CWWK Intel i3-N305 ITX NAS Motherboard Review (FAILURES)
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- Опубликовано: 3 окт 2024
- CWWK CW-ADLN-NAS Intel i3-N305 NAS ITX NAS Motherboard
Intel i3-N305
1x DDR5 SO-DIMM RAM slot
2x M.2 NVMe PCIe 3.0 x1 slots
1x PCIe 3.0 x1 slot
6x SATA (JMicron JMB585 SATA controller)
USB 3 A USB 3 C
4x 2.5GbE Intel i226-V Network
Review of motherboard that ended up with some questionable results and failures.
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Your videos are exactly feeding the audience what they want to know, the connections, performances, tempeartures, power consumptions, options for extra board connections, transfer byte rates etc etc etc. not much speech but precise. Thanks mate.
Great review. It's unfortunate your board is obviously defective (fingers crossed CWWK will RMA, please do let us know how that turns out), this is a pretty impressive motherboard.
I think I will grow very fond of this channel of yours. I really appreciate your honest and no nonsens reviews.
I'm no expert, but a x16 1050Ti not displaying doesn't seem abnormal in an x1 slot. In my head, many reasons why that x16 card cannot push a display. Much less a 4k display. Your PCIe to NVMe adapter is also longer than x1. Your SATA controller is a x1 card, and worked. The problem seems to be when you try to use a long (x4, x8 or x16) card in the x1 slot. The absence of BOTH the 1050 and the NVMe drive as a device is indicating they're not POSTing. The lockups and freezes could be due to the board or missing/bad software drivers, such as the chipsets.
Thanks for taking the time for watching and your message.
All the power delivery in a PCIe slot comes from the first 11 pins, up to 75W. All the pins behind that are data. You can always slot a larger card in a smaller slot, you will just get degraded performance based on the number of PCIe lanes.
With similar motherboards, I have no issue running a PCIe 16x GPU in a 1x slot, of course limited to 1x PCIe lane performance.
The issue seems to be because it is a shared slot, it only can provide up to about 10-12W as is typical max power for an NVMe slot. But that doesn't explain why the SSD wouldn't work in the PCIe slot when it worked fine in the M.2 slot.
Regarding the lockups, CWWK has acknowledged this is an issue with RAM running at 4800 MHz. Dropping speed to 4400MHz and it seems to be stable.
There is no reason to get this board at this point, however, when they have the CW-NAS-ADLN-K motherboard now which has full 4800MHz RAM support, a full 4x PCIe 3.0 slot, and two M.2 PCIe 3.0 x1 slots that can be used independently, and at a cheaper price.
28:01
If you use google translate on bilibili (their version of youtube), it seems the purple board's features were made by "viewer's" requests.
Its very telling that they needed a reality check from "viewers", probably bad engineers (doubt) or bad management (most likely, trying to scramble cheapest available parts asap)
Thank you for all your reviews of these itx nas boards from aliexpress. I don't know if you've seen it but there's a new board that has popped up in my research. It's similar to these NAS boards but with an option of a 12450H i5 cpu or 8505 pentium cpu which supports up to 20 pcie lanes. Hoping you can get your hands on one and putting out a video!
I actually picked up the Q670 NAS board by CWWK as well as the CW-NAS-ADLN-K motherboard. I'll look out for that i5-12450H one though.
@@htwingnut oh awesome! looking forward to a q670 board video! that's the other board i was interested in.
Thanks, very useful review. Let us know how CWWK handles the problem, I think the N305 is a great choice. I have been impressed with my GMKtec N100 NUC.
Do you have the Pentium 8505 ITX NAS motherboard? I would love to hear your take on that motherboard, as it have a PCIE x4 port and more ports.
at 5:16 you mentioned taking off the metal shroud from the cpu, but never did; it got planned for a future video perhaps?
Since I'm eyeballin' their 8845HS-board, I'm kind of curios to see if it's hack job or not.
Yeah, sorry. I started filming this in the beginning not with the expectation that it would be a problematic board. I didn't want to remove the copper plate for fear of not getting an RMA. I am hoping to get a resolution soon, and will gladly remove the copper plate if/when I get a good unit.
There is always power limitation on boards with dc input for pci slots. For example your 1050ti made for x16 slot with 75w desktop limitation with regular psu. Often for thon mitx boards there is info in manual of max power consuption. For example asrock n100 board can handle 40w pcie card at max with 90w psu, and 20w card from 60w psu. So there is 2 limits - from board and from psu, but 40w is upper limit
Yes exactly it's no issue to put pci X1 card in 8x or 16x slot, but doing the opposite will give lots of problems, you don't get the required bandwidth and power
In your description you said the motherboard has x4 pcie slot. The first video card (Nvidia 710) graphics card is a x1 pcie video card and only requires 1 pcie lane. The msi video card is a x16 video card which requires 16x pcie lanes to work. The NVME adapter also looks like a x16 device which would require 16 pciei lanes to work. The LSI is a x8 device and requires 8 pcie lanes to work.
Thanks for the feedback. However, all the power comes from the front 11 pins, up to 75W, and then the data lanes are everything behind it. A 16x card can run perfectly fine in a 1x slot, just with reduced performance. I think I have a video somewhere showing this.
I would love to buy this motherboard but without the issues...😉
Any updates on the RMA?
They refunded me for the board. I then purchased the purple board which has some issues of its own and have to RMA that one too. Not looking too good for CWWK boards so far.
The don't have the required bandwidth nor power.
Thanks for taking one (big one) for the team! youch
LOL. Yeah. If any one wants something similar, I'd recommend their purple board. Hoping to get my hands on one in the near future.
Amazing videos, exactly what we need. Thx!
Can I pull a request? Throw in a PCI 10gbps NIC for the tests (speed, etc)
Thinking in one of these boards with x5 hdds and xpenology for main synology backup.
Thanks for the kind words. Sure, I can do that.
I would definitely avoid any purchase from this company until and unless they show good customer service with respect to a warranty return.
Hi, I just bought the N100 ITX NAS motherboard and I'm also experiencing random freezes. I can't even install the OS... Would you happen to have any advice? I don't really know what to do
Thanks !
One thing you can try is to downclock your RAM. I hear that some users set their RAM to 4200 or 4400 MHz instead of 4800 MHz and seems to increase stability. You should be able to do this in the BIOS, but I don't have the board any more so I can't confirm, unfortuantely.
Wanted to let as many people know that doing so indeed fixed my stability issues and should be considered as a good option. Thanks!!
I'll start using the NAS and hopefully performance will be good as well
@@SonicPlyr Great to hear and thanks for the confirmation!
Power consumption at idle about 19W???? Crazy!!!! My Core i5 12500, with 32GB RAM, with 2 SSDs, and 3 HDD (two spined down, one working all the time), with couple of containers (cloud, pihole, proxy, etc.) need about 30W.
Yeah, it seems that is the biggest issue with these boards. I've heard it's due to the onboard SATA controller, but I'm not so sure. Definitely could use some improvement in that area.
Were you able to get different board or a refund from them?
I thinking about buying a Mini PC from CWWK and now I'm concerned about their customer support in case something's wrong with it.
They have been very good so far. They are allowing me to exchange it for their "purple" board CW-NAS-ADLK-K. My return board hasn't reached their facility yet, but they said once they receive it, they will ship out the replacement right away. All their other products so far that I have checked out seem to work perfectly fine.
Okay, thank you :)
@@htwingnut Do you plan on doing a review of that new purple board when it arrives?
hmm.... some china YT reviewer mention some WATCHDOG TIMER bug in the bios....
did you try DISABLE the WATCHDOG TIMER monitor?
Amazing video, everything I really wanted to know about this board and more! Thank you very much for getting and sharing!
I got the topton version of this and im also having issues with system hang as well as hdd failing to move data after certain amount of time. At first i thought it was a ram issue as my crucial ram failed memtest, but my replacement ram also failed.... 2 bad rams could be a thing but I've been building computers for over 10 years where this is the first time I'm having memtest fails.
Not only that, this board showed up way later than promised which delayed my build for 3 weeks.
Thanks for the feedback. Yeah something doesn't seem right with this motherboard. Maybe a BIOS update will fix it. It could also be a manufacturing defect or design error too. Curious that you're seeing the same issue.
No way I will be using this or recommending it for any project. I can live with the PCIe slot quirkiness, although it's not right. But lockups should not be tolerated.
Good luck. I'm hoping to get this swapped for their newer "K" purple board. Hoping it's better equipped.
@htwingnut just wanted to update you after doing some digging... apparently, these boards are very sensitive with ram. Someone had success with lowering the ram speed from 4800 to 4400 so I tried that just now. About to complete one pass of memtest with 0 errors, while at 4800mhz it threw out about 75 errors.
Give that a shot and run memtest to see if that will resolve the system from crashing. Once I get through 2+ passes, I'll fire up the unraid server and validate.
@htwingnut wanted to update you that the memory timing declock has made my system stable and haven't had a crash since. It completed 4 passes of memtest with flying colors. Completed a 12TB parity check and is humming along now.
Not good, hopefully a bad mobo and not indicative of poor quality in general.
Can you please test the new "cw nas adln k" ?
Yes. I have one being shipped. Hopefully it gets here soon.
The issue with these Chinese boards is unstable BIOS, and no BIOS updates.
Its a Frankenstein combination of components which is why they can't fix it all. The BIOS is not natively created it is modded from another.
I have some story with this boards too. I bought n305 mb with 32gb ram and 1tb nvme, but received N100. Now I'm in the process of the return. The N100 mb is flawless, my system is running for 2 days without a hickup, but I do not use any pci-e card, just a second nvme drive. The only thing I'm not happy with is the Jonsbo radiator, which is a little bit noisy. I'm wondering if any standard radiator (ex. Noctua NH-L9i ) would fit this mainboard and if I could remove completely this copper block and use the radiator without it.
Nevertheless even N100 is not that bad in term's of CPU, but since I'm using Proxmox (Unraid + Docker VM), I need 8 cores from N305. You can find some information that N100 won't be reliable with Proxmox, but that's not true, It's working flawlessly, keeping in mind there are only 4 cores to allocate.
The second thing that made me a little bit worried is that when I placed the radiator, I screwed it to the end, which caused the whole mainboard to bend and I realize that when I screwed the mainboard to the chase. I loose them to a a more comfort bend, but that's a shitty design. The copper block is few mm higher than standard CPU IHS and the lack of backplate element does not help. Do you still have this board?
If you ordered an N305 they should provide an N305, sorry that happened. The Jonsbo radiator seems to touch down to the capacitors just next tot the CPU. This has me concerned.
I still have the board and am trying to get it replaced with the newer CW-NAS-ADLN-K board.
@@htwingnut Well, I'm currently waiting for N305 from your video, hope it will do same as N100 I've returned :) I've replaced the fan from the Jonsbo radiator to MUCH silent, a little bit thicker Noctua Redux fan, which has the same airflow, but it's like 17dB comparing to 27dB. It was day and night.
Hi, I’m currently running n305 board that you’ve reviewed, with no issue (without pcie card). Enabled cstates in bios. The CPU is much more efficient than n100 :)
@@HighFlyD What kind of RAM are you using? It seems that this board for whatever reason is sensitive to RAM. Some have stated to drop the RAM speeds to 4400, others have swapped RAM altogether and had better improvements. I'm just not fond of a board that's that sensitive to RAM, not to mention the limits of the PCIe slot. Thankfully CWWK are exchanging the board for their "purple" board which seems much more competent.
@@htwingnutI,m not sure, I bought memory in bundle with the mainboard. No issues so far and I have it going 24/7
One of the m2 slot is shared lanes with the pcie slot so it can only use one of them at a time
1 PCle x1 slot supports expansion cards (shares signal with the second M.2
Yes, thanks, I am aware. The second M.2 slot was not utilized when using the PCIe slot.
I also have an N305 board that is hanging. I installed it near the end of April and was out of the country in May and June. It hung on May 22. I've installed different software since I returned, and it is hanging more often. The CPU temps are never over 30c. Is there a new bios?
I haven't noticed a new BIOS but I did hear setting RAM to 4400MHz or lower can help. I haven't tested it personally. I returned the board back to CWWK.
@@htwingnut I replaced the 32GB of Crucial RAM with 16GB of Samsung and it has been stable since the swap.
What did CWWK say about the heatsink touching the capacitors?
Also when I ordered the purple board they said I should use Samsung or SK Hynix RAM. I already have 32GB of crucial so hoping it’s not a compatibility issue. Still waiting on delivery 😅
Mines has arrived - I am very happy with it! Can’t wait to see your video on it. RAM is 32GB crucial and is currently running through at 24 hour stability test. No issues so far!
@@zr0dfx
Hi. I am also interested in that one.
Did you test PCIe slot with any kind of card, adapters, GPU or anything similar ?
@@zr0dfx
One more question about purple one, I see this one has fewer LAN ports so I wonder if PCIe shared with second M.2 slot ?
Would be thankfull for ur feedback for the purple mb❤
I just got mine and tried hooking up with a SFX PSU, I don't have a 4Pin connector so just plugged in the 24 pin ATX connector and powered on the PSU. The CPU fan has been spinning for a atleast 20min now and I don't see anything on the screen -- any idea what Im doing wrong? I do have a 6Pin PCIe connector but not sure if I should plug that into the 4pin slot
4 pin connector is required for the CPU. It won't boot unless you have the four pin CPU power connector. The PCIe connector cannot go in the 4 pin slot.
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Yes your data is not valuable. Please risk it on questionable motherboards.
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