Frequently Bought Together
The board itself is great, but I have received a wrong I/O skield which doesn't fit the board. I wrote to CWWK and asked for a correct one, but they didn't respond.
Purchased an n355 board to replace an aging Xeon system.
Board arrived in the UK approximately 10 days after ordering.
Added a Thermalright AXP90-X47, 32GB Crucial SODIMM and a Teamgroup m2 boot drive.
Fitting it into an old case was easy after ordering some additional standoffs to suit the m3 screws.
Seems to idle around 22W with HDD's spun down.
Arrived nicely packaged in about 10 days in Germany. No additional fees and taxes had to be paid. Installed 32GB RAM (Corsair Vengeance DDR5 4800MHz CMSX32GX5M1A4800C40), 1TB M.2 Mvme (Kingston), Noctua NH-L9x65 CPU cooler and put the lot in a Jonsbo N2 case. Proxmox works perfectly, currently idles at 17W. Super happy with the purchase so far.
I ordered two boards with N355 CPU: one for NAS server and second for Proxmox server. I installed 48GB RAM in both motherboards.
First boot takes a bit longer because it seems it detects the RAM. If you change the RAM memory it will take a while the first time it boots, the rest of the times it will be as fast as expected. Plenty of choices to tweak in the BIOS menu. The fan (Noctua NH-L9i in my case) will not spin when CPU temperature is low which is great.
NAS server: great choice because its 6 SATA ports + 2 M.2 ports + PCIe x4. I use a RAID PCIe card to allocate all my storage devices. It works great. Motherboard + CPU power consumption about 20w idle with a few storage devices.
Proxmox server: great choice again. I used 2 nvme storage devices to setup a mirror to increase data security. I can run many containers and virtual machines with 48GB of RAM. You need more RAM than CPU for Proxmox so maximizing RAM is a good thing for this setup.
I have just two recommendations: (1) add the audio pins to connect to the tower. I know it is completely useless for typical use case of this motherboard, but it is a nice to have feature. (2) My second wish is for the inner USB ports: just use the board pins for the USB ports and if someone wants to use them to attach something, let them buy the cable, as if not, the usage of these two ports is quite limited because they are not easy to use once the tower is prepared. I plan to buy a remote KVM board to control these machines from remote (even reinstall the OS).
Really happy upgrade from my previous AMD Ryzen 3600 that was using way more power than these two servers at the same time.
I tried to find a N150 motherboard from the "established" brands - without luck. CWWK was the only one that delivered.
The CPU info says "Alder Lake" instead of "Twin Lake" - which is odd. But the model and number is correct according to various linux tools. So should be genuine.
All my SATA drives (hdd+sdd) were found and hot-plug, etc. is good. 32GB Corsair Vengeance working fine - just wait a while during the first boot. I got anxious and restarted... even thought something was wrong. Will try out NVME next.
C8 states are at 80% which is great! BIOS needs someone with IT background but that should not be an issue for anyone with access to the internet.
All in all I am very happy so far.