the two builds I have planned.

I have the same board. I have it in a Thermaltake 100 Mini case. It runs TrueNAS Scale out of the box with no modification. Have a bunch of drives connected, 16GB RAM and both NVME drives populated. It's been rock solid for almost a year now.

I've actually been looking for a board with multiple 2.5Gbps ports to build a home top box with built in firewall and router for my FTTH clients as well as a SMB box that can do some cool stuff. This actualy looks like it has some potential, however, they are no longer on Ali, so I am going to try and get in touch with the manufacturer. Nice video, you got a new sub!

I think you might actually be sure 😁 nice videos glad they came up in my feed

If anyone is looking at buying one of the CWWK boards just keep in mind that the model in this video (N5105/N6005) is based on Jasper Lake (10th Gen 2021). For approx the same price you can now get the Alder Lake (12th Gen 2023) N100/N305. The issue with the older 11th Gen chips is that they don't have AVX2 support which will limit your ability to run some newer software packages. Also all 4 ethernet port boards use the JMB585 SATA controller which will prevent entering C states lower than C3. The latest purple CW-NAS-ADLN-K (dual ethernet) use the ASM1166 which doesn't have this issue. Thus if power usage is important and you can cope with only dual ethernet (trunking is your friend) then this is a better option. Another nicety of the CW-NAS-ADLN-K is that the PCIe port is x4 so you can hang off a 10G ethernet or a NVMe splitter etc.

This thing is great for a router and Docker host / hypervisor aaand if you do not care about your data then its a very capable NAS as well.

The internal USB ports are intended to connect expansion USB cables, or pigtails in a same case you will use that motherboard like front and back I/O

"i dont know what that means, com port" I screamed in pain as i suddenly got old and threw my back out

Hi, I have a motherboard with the same CPU and I run Proxmox on it no problem!

Thanks for this video! It will be great if you can show us how to put this into an ITX case and show how to wire up the network with an appropriate switch as well so that we can follow your steps to build a nice NAS at home. Thanks again!

You're not getting many VMs using that CPU that's for sure. The lack of ECC is a huge disappointment. However, since its only use case is for a NAS, I'd run Unraid or TrueNAS Core on it.

Link aggregation, doesn't it mean that you can have max x number of 2.5 Gbit connections? X is the number of lagg interfaces. So can't have 5 Gbit with two bridged, but you get two 2.5 Gbit parallel capability.

Great video! I've never seen them come pre-populated with RAM and SSD though. Even in your link they don't show it coming with SSD or RAM.

I have a mini pc with the same cpu. You are dropping frames on youtube because you have the desktop set to 4K. It can output 4K but it's not powerful enough to do it smoothly, even the windows transition animations are sluggish. Drop it to 1440p and everything will run fine, even youtube.

Hello, nice review. I've seen you said that in other reviews, so: if your connection was not fast enough to stream it would never show up as dropped frames in stats for nerds. The frames would just load up more slowly, causing fewer dropped frames, if anything.

In my opinion, for home use, buying a small, cheap MiniPC like Beelink or so ... and putting a large hard disk inside it is sufficient, and it does not consume energy at all. thank you for the video man.

That "gorge" header is for an old-school RS232 serial port.

awesome content ;) glad to have found this; subscribed!

Internal USB is quite useful for boot drives for FreeNas etc. installs. You have two so they can go in raid as well. Software raid obviously. I've done that before with a mod to the internal USB headers of a normal motherboard to do the same thing.

Can highly recommend these. I have one of the similar N100 boards, running Proxmox hypervisor, running an Openmediavault VM & a Plex LXC container. Mapped the 6 port SATA controller directly via Intel VT to the Openmediavault VM which is running as NAS with 4 sata disk & ZFS filesystem. Even mapped the onboard videocard to a Plex LCX container for GPU transcoding. Combined with a Plex Pass Plex is actually able to do 4K transcoding to my Google TV (big surprise that worked), Only adding subtitles in the transcoding mix seems too much for Plex to transcode. Running at 24 Watt idle with spin downed disks, 60 Watt peak load for the total system when disks are spun up. Running with 4 SATA disks in a Jonsbo N3 which has a SATA backplane.