This mini ITX board combines Alder Lake-N processor with 10 Gb and 2.5 GbE networking and up to 8 storage devices (2 x NVMe + 6 x SATA)

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  • outdated SATA controllers that don’t let your computer reach higher C-states, and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.

I see one 4-pin, a 3-pin(?), a 8-pin and multiple 9-pin connectors.

Looks like 2x 4 pin fan headers:

A diagram of the motherboard

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.

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.

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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.

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It might be ‘state after G3’

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