MORE CPU + Motherboard Combos for NAS Builds (ECC, AMD, CWWK, TopTon & More) for 2024

only Ipmi is missing

I used a motherboard pulled out of a lenovo ThinkCentre M73 SFF. It has an Intel Dual-Core i3-4130 3.4GHz processor, 8GB ram and works great for Unraid used as a backup server. Cost $25 USD.

BD770i is really nice board - my idea is to do it in this way: I took one of m.2 slots put there m.2 to pci express adapter and to that 2 port 25G nic (Intel E810-XXVAM2 can use pci 4.0 so 4 lanes should be enough). Another m.2 + pci x16 slot as it support x4x4x4x4 mode will be utilized by nvme drives. So in final I can have 5 disk nvme NAS capable of 50Gb transfers.

As you add boards I'd love to see mentions on if they're suitable for transcoding as well.

Hi again, so cool that you included the minisforum motherboards.
I can image it's very hard to make a list of motherboards like this because everybody's usecase is different.
For me the BD770i is perfect.
Yes there is only 1x 2.5gb nic but thats fine because all my switches 2.5gb so i dont need anything faster than this speed.
I picked the lower board because this is already way overpowered for my needs and the 790i consumes more power.
The 55w tdp is just a (max) number, the server idles most of the time and thats way lower (23w in my case).
The reason AMD boards were left behind for a long time must be native Plex support for the AMD igpu. Plex now natively supports AMD igpu transcoding and it does it like a champ out of the box. When i transcode a 4k movie on this board the cpu usuage goes from 1-2% to 3-4% and powerusage from 23w to 26w, thats really low.
I build this system with powerusage in mind but i wanted to have the ability to (if i wanted) put a gaming vm in there maybe to stream games to one of my nvidia shield.
At the moment i only use this unraid server for Plex, Radarr, Sonarr, Sabnzb, pihole, home assistant, twingate and it handles it like a champ.
Good video keep it up!

PS: I wanted to add, my previous itx motherboard in my nas server is a Topton N100 4c/4t and it used 1w less idle compared to the Minisforum mobo. The N100 is nice and could handle most of my needs but didn't offer any more processing power playroom. Since the power usage (in idle) is almost identical I opted for the mobile powerhouse cpu

Would really appreciate a video on bigger atx boards for something like a 24 bay nas? I have an older dual Xeon board that’s getting slow. E5 2470 v2, and I use just about every pcie slot on it, HBAs, 10gb, video card for transcoding, etc.

I hope minisforum makes a AR900i version that has the 14900HX CPU, performance wise its 1 to 1 with the desktop 13900K at around 100 watts less. the Serpent canyon 12th gen nuc enthusiast might be a good choice as well, barebones it sells for $650 but it has an A770M graphics card built in, if you buy a 64 GB of Ram kit and a pcie 4.0 NVME it uses 20 watts at idle, pretty good for an all flash media server or something

Great video as always! One test I would love to see in the future is a mini-ITX nAS DYI build with a MB as the MSI MPG Z790I EDGE since that one has 3xm.2 slots and 4xS-ATA ports paired with a i5-13500T or i7-13700T CPU. The low powered edition CPU (35w TDP) is almost always left out on the other tech reviewers. In my mind this would be the perfect match? A full CPU with all the features and cores/threads but with a low frequency to keep the power and heat as low as possible.

FYI: Gigabyte B550I motherboard supports ECC UDIMM.

You should make merch with seagles on it

Going by my own experiences the only advice I can give to those considering the motherboards linked in the video description is this: *read the reviews*. While there are many complaints, by far the biggest culprit seems to be with BIOS issues that cause many headaches. A lot of this stuff is simply junk. Sometimes it's fun to play with junky hardware but building your NAS around these motherboards might not be the best idea. Just my 2c.

Every board is already up +200$ lol

minisforum ar900i can't recognize any sata adapter, whether it's by pcie slot or m.2 to sata. One other person also reported sata not recognized on raid card installed.
Also tired of these vendors sending out the highest power consuming cpu's with these boards. Where's the low power, fast storage boards?

Thanks to your videos, my vision about NAS or storage is expanding, I built a XEON v4 with storage thanks to your tips. Thank you for the daily information.

hi, for the CWWK amd board, i saw it has a hard drive power supply holder. Does this mean I dont need to connect the HDD power cable to the PSU and can just use the board to supply the power to all 9 HDD? Anyone has tested it?

I was convinced I was originally going to go a custom build but with the f4-424 pro hitting almost all the boxes for what I was trying to get out of the custom it didn't make sense to put in the time that was going to be required. The video before this and this one haven't made me regret my decision at all.

You should check out Supermicro X13SAN-H. It's a 3.5" SBC rocking 12th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-1265UE Processor, M2 x4 and PCIe 4.0 x4 SlimSAS

I’m trying to figure out what cpu and ram combo would be required for a 8 * 12tb disk nas that would be used for nfs share to a jellyfin server hosted on a separate system

With the amd motherboard that supports ecc - does the cpu support it too ?

CWWK links to Minisforum

I would suggest anyone really want AIO go with Xeon D1581 board, 16 cores 32 threads, 32 PCIE lanes(gen 3), support ECC, newer ones even have 2.5G or 10G on board, downside of course it's an old CPU, 65W TDP.

If you want a low power NAS build but N100 or N305 is just cutting too much, you can go with Pentium 8505, 4 e-core, 1 p-core, 6 thread, 20 PCIE lanes, about 10W highier than N100, but enough power to do your basic NAS things, some boards have 2.5G nic, 2 full speed X4 nvme, some sata port and even 1 PCIE X 1 slot, but this one is a bit new and rare right now, you may need to wait for Q3 or Q4 2024 to see them show up in your country.

Please note the additional risks when using combo cpu+motherboards. One issue can take out both components and you can't replace either separately.

I'm looking for something a wee bit different from a traditional NAS.

I'm looking for a box with the specs to run AI models at decent speeds that fits within the physical footprint of a traditional home NAS.

Currently I'm running them on my home PC (128GB RAM, Core i5 12600K, NVME drives all around) and it's performing quite well along the lines of ChatGPT but with it being hosted entirely at home. For AI the two big factors are 1) Dedicated GPU and 2) buttloads of RAM with the minimum being 128GB.
My main model takes up around 72GB of RAM because the entire model loads itself into RAM for speed and then uses the GPU to process queries.

Folks won't believe it now, but at-home AI will be a thing in the future. Why? Because every single one of the publicly-available online models are neutered beyond belief to "comply" with local laws in pretty much every country on the planet.
Uncensored/unrestricted AI models are not but those are really only available to folks like me with the tech to run them in our own homelabs.
As they grow in popularity, more folks are going to be looking at dedicated mini PCs/servers so they can run 24/7 without requiring use of the user's own PC.

And they're going to grow in popularity because it only takes about 15-30 minutes to set an AI up complete with an web-based interface, depending on your ISP speed.

Isn't cpu+mobo combo usually a cpu and a mobo not soc?

Where would you find the ddr5 ecc sodimm for that amd motherboard. I can't seem to find any.

the AMD 7840HS does NOT Support ECC.
Only the AMD Ryzen PRO 7840HS supports ECC! Which is probably not used by this Board from cwwk.
So the Board probably only supports On-Die ECC which is a default from DDR5 but no MultiBit ECC.

Great video, thank you. What would you recommend/can you do a build for a £2k budget for 4K transcoding and VMs NAS with ECC RAMs? I am thinking of a 4-6 bay and really don’t want to go with Synology or QNAP as I don’t like being restricted and under the mercy of their abrupt hardware and software policies. Thank you and keep up the great work.

PCpartpicker really sucks for picking out mobos with ECC support, because since AMD has no official support on their AM4/AM5 boards, they just filter EVERYTHING. That makes the site useless for finding AMD ECC boards that aren't server-grade, so I just ditch it completely. Skinflint is infintely better for finding mobos

Great video though, thanks a lot for the mention of the AMD mobo + cpu combo that has ECC. It looks really good.

EDIT:
It's actually pretty bad all things considered.

Not only are DDR5 SODIMMs with ECC rare and expensive, but I don't even think you can even make use of the ECC compatibility.

The MOBO is stated to have ECC support, but it's pointless when none of the CPUs do.

Would love to see some DIY ATX NAS CPU, and motherboard solutions. Why? server and NAS build combo

Does CWWK AMD-7840HS support WON (Wake-on-LAN)??

Hi, You‘ve mentioned a high power consumption for the CWWK board. Can you maybe provide exact numbers for that, unable to find anything online unfortunately. Did you also test ECC in the CWWK? Thanks!

My Next Upgrade for my NAS Homeserver is most likely a Minisforum MS-01 together with a QNAP TL-D1600S (comes with PCIe-Card and Cables). But the i3 N305 Boards looks really good too

One thing that needs to be said about Minisforum and their boards is that being a smaller chinese manufacturer, their BIOS and firmware support is absolutely dreadful... Also many of the bios options are labeled wrong or translated incorrectly. If some sort of vulnerability or fault is discovered year or two down the line you're out of luck!

How about the R5-5650G for £130 new on eBay w/ cooler, with ASRock or Gigabyte A520i/ac for £105, Amazon? It's only GbE, but supports ECC (and some other enterprise-y stuff from the Ryzen Pro) for a lot less than the CWWK board. The R5-4600G is currently £82 on Amazon too, which seems like a deal. (I haven't actually built it, I'm using a Pi 4)

How about a dedicated video about m.2->sata cards, whats a multiplier, which ones are good and you can use them reliabilty, stress test disks on them, power consumption added compared to LSI hba cards would not be bad either. Just an idea. As I see lot of comments shooting these down as unfit for the NAS job.

What we truly need is cost effective NAS cases! Everything on the market is crazy expensive. The 4 bay case for mITX motherboards are a minimum $80 and anything for mATX, you are looking at $200.

Beware, CWWK AMD-7840HS don't have ECC. The processor does not have ECC in this board.

Considering I want an all flash NAS, is the ar900i the best choice? If so would one of the 4 nvme slots have to be used for os?

If ECC doesn't matter and the used market is something you're comfortable with - there are now many H110 ITX and Q170 ITX boards. Some are even coming with external 12V or 19V PSUs (HP 7.4mm barrel jack), like the Asus Q170T.

A Pentium G4560 or i3 7100 would be dirt cheap to use with them. They're limited to 4 SATA slots (or in case of regular ITX, however many your HBA can support) and having access to 7th gen means the HD 630 will do hardware transcodes for 4k DV/HDR content with no problem if you need it. In fact, QuickSync means you get better performance than from Nvidia or AMD by a long shot.

Now the only way I'd ever consider this is for an ultra budget NAS that's also space constrained (so Optiplex or similar is not an option) - but you can do a full build for under $200 guaranteed.

Listen (I know you can hear me, just an expression)! I am at the crossroads between buyng the cwwk 9 sata board or the minisforum AR 900i for my Jonsbo N3 case. I am not a graphics monster kind of guy, but with the minisforum, I will use the PciE slot for an LSE controller, but with the cwwk it can handle drives from the board (leaving the PciE slot open. I don't know who will read this, but GIVE ME your assessment. It will be a NAS and maybe turn into a VM machine of some type (windows, linus etc.) with 32GB DDR5. OK so nobody knows me, and I don't know you (except the NASCompares guy). Let me know... almost time to buy..

All DDR5 has ECC baked into the spec of ddr5. ECC isn’t really a thing with DDR5.

For those on the hunt for an affordable alternative to the QNAP TS-h1290FX or the TBS-h574TX-i5-16G, the Minisforum AR900i might just be the perfect fit. I'm planning to use this to build my next all-flash NAS. Currently, my setup includes an ASRock Z690i motherboard paired with an Intel i5-13600k and 64GB of RAM, all housed in a Fractal Design Terra Case. I'm gearing up to switch this out for the AR900i and equip it with four 4TB Gen 4 NVMe drives. Additionally, I'll be adding an Nvidia RTX A2000 as the GPU. Its low 55W TDP is a blessing for 24/7 operation, enhancing the system’s efficiency. Unraid will serve as the operating system for this robust and versatile build, and I will configure the array using ZFS to ensure data integrity and performance. This setup will also allow me to run Windows 11 as a VM along with various Docker apps for daily use.

why so many boards with 4 x 2.5 GbE and so few with 1 x 10 Gbe?

What is the best motherboard cpu combination for nas and media server? Thanks.

One solution for mITX+ECC+new gen CPU is AM4 Ryzens offering paired with B450/B550 mITX boards, or even A520 (preferably ASRock or ASUS, as they report the best ECC support). When paired with Ryzen PRO G series APUs, you get the iGPU that you can use with Jellyfin for hardware transcoding support (no Plex as far as I know). Just don't use normal G-series CPUs, as they don't support ECC.
If you don't need iGPU, then you can go for any modern Ryzen, as they support ECC (except non-PRO G-series).
Very important - Ryzen only support unbuffered ECC (UDIMM) opposed to registered ECC (RDIMM) with server chipset boards. UDIMM memory is a bit more expensive and usually harder to find on a used market. Still, you can usually get 2x16GB DDR4 ECC UDIMM for around 120USD new. The highest size support I've seen on the mITX boards was 2x32GB.
Using Ryzens PRO G-series also should produce lower idle power, as those have monolithic cores, similar to laptops, thus not needing to power the infiniti fabric between chiplets.

AMD AM4 boards do support ECC. Take a look at the ASRock B550M-ITX/ac. It supports ether a 16 or 32 Gb dimm.

I need ECC, 10Gb, Quick Sync, mini itx

As a noob with 4x 4tb nvme drives and only basic knowledge, what would you recommend for me?

I don't care about crazy speeds, i just don't want to have all of these connected to my PC with a bunch of usb cables and the storage separated by drives.

Also, would i just hook the nas up to the wall and plug it to my spectrum router?