Topton and CWWK - Who Are They, and Can You Trust Them?
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- Опубликовано: 30 июл 2024
- (UPDATED) Best CPU+Motherboard Combo for Your M-ITX NAS Build - ECC, PCIe Gen 5, 4x4 NVMe and MoreThe Best CPU+Motherboard Combo for Your NAS Build (UPDATED) nascompares.com/guide/the-bes...
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Direct Link to CWWK Site for new AMD board Combo - cwwk.net/products/cwwk-amd-77...
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Video Chapters
00:00 - The Start
00:30 - What do we know (and what we don't)?
01:53- Who Are Topton?
03:30 - ALWAYS a Gmail...
04:40 - The Alibaba Checks
05:40 - Warranty?
07:00 - Topton on Aliexpress..
08:17 - Who Are CWWK?
09:20 - No Longer on Alibaba
10:25 - More Product Information
10:50 - ALL TEXT IN IMAGES (SERIOUSLY ALIEXPRESS, QUIT IT)
11:08 - Way More Software Support
11:40 - CWWK Warranty
13:14 - Harder to Buy online
13:45 - Where Are CWWK and Topton Factories?
14:55 - Images on the website
15:35 - Shared Factories?
16:29 - Brother and Sister companies?
18:31 - Website Point of Sale?
19:13 - CWWK Home website is a headache
20:15 - Security
20:52 - The ACEMagician Malware...
20:15 - How hard would it be to create a software backdoor?
22:50 - I wish we knew more about them!
23:51 - Will I continue to review CWWK and Topton
I Built the Jonsbo N3 NAS ($599 Intel i9 Erying TrueNAS SCALE Build) - • I Built the Jonsbo N3 ...
The Jonsbo N3 NAS Review - Still the BEST? • The Jonsbo N3 NAS Revi...
I Built the Jonsbo N2 NAS - • I Built the Jonsbo N2 ...
The Jonsbo N3 NAS Case Written Review - nascompares.com/review/the-jo...
Jonsbo N2 vs N3 NAS Case - Get It Right First Time! nascompares.com/guide/jonsbo-...
Jonsbo N2 NAS Build Complete Guide UnRAID/TrueNAS - nascompares.com/2023/09/01/jo...
Jonsbo N2 NAS Case Review - Still The Best? nascompares.com/review/jonsbo...
Amazon ￡264.64 Build:
Jonsbo N2 Build for Under/Around £250
Jonsbo N2 + TopTon Intel n5105 Celeron / Pentium n6005 Build (+$35)
Jonsbo N2 Case ￡74.04 (Ali) - amzn.to/3Z3f3Mu
Topton N5105 + 128GB NVMe + 4GB RAM ￡193.48 - amzn.to/47ZibNw
SATA 6 Connector ￡4.19 - amzn.to/3ZbYGNJ
400W SFX PSU ￡24.36 - amzn.to/3qQRzxG
---
Best Jonsbo N2 Build for £750-1000
Jonsbo N2 + Gen4/5 MoBo + Intel Core i5 12th Gen with Int Gfx + 32GB RAM + 10GbE Build
Jonsbo N2 Case ￡74.04 (Ali) - amzn.to/3Z3f3Mu
SATA 6 Connector ￡4.19 - amzn.to/3ZbYGNJ
600W SFX PSU ￡43.78 - amzn.to/3sMaf1P
Asrock Z690M-ITX/AX gEN 4/5 Motherboard £171.20 - amzn.to/3EMpjQ9
Intel Core i5-12600K 12th Gen £239 - amzn.to/45UtNiQ
Corsair VENGEANCE LPX DDR4 RAM 32GB (2x16GB) £59.99 - amzn.to/45CB2fV
ARGB CPU Radiator Fan (LGA1700) ￡13.38 - amzn.to/3sLPy6c
(better option for CPU Fan) Noctua NH-L9x65 CPU Cooler £49 - amzn.to/3EqsLjd
X540-T2 Intel Chipset PCIe x8 Dual Copper RJ45 10Gbps ￡39.34 - amzn.to/3Z3GSUU
Tbkoly Controller Card Motherboard Expansion Card 1 To 5 Port SATA £20.45 - amzn.to/3P8F3RV
(Optional) 2x M.2 NVMe PCIe 4 X 8 Card GLOTRENDS Dual M.2 PCIe 4.0 - amzn.to/3ZaeEbk
AliExpress Links
Jonsbo N2 - s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_DD9...
SATA x6 Cable - s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_DeD...
Cheaper CPU Fan - s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_Dd9...
Better CPU Fan - s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_Dk1...
2x M.2 NVMe Card - s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_DmF...
600W SFX PSU - s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_DFm...
H610 mini itx Motherboard - s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_DlX...
i5-12600K CPU - s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_DkQ...
Corsair 16GB Memory - s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_DlY...
Thinking of buying a product mentioned in today's video? If this video has helped you make that decision, you can use the links and we will get a small % profit of whatever you buy. 
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I believe no one would even mention these brands if similar motherboards were made by brands like ASUS, Gigabyte, or MSI. Unfortunately, there are no affordable alternatives for enthusiasts in the market. And companies like QNAP and Synology offer blatantly weak hardware at unimaginable prices.
That's usually how businesses starts, when there is a gap in a market that needs to be fulfilled.
Why would Asus break the "buy a new plastic router every time we EOL yours" scheme for a router appliance that in all likelihood will be plenty for 10 years? They wouldn't.
You'are right. After gonig Topton's mini PC range, I am thorough impressed by their designs. Their hardware specs change much faster and do not align with how the western companies release products and promote themselves. One can simply buy the OS (win 11) from elsewhere. I doubt they steal data from the hardware itself but it may not matter for most gamers.
I remember the old Nokia company phrase (from its own staff in the 2000s): The time we spend on polishing the powerpoint slides is the same as the time others spend on releasing new phones. Huawei was about to crush everyone with their speed and quality, that's why US blocked them out of fear.
I am amazed the larger oems have not taken notes and started to make similar boards
They can't because marketing try to get maximum $ from product line.
I think that this market is too small for them to care.
Look at NAS cases... Nearly no competition for Jonsbo, big brands don't care.
I tried looking into other ITX boards with N100 processors and they're targeting very industrial applications only. Minimal drive hookups, but back panel space allocated to DB9 serial ports. Not what I was expecting to find at all.
As a member of Topton，I feel many thanks to find our product showing on the NASCompares channel! And also appreciate for the recognition and support from every buyer.
Please make a mitx board with:
3 minisas for 12 sata
2 or even 3 nvme
PCIe slot
Intel 1700
SFP+ or 10g NIC
I don’t understand the 4 NIC thing at all.
As we have seen during the pandemic for FFP2 masks the certificates usually are worthless/forged. And in this case the certificates don't really certify that much. The certified fact is simply one specific product is free of harmful chemicals or elements. There's just no guarantee on security or the integrity of these companies. That said, I bought a Beelink Mini PC for a family member but made sure to delete all partitions including the recovery partition and installed a fresh copy of windows. With that done it's a great piece of hardware with probably only a little risk left.
Wow, I'm really excited to see our computer products on NASCompares. Thank you again!
Excellent investigative content
When I bought my N6005 a few years ago, it was listed as an OpenWRT board. The box says openwrt. From what I recall, there were no markings on the board and there was no documentation other then what was on the 3rd party sellers page on Aliexpress. When I bought it, I knew it was a roll of the dice and if broke early or there was some other issue. But, it's been a very very reliable product. The bios and exactly what's in there is a good question. I have what I need to extract the BIOS and peek at it, but I'm not feeling confident that I'll be able to determine anything.
Great video! I’d like to suggest a video topic. Is optane cache still relevant in 2024?
19:13 you need to consider that the website is being auto-translated to english by some 3rd party translation plugin, which breaks a lot of the functionality of the website. The actual chinese website is not this bad.
This topic is very interesting. Even if the most important brands in the NAS field (Synology, Synology and 3 or 4 others) offer very effective solutions right away, they are closed systems that force users to make forced choices on important issues, in particular these two: the operating system that you cannot choose and cannot change and the limited selection of certified accessories (with Synology especially certified RAM and disks are very few and cost double). These solutions produced by the Chinese now have good construction quality, ease of supply and open up new, extremely interesting scenarios for configuring a NAS exactly as you need it without spending a fortune. Thank you!
Topton seems to be a brand of Dongguan Tuofuton Electronic Technology Co., Ltd.
if they are not targeting end users, but b2b, then they may not providing warranty. Actual sellers can provide warranty, but usually the shipping cost is too high for individuals.
HELP! Topton and CWWK have both blocked the Q&A sections on ali. I need to know if the BIOS on the 7840/8845HS ITX board supports bifurcation of the PCIe slot into x8/x4/x4. Can you check please? You're the only one I know who has one :)
Good and informative Video and I can see your point. But it leaves me with one question: What "reputable" Vendor has similar Products. Meaning 6x2.5 GB Nic and low power CPU. But enough for a little Proxmox host acting as Firewall/Router and some VMs? (I'd love some suggestions)
No one is stopping you.
Trust and peace of mind is worth every penny to me. Synology, QNap, of one of the hard drive mfg.
What I do like about many of the Chinese companies you see on aliexpress etc is the opportunity to try out features that brand companies often will not offer outside the enterprise, or for a significant markup. I got to try early 2.5Gb ethernet switches when 1Gb was the only thing generally available, now seeing more 10Gb and SFP+ stuff in much the same way.
My "normal" homelab environment tends to still use brands like Synology, much in part because I think they offer a great out of the box experience. But it is annoying when they skimp on things like network connectivity (or offer it only through expensive proprietary addons).
The router manufacturer you mentioned is AVM not Fritz. Fritz is more a name for their products. Like Fritz!Box or Fritz!OS 😉
11:06 Image format is for two reasons: first, styling. See also just how prevalent it is for Japanese web too. Even fully online-available font and color text is many times done as an image. The second reason is because images have historically been very rarely been backed up or OCR'd. So plausible deniability. "There was no change, that was always there as such."
Just bought an aoostar to combine with an Unraid license before they go subscription. Just to play around with it until Synology gets their proverbial sh*t together and put out a new quick sync compatible NAS. That said... Upon arrival I will be profoundly scanning this thing though.
6:03 "Default installed our activated OEM cracked version Win7" 🤭
SLIC BIOS is still a thing??
@@Spreadie Yeah, still works fine even in win11 (most win8 and later devices have keys in bios now)
Have one of these Chinese motherboard, does it support sas drives?
One should separate various areas of this discussion:
- are they a decent manufacturer (serious supply chain, a decent warehouse, production facilities crewed with people who know what goes where), do they have some sort of qc - in the end, pertaining to quality of the product
- warranty? Irl, most products you buy from China are "as is" and even obtaining replacement for doa may be nigh impossible, less so the warranty for a product that dies say in a few months. Any claims they make can in most cases be considered lies. Even if it works, sending it there and spending time on managing this process may be more expensive than buying another one.
- are their products made of safe materials (this I'm less worried about, since they make them out of parts/materials it's hard to screw up), in any case such certificates are often bought even in better-managed jurisdictions, let alone China
- is the os bundled with the product legitimate? In most cases, the answer will be "of course not"
- are there any sw backdoors? If it's a pc, best practice is too kill the install anyways. If it's a NAS like ugreen, no way of knowing, really. Logic dictates there will be all sorts of backdoors there (I feel better about Synology nases but only in regard that the backdoors there are more likely to be American instead of Chinese, though could be both).
- are there fw backdoors (e.g.bios/uefi)? No way to know, safe to assume yes
- are there hw backdoors? Possibly. This topic is so complex it's hard to rule them out. One might safely assume that there are ingenious ways to have for example a board that on receiving a certain command via network will start working in a slightly different fashion via a mechanism not easily identifiable without deep inspection by hardware security specialists who will never be paid to do this
Great comment, I have concerns with these Chinese boards but at the end of the day I did pick up a $25 B75 ITX board to keep my old 3770k system alive.
You done any investigating into Eryang??
It's been a while, over 20 years, since I built a PC but seeing mini itx motherboards fully loaded, like 7940HS 9-Bay NAS from cwwk, made me think of building a homelab/san server. I just ordered the board from cwwk website and hope there will be no regrets. My biggest worries are compatibility and support just like anything you buy from China.
I own one Ryzen mini pc from Topton/CWWK. Great little machine. But to me, one Chinese company of mini/industrial PCs that stands out from others, is Qotom. I've had very positive experience using Qotom products throughout the years.
thanks for your support for our Topton PC
It is very right that it is "you" who are responsible for your data security. Hardware, Software and Data... "You gotta keep them separated", man 😃
I'd feel a lot better if you could get coreboot onto them
I dunno the results of the effort, but there was a user on the servethehome forum that was trying to get core boot working on these boards. IDK if he was successful, but there were a bunch of promising indicators from what I remember. It was part of a 100+ page thread regarding the new NXXX series of Alder Lake processors.
Have you seen this FriendlyELEC CM3588 NAS?
I was interested in getting one yesterday when I learnt about its existence but decided to keep my Ugreen NAS order. It might be good for a low cost, all flash storage based system, but for HDDs, considering an extra PSU to power the drives it won't be much cheaper than the Ugreen.
I beat the crap out of a cwwk q670 board and it’s rocking it. Documentation and bios updates are really poorly managed though.
*ding*....Not seagulls this time 😂, I was tempted by picking up one of these for a NAS setup, but went down the mini-PC route.
How did you set up drives with a mini pc? I’m tempted to get a 3 M.2 slot one so I don’t have to deal with hooking up HDDs. I dont need 10+ terabytes to justify a multi bay NAS
@@ultravioletiris6241 Ah, that would be with a DAS unit which I got a mediasonic unit that Wendell from L1 was testing.
@@ultravioletiris6241 Ah, with a DAS unit, I got a Mediasonic one (HF7-SU31C).
FCC and CE certs are only for one product, and it could be a totally different product than you care about. RoHS is mostly just "we didn't use lead solder", which is easy enough. What you really want to look for is certification of a quality management system (typically ISO9001). This should be provided by an independent agency and it will have an expiration date on it.
Any news about 2024 Synology and Qnap Nas realese...... 2 and 4-Bay.... I have been Switching to Qnap but i still love DSM...
All overpriced crap. So glad I got away from Qnaps crap.
@@chublez I have the same. Now I run Truenas on old Qnap NAS via USB stick, because Qnap software has only basic funktionality and lot of problems with backups, IPv6, ...
For basic boards they are pricey. $500 for a Celeron mb?
Prices are under $300
As most of anything coming from China, it’s always somewhere between brilliant and down right shocking, literally. Funny enough Topton has rather a good name, feels good, and I have a motherboard (J6413 NAS board for unraid) mainly because of the power usage on its way from them 🙀, so this article scared me a bit, but I feel lucky today and I know it’s hopefully going to be ok. 😂😂
It is normal that memory, hard disk, BIOS battery may be loose during transportation. Any problems can contact customer service, we will give technical support.
"DDR4 512GB" from that line I already don't trust them.
Why aren't Synology, QNAP, and Asustor referred to as "Eastern" companies?
CWWK was doing OEM for a long time, but in China it is also been the pricey choice, because it's more like doing social media influencers BS in China, for warranty, in China it's always 7 day free unconditional free refund, 15 day free return, 1 year warranty, don't know about aboard.
Topon is just CWWK but older and lesser social media influencers BS, getting their bucks more from industrial product line, and its oversea marketing is slightly better(I just took a look at CWWK English website, lol, they are really not preparing anything.)
That's also what i heard, that CWWK was doing OEM for topton, mostly for the mini routers / industrial products.
@@ledoynier3694 I can't find any sources on that, there are so many OEM companies in Guangdong I guess they may work for each other at some times.
Don't waste your money on any of Topton's computers. I made that mistake.Two years in, the GPU died (Nvidia GTX 1650) died. It's a laptop type GPU and can't be replaced by user.
They don't even put they're name or model number on the computers.
You've been warned.
trust isn't something that someone should have for a brand or corporate entity.
i wouldnt hesitate to do business with topton based on their reputation and history. i would be surprised to get any warranty support from them
i would also reiterate the comment about the expense of malware development. none of these oems will ever have malware as sophisticated as facebook, google, microsoft or even asus include in their products. tho they may i suppose be more happy to inflict damages upon western clients who lack any ability to hold them responsible.
My takeaway from this video: Chinese companies need to market themselves better.
Literally the entire narrative would flip if they have a nice website.
Extra costs. "People buy them anyways so why bother". Also, Chinese web design, like baby Chinese things, is weird
Good luck sending stuff back to china. It’s probably not worth it and they count on it. Long time ago there used to be local distributors in almost every country or region who provided at least basic warranties.
To be fair, if you buy from Ali, you have free return in case something's wrong with the hardware. I got the wrong product a couple times, and once a DOA (not from Topton/CWWK, completely different products) and send them all three back free of charge to a local address in my country (France) using a return label generated by Ali website. I got a full refund each time within a couple weeks.
Don't have a reason to care about either one of these companies yet. Two companies making NAS mobo's and none so far that I have seen supporting ECC memory. If they do, they are few and far between as I have looked at all the products on both their websites quite a few times. Regardless of the added cost...these are not true NAS mobo's without ECC. Long term storage be damned I guess! Which begs the question, why even buy "NAS" specific hardware at all at that point? I am currently building a complete 2U rackmount all SSD M-ATX system with ECC for just under $1K US. If i can piece together something like this ala carte for that price, surely a manufacturer with all their purchasing power and production capabilities could do it better and for less.
This is a NAS specific RUclips channel...so tired of seeing video after video on NAS' that do not support ECC. Catering to the lowest common denominator does not interest me.
I have noticed this too. All the channels covering NAS stuff usually leave out the bit where they do not have ECC. Like you, I will not buy or build one without it. I specifically have a NAS to protect my data, not let it rot.
Have you ever experienced in your life a situation, where not having ECC memory ruined your data? Because (for me) for a "home nas" ECC memory looks to be a bit of a overkill.
@@W0W0S I most certainly have. And a home NAS is not always JUST a home NAS for every person. One of my home NAS' has all my work files on it for the past 20 years plus now. I cannot afford to lose any of it for various reasons. ECC is not a necessity if you don't have any concern for data protection. However if I have data on disk, it is there for a reason and not something I want to lose regardless of its importance. And today, ECC memory support in the CPU and motherboard is not much more expensive. Hell, you can buy a cheap Ryzen (3000 or 5000 series) CPU and motherboard that supports it if you don't want to go the Xeon route or older Intel chips (up to 9th gen I believe) that still supported it. The memory itself for unbuffered DIMM's is not that bad price wise either. It's your data, treat it however you want, I will treat mine likewise. Manufacturers should realize there is a market for informed consumers who want ECC and would pay a bit more as well. But they are too short sighted.
I'd be interested to see your build. Please, put it on PCPartsPicker.
Board with Ryzen 7940HS supports ECC.
I smell CCP backdoor.
I was looking for a product on the toptonpc website and on the "shipping & delivery" entry I just found a nonsensical pseudo-latin Lorem ipsum text, like: "MAECENAS IACULIS
Vestibulum curae torquent diam diam commodo parturient penatibus nunc dui adipiscing convallis bulum parturient suspendisse parturient a.Parturient in parturient scelerisque nibh lectus quam a natoque adipiscing a vestibulum hendrerit et pharetra fames nunc natoque dui." (copied from the website).
Obviously, they don't think customers will look there to buy any products.