What’s your opinion on this board? Is it worthwhile to use as a home server?
Pretty killer specs on paper. In my experience, these AliExpress boards have a bunch of minor annoyances that add up. Examples of those annoyances from my experience include:
- a complete lack of support after the sale (you’ll never get a BIOS update, or if you do, you have to get it from some dodgy Chinese Dropbox-equivalent),
- a lack of 4-pin chassis fan headers,
- outdated SATA controllers that don’t let your computer reach higher C-states, and
- non-standard CPU coolers that you’ll never be able to replace if they fail.
So true. I’d complement the first point to include a general lack of documentation. Sometimes, we can’t even know some pinout schema without trial and error.
I own a Chuwi Larkbox X (another N100 device) and I can’t tell it to boot up after a power failure in the BIOS. So that is another thing to keep in mind.
It might be ‘state after G3’
I see one 4-pin, a 3-pin(?), a 8-pin and multiple 9-pin connectors.
Looks like 2x 4 pin fan headers:
But yeah I’ve got an AliExpress X99 board, which threw all sorts of hardware errors, had no fan speed control (100% all the time), no working hwmon sensors, and I ended up buying a used Supermicro board instead.
