Hi all. Since the publication of this video, it was brought to my attention that this motherboard has had several issues encountered with it. Although I never encountered them, further investigation does show a decent amount of users online raising concerns with their units. (Example www.reddit.com/r/homelab/s/eeRCYY8wYs ). Going to do a little more digging with this board in the office, but apologies on missing this during the review.
And a touch of jeopardy. Every time I watched I was always wondering is this the time where the Tower of NAS comes crashing down? 🫢 Love the content, though. Don't stop!
Those boards are very bad with power management as well as Bios settings and documentation. Mine always freezes up when aspm activated. I basically choose it for due to (not working) power saving features
My last cwwk mb got bricked after a „successful“ bios update, which was needed because it died during installation of we’ll basically anything I tried. JBAT jumper or removing the cmos battery didn’t help. And have fun finding a manual, the bios updates are in labeled in Chinese
After waiting months and months for Synology to disappoint me with new enterprise products, I went with a Q670 build for my first ever NAS, went over budget but am really enjoying the extra performance on tap
I have it since last week! I thought it was faulty because it takes 40 seconds to boot with mine 12500T and 32Gb of ram! It has been working 24/7 ever since 😊😊😊
Nice to hear. Could you share with us power consumption numbers? Have you tried turning ASPM on? Do you use all 3 nvme slots? What RAM and nvme SSD do you use? I hear mobo is picky when it comes to skome brands. Thanks
@@markas85 I haven't checked the power consumption yet, but I will. Currently, I'm using one NVMe slot, three HDDs, and one SSD in a Jonsbo N2 case. My setup includes an ESXi host running a Sophos firewall, FreeNAS, Linux, and a Windows VM. I have 2x32GB Kingston DDR5 RAM operating at 4800 MHz; higher speeds require a 13th or 14th generation CPU, and a Intel 10gb X550 T2 network card. I don't know if ASPM is on, I'll check that too
the reason for the speed decrease on the ssds is the usuall: not enough pci-e lanes. only 1 m.2 and the pci-e x16 go directly to the cpu, the rest are connected to the chipset. i've tried a lot of those boards, it's the same deal. they try to cram as many interfaces as possible, but they end up not working good at most.
Correct. And really the only way you're going to fix that with Intel is to go Xeon - None of the current gen CPU's have much PCIe bandwidth. A few designs put the ports behind a switch, but that still bottlenecks in and out of the CPU. For anything "serious" mini-itx really sucks, and most consumer level boards aren't that suitable for high-speeds due to this too. (Some exceptions exist... sort of). Personally the video could stop with "No ECC" and I would be done there, since integrity of data is the whole purpose of a NAS, and Intel has been holding that back for enterprise-only for years.
@@ChrisCebelenski another problem with intel is bifurcation. you get only x16+x4 and x8x8+x4. amd is better at this but still has the same number of pci-e lanes, i think. meh.
Looking to replace my 10 year old ts440. The one thing holding me back from most builds is lack of lights out management so this looks ideal but no UK sellers 😢
CWWK had a Core 8505/i5 itx board with an SFF to 4x nvme board. Is that still available? I was tempted by that. Info was scarce on their site, but i guess it would have been throttled to x1 lane per nvme.
Did you use a full fat 12500, or the T version? With boards/users that have problems in mind, could you write up for us which memory and nvme you were using? Other products have had favourites and disliked brands. So your choices may have helped with reliability.
I have one of these boards (I think, came via King Novy store on AliE), waiting for other bits to arrive to hook it up properly. However, while they say it supports 5600 DDR5, mine refuses to run the RAM at that speed and doesn't offer XMP to unlock from the base 4800. "Support" in this case means, "you can plug it in and it will run at 4800", at least for my board.
For ECC it would need a W class chipset (eg W680), but its pretty neat. Also a DTX variant with two x8 slots would be handy variation (eg. for a Node304 chassis or most of ITX enclosures made for dual-slot GPUs). Then a slight shape adjustment into the depth also would made possible the underside NVMe's moved to the top for easier access. Not that I am happy with all three Gen4x4 sharing a bottleneck in form of the DMI .. but be it - at least it keeps the PEG slot and all its bifurcation options for expansion cards. If size would not change, then the two extra NVMe would be nice be in form of connector for cabled drives (eg SFF or slimsas) - as one just have to cool a gen4 drive anyway and the underside ones are being grilled too much in this setup imho.
Ecc limitation is a Intel choice (if the motherboard maker used a ryzen cpu, ecc works just fine) ecc is limited to i3 and xeon (or soldered cpu) and right chipset combo
@@TheEfthyy That isn't exactly how it works. Most of the 12th gen and up CPUs support it, but only with a single chipset. Any A/B/H/Q/Z chipset model will instantly tell you that it won't have ECC. No matter what, you can only ge ECC on them with the W680 chipset. Since I never see it on anything Chinese made, I suspect Intel is either stingy with it and only sells it to big companies or they charge a ton for them and people won't buy this board if it has ECC and is double the price.
@@PeterBrockie yeah like I said the mobo needs to support ECC, via the W680 chipset like you mentioned, likely just a cost thing, most consumer diy people buying these don't care about ECC likely, it's definitely worth it but not needed
I don't understand the motherboard maker obsession with ITX. I think its fairly clear that a larger board with physical x16 slots and bifurcated x8 and x4 allocation options would be a functionally superior design. If you want a gaming rig with a graphics card and some SSD slots for steam, great, but messing around with PCIE extenders feels like Apple's dumb idea of putting only USBC on laptops. Even PCIE gen5 for a mini NAS (or gaming) seems like expensive overkill on an i5 board.
One point I'd like to understand better, if anyone can help me out? It's mentioned near the end that some wouldn't want to use SFF to SATA breakouts - is there a reason? Besides the form factor, the SAS protocol I'm familiar with has 4 channels per connection, which should support 8 drives here the same as 8 individual connectors. Yes?
Sucks that you won't get ECC support unless you use a "workstation" class chipset like W680 --- even though this is just a pass through as the Intel CPUs handle memory and ECC internally. Any idea on warranty repair costs/time for these CWWK motherboards? I can't help; but, wonder if these cheap motherboards use decent enough capacitors and other components to last long enough for ECC memory to be a worth while long term feature.
Can you elaborate on the issues? Perhaps BIOS settings for Unraid? This has eveeything i need but im aware the cwwk BIOS is not very stable and difficult to find (if it exists).
Waiting for this board to be delivered. I should've dig more into all the issues people are reporting because it seems there are many. Given title of this video has "Mobo Review" in it, I was hoping to see some of these issues covered. I'd say this is more of a overview of a product rather than review.
Hi Mark. The honest answer is that I was not aware of the issues, largely because I didn't personally encounter them - so didn't have cause to check. But it sounds increasingly like I got lucky. Gonna make a pinned comment highlighting this (going to point at this Reddit post here www.reddit.com/r/homelab/s/eeRCYY8wYs ). Apologies for missing this!
@@nascompares Glad to hear you didn't have those issues. That's uplifting. Given you you're around 30W at idle with i5 12500, I understand you didn't try tuning for power consumption? I read a lot of people have problems with ASPM turned on. I also saw few people achieving sub 20W numbers on idle.
Repeated misuse of "architecture" - version/generation etc is NOT architecture. Also, IO isn't scalability in the way that it's mostly used. Sure, you could hang a bunch of stuff off USB in various flavors, but to me the point of building a NAS thing like this would be to have the stuff internally inside one box, not having a bunch of adapters and jank hanging off USB of various flavors. Just my 2ct. This only really makes sense if you can source the rest of the parts for free or supercheap, since built up the base system gets into a category where it is competing with serious setups based on the price, like proper servers that have a lot of features this does not have, like lots of slots for network cards, storage controllers, GPUs for transcoding/AI, slots for more RAM, better and in some cases more CPU's and so on forth. There are Dell and HP purpose built servers which can be had for not that much money that have greater potential for most uses - the one thing where they do not beat this is choice of case pretty much, so they look like they look since you can't case swap them easily.
Just checked their website (I know they're Chinese but still): please correct me if I'm wrong here but no mention of a mailing address, no phone number, no way to contact them except their online form, not even a mention of the fact they're a Chinese brand. Hard pass for me. Whatever the brand/manufacturer, I never buy anything if I don't have the above-mentioned information.
I really liked this kind of mobos until I looked at them seriously in order of purchasing one. Simply put, they make no sense. For less than half that price I bought an Asus ATX motherboard with 6 sata ports, 3 m.2 ports and more pci connectors than I can really use without reaching the pci-lanes limit for the cpu. Put on top of that an i3-12100 and still you would have some money to spare before reaching the price of that chinese motherboard with who knows how many issues.
Hi all. Since the publication of this video, it was brought to my attention that this motherboard has had several issues encountered with it. Although I never encountered them, further investigation does show a decent amount of users online raising concerns with their units. (Example www.reddit.com/r/homelab/s/eeRCYY8wYs ). Going to do a little more digging with this board in the office, but apologies on missing this during the review.
I miss the old cluttered studio. it had character.
And a touch of jeopardy. Every time I watched I was always wondering is this the time where the Tower of NAS comes crashing down? 🫢
Love the content, though. Don't stop!
lol same
Once or twice they did. And it hurt. New messy studio finished yesterday, coming soon. It is similarly dangerous too
Those boards are very bad with power management as well as Bios settings and documentation. Mine always freezes up when aspm activated. I basically choose it for due to (not working) power saving features
My last cwwk mb got bricked after a „successful“ bios update, which was needed because it died during installation of we’ll basically anything I tried.
JBAT jumper or removing the cmos battery didn’t help.
And have fun finding a manual, the bios updates are in labeled in Chinese
Same. NICs kept flashing but otherwise dead. I had to send it back for a refund.
I would've liked a bit more info on the power consumption. I've read numbers as low as 3W for idle with one SSD installed so 30W seems very high.
After waiting months and months for Synology to disappoint me with new enterprise products, I went with a Q670 build for my first ever NAS, went over budget but am really enjoying the extra performance on tap
I had the previous version that had the 8 individual SATA ports. Ended up returning it because of weird stuff that cwwk still hadn’t fixed.
I have it since last week! I thought it was faulty because it takes 40 seconds to boot with mine 12500T and 32Gb of ram! It has been working 24/7 ever since 😊😊😊
Nice to hear. Could you share with us power consumption numbers? Have you tried turning ASPM on? Do you use all 3 nvme slots? What RAM and nvme SSD do you use? I hear mobo is picky when it comes to skome brands. Thanks
@@markas85 I haven't checked the power consumption yet, but I will. Currently, I'm using one NVMe slot, three HDDs, and one SSD in a Jonsbo N2 case. My setup includes an ESXi host running a Sophos firewall, FreeNAS, Linux, and a Windows VM. I have 2x32GB Kingston DDR5 RAM operating at 4800 MHz; higher speeds require a 13th or 14th generation CPU, and a Intel 10gb X550 T2 network card. I don't know if ASPM is on, I'll check that too
the reason for the speed decrease on the ssds is the usuall: not enough pci-e lanes. only 1 m.2 and the pci-e x16 go directly to the cpu, the rest are connected to the chipset. i've tried a lot of those boards, it's the same deal. they try to cram as many interfaces as possible, but they end up not working good at most.
Correct. And really the only way you're going to fix that with Intel is to go Xeon - None of the current gen CPU's have much PCIe bandwidth. A few designs put the ports behind a switch, but that still bottlenecks in and out of the CPU. For anything "serious" mini-itx really sucks, and most consumer level boards aren't that suitable for high-speeds due to this too. (Some exceptions exist... sort of). Personally the video could stop with "No ECC" and I would be done there, since integrity of data is the whole purpose of a NAS, and Intel has been holding that back for enterprise-only for years.
@@ChrisCebelenski another problem with intel is bifurcation. you get only x16+x4 and x8x8+x4. amd is better at this but still has the same number of pci-e lanes, i think. meh.
I have the previous version and it’s awesome.
Looking to replace my 10 year old ts440. The one thing holding me back from most builds is lack of lights out management so this looks ideal but no UK sellers 😢
CWWK had a Core 8505/i5 itx board with an SFF to 4x nvme board. Is that still available? I was tempted by that. Info was scarce on their site, but i guess it would have been throttled to x1 lane per nvme.
Please recommend a system for SAS 8+ SAS Hard drives
Did you use a full fat 12500, or the T version? With boards/users that have problems in mind, could you write up for us which memory and nvme you were using? Other products have had favourites and disliked brands. So your choices may have helped with reliability.
I have one of these boards (I think, came via King Novy store on AliE), waiting for other bits to arrive to hook it up properly. However, while they say it supports 5600 DDR5, mine refuses to run the RAM at that speed and doesn't offer XMP to unlock from the base 4800. "Support" in this case means, "you can plug it in and it will run at 4800", at least for my board.
For ECC it would need a W class chipset (eg W680), but its pretty neat. Also a DTX variant with two x8 slots would be handy variation (eg. for a Node304 chassis or most of ITX enclosures made for dual-slot GPUs). Then a slight shape adjustment into the depth also would made possible the underside NVMe's moved to the top for easier access. Not that I am happy with all three Gen4x4 sharing a bottleneck in form of the DMI .. but be it - at least it keeps the PEG slot and all its bifurcation options for expansion cards. If size would not change, then the two extra NVMe would be nice be in form of connector for cabled drives (eg SFF or slimsas) - as one just have to cool a gen4 drive anyway and the underside ones are being grilled too much in this setup imho.
How is that top NVMe slot wired up? Through the PCH or CPU?
Ecc limitation is a Intel choice (if the motherboard maker used a ryzen cpu, ecc works just fine) ecc is limited to i3 and xeon (or soldered cpu) and right chipset combo
some consumer range Intel CPUs allow ECC support now, for example, i5 14500, the motherboard itself still needs ECC support as well
@@TheEfthyy That isn't exactly how it works. Most of the 12th gen and up CPUs support it, but only with a single chipset. Any A/B/H/Q/Z chipset model will instantly tell you that it won't have ECC.
No matter what, you can only ge ECC on them with the W680 chipset. Since I never see it on anything Chinese made, I suspect Intel is either stingy with it and only sells it to big companies or they charge a ton for them and people won't buy this board if it has ECC and is double the price.
@@PeterBrockie yeah like I said the mobo needs to support ECC, via the W680 chipset like you mentioned, likely just a cost thing, most consumer diy people buying these don't care about ECC likely, it's definitely worth it but not needed
I don't understand the motherboard maker obsession with ITX. I think its fairly clear that a larger board with physical x16 slots and bifurcated x8 and x4 allocation options would be a functionally superior design. If you want a gaming rig with a graphics card and some SSD slots for steam, great, but messing around with PCIE extenders feels like Apple's dumb idea of putting only USBC on laptops. Even PCIE gen5 for a mini NAS (or gaming) seems like expensive overkill on an i5 board.
One point I'd like to understand better, if anyone can help me out? It's mentioned near the end that some wouldn't want to use SFF to SATA breakouts - is there a reason? Besides the form factor, the SAS protocol I'm familiar with has 4 channels per connection, which should support 8 drives here the same as 8 individual connectors. Yes?
have you seen cwwk has a 9bay amd embedded mobile processor version now? has ecc sodims has me really thinking of going that direction now.
What is this other one called?
@@drewbert83 they dont really do model numbers but this is the one CWWK AMD-7940HS/8845HS 8-bay/9-bay
@@Perplexed1185 Yeah that looks pretty sick.
Sucks that you won't get ECC support unless you use a "workstation" class chipset like W680 --- even though this is just a pass through as the Intel CPUs handle memory and ECC internally. Any idea on warranty repair costs/time for these CWWK motherboards? I can't help; but, wonder if these cheap motherboards use decent enough capacitors and other components to last long enough for ECC memory to be a worth while long term feature.
Can you elaborate on the issues? Perhaps BIOS settings for Unraid? This has eveeything i need but im aware the cwwk BIOS is not very stable and difficult to find (if it exists).
there is also B760 board (as low as $129 including shipping) that have:
8*SATA
4*2.5Gbe (i226)
2*DDR5 SO-DIMM
2*M.2 NVMe
4*USB3.0
1*PCIe x4
mITX?
Waiting for this board to be delivered. I should've dig more into all the issues people are reporting because it seems there are many. Given title of this video has "Mobo Review" in it, I was hoping to see some of these issues covered. I'd say this is more of a overview of a product rather than review.
Hi Mark. The honest answer is that I was not aware of the issues, largely because I didn't personally encounter them - so didn't have cause to check. But it sounds increasingly like I got lucky. Gonna make a pinned comment highlighting this (going to point at this Reddit post here www.reddit.com/r/homelab/s/eeRCYY8wYs ). Apologies for missing this!
@@nascompares Glad to hear you didn't have those issues. That's uplifting. Given you you're around 30W at idle with i5 12500, I understand you didn't try tuning for power consumption? I read a lot of people have problems with ASPM turned on. I also saw few people achieving sub 20W numbers on idle.
have you ever thought about testing the odroid h4?
No ECC? I am offended. and not surprised. :(
Sorry bud
Unless it’s the W680 chipset you will not see ECC on Intel. It’s already in the title.. 😉
What about something like this that is using AMD? The reason is, that AMD supports ECC.
I want a server but I need it to be loud, small and unreliable. Is this the board for me?
Repeated misuse of "architecture" - version/generation etc is NOT architecture. Also, IO isn't scalability in the way that it's mostly used. Sure, you could hang a bunch of stuff off USB in various flavors, but to me the point of building a NAS thing like this would be to have the stuff internally inside one box, not having a bunch of adapters and jank hanging off USB of various flavors. Just my 2ct. This only really makes sense if you can source the rest of the parts for free or supercheap, since built up the base system gets into a category where it is competing with serious setups based on the price, like proper servers that have a lot of features this does not have, like lots of slots for network cards, storage controllers, GPUs for transcoding/AI, slots for more RAM, better and in some cases more CPU's and so on forth. There are Dell and HP purpose built servers which can be had for not that much money that have greater potential for most uses - the one thing where they do not beat this is choice of case pretty much, so they look like they look since you can't case swap them easily.
unless you enjoy solving problems I would avoid. If you get it shipped you will find like many other online that there are problems with these boards.
Just checked their website (I know they're Chinese but still): please correct me if I'm wrong here but no mention of a mailing address, no phone number, no way to contact them except their online form, not even a mention of the fact they're a Chinese brand.
Hard pass for me.
Whatever the brand/manufacturer, I never buy anything if I don't have the above-mentioned information.
I really liked this kind of mobos until I looked at them seriously in order of purchasing one. Simply put, they make no sense. For less than half that price I bought an Asus ATX motherboard with 6 sata ports, 3 m.2 ports and more pci connectors than I can really use without reaching the pci-lanes limit for the cpu. Put on top of that an i3-12100 and still you would have some money to spare before reaching the price of that chinese motherboard with who knows how many issues.
why no 12 port versions of any of these NAS motherboards. GRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!
andddd its intel :( easy pass