yeah it's a shame this doesn't come with a hdmi connector... then i'd be sold. even though i wouldn't use any of the sata plugs and just hook a sas controller+expander up to it... hdmi + ecc + pcie x8 capability cpu+mobo for $400 would be a steal
At $400 it's priced out of the core HTPC market; it's clearly intended as an entry level large storage server. As pointed out below, the spaghetti explosion from wiring a dozen drives with individual cables makes it unsuitable for most enterprise use (or prosumers who know better).
For $400 you could put together a better HTPC/NAS combo solution with an AMD AM1 ITX system and an Areca SAS RAID card in a PCIe slot. You'd get a superior onboard GPU with HDMI, native USB 3.0, and a better RAID card, not some Marvell crap.
Your mainboard doesn't support ECC RAM and your SAS Controller only supports 8 SATA drives without further expanders. Together with the two SATA connectors on the mainboard you got only 10.
The quad core has an even lower TDP of 14W vs. 20W of the octa version. The C2750 has a faster CPU compared to your Athlon 5350.
The only disadvantage is the poor IGP. Considering that this is more a storage/server board, less a HTPC (who wants 12 noisy hard drives in the living room?) and the unbeatable price, it's a very interesting porduct in my opinion.
If you purely want a NAS, there are probably better solutions than what I outlined, but for a hybrid (and who is to say the NAS wont be SSD's or 2.5" 2TB drives that are dead silent) this board, like Ian pointed out, is kind of a joke for an HTPC solution. It is VERY market specific, and virtually ALL AT readers aren't part of that market. This board is grossly overpriced, especially for something with ASRocks name on it. Even cold-storage servers should have USB 3.0 or eSATA. and quality products don't use some buggy $3.00 Marvell chipset that wipes arrays at random.
I'm with you Up, how did this get sidetrac'd into HTPC, I'm looking for an alternative to some of the stock Qnap and Synology geer for use in my home. Want NAS box with lots of tru put. Not clear on why Ian says no NAS. Whats up with configuring as a NAS? Any other suggestions
Avoton supports intels visualization extensions with 64GB of RAM and 8 cores it could be a decent low powered KVM server sliced up in many different ways.
I have to say I'm surprised they didn't go with minisas connectors instead of a fistful of satas. Supermicro have done the same thing and it simply doesn't make sense.
yeah they could have saved a ton of real estate using mini plugs. Even full sized servers like HP's ML310 series use mini plugs to keep the board clean. Even more important on an ITX board. This board has a lot of oversights, which ASRock will learn is unacceptable in the market they're targeting it at.
Bad idea in this case, since they're using SATA instead of SAS. Someone would inevitably try to use this with an SAS expander... But I agree with Supermicro having made an odd choice. Their LSI2308-equipped motherboards would be perfectly equipped with SAS connectors.
if you're looking more for a media player you can plug into your TV, then one of the many other Baytrail-D motherboards would be suitable... there's a useful list and discussion of them here: http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php...
i'm probably one of the core target prosumers for this, as for a few years now i've been running something similar at home... namely a sandybridge itx board, 35 Watt i3, ecc ram, supermicro low profile (lsi) sas controller, supermicro 24x (lsi) sas expander backplane, 400w passive psu, passive cpu cooler, 18 sata 2.5" hdds (5200rpm - WD scorpio blue / hitachi travelstar)
and while this board fits my requirements wonderfully while being cheap there is just one dealbreaker... 12x sata? wtf? no-one sane will run so many hdds without a backplane. it's just unmanageable. the most simple backplane with 12 sata plugs + some power plugs & 12 correctly spaced hdd plugs woud do. and could be manufactured & sold very cheaply. but there is no such thing... (step up asrock :)
With 18 drives, you might want to consider a BackBlaze pod with room for 45 drives, especially now that we have 32 and 40 disk controllers. That with some ZFS would be quite an excellent NAS IMO, and I am heading that way, slowly.
100 square metres is a pretty huge apartment, but the idea behind a storage server isn't to put it next to your TV or projector anyhow. I'm moving from a 34sqm apartment to a 65 sqm apartment, and I've got a 15-drive (18 drive if you include the boot/cache SSDs) ZFS file server for all my media. But it's a headless system, and even though it's pretty quiet (I've used nothing but low-power drives), it doesn't need to be anywhere near the home theatre setup. It's going to go in a closet somewhere. The only connection it needs to my home theatre is not an HDMI cable, but a Cat6 cable :)
Of course, I don't have a dedicated HTPC either; my main desktop (an SFF system) will be in the same room as my home theatre, connected to my HDMI matrix switch. It can access files on the giant file server in the closet, while taking up very little space itself. If for some reason my desktop couldn't be near my home theatre, I'd probably just buy an NUC-like system for that.
true it doesn't need to be near the tv... but at least my appartment doesn't have a closet. so its either bath, kitchen, living room or one of the sleeping rooms. or the cellar... 5 floors down. installing network cabling there is north of $5000... and wlan through multiple concrete thats just not going to do it.
The article states there are 4 fan headers, but there are actually 6. The aforementioned four next to the CPU socket and two more in the corner near the cluster of SATA ports that are all-white.
Your comment about the reason for using the PLX switch is wrong. First, the PEX8608 is an 8-lane switch and they are using it in a x4 (from CPU) to 4 x1s (to PCIe end-points) topology. The Avoton CPU actually has a total of 16 PCIe lanes, but can only bifurcate to 4 controllers. So the real reason they are using the PLX switch is to be able to have more than 4 PCIe end-points connected to the CPU. There will be no performance degradation or sharing of bandwidth due to the presence of the PLX switch since there is an equal number of lanes going into it from the CPU as as there are end-points connected on the downstream side.
Supermicro has two similar board with a few differences of SO-DIMM, USB 3, 4 NICs, and 6 sata headers. It's also cheaper. I think the features of this board is much better than this ASRock board.
Is it just me or was this review an extremely bad match to that product? What about NAS performance, which undoubtedly will be one of the major selling points? Instead we get gaming on a product as far from gaming as it gets. And content creation?
According to users on several forums, this board has been the focus of many different types of build. I've done a brief analysis here of usability and interface, but Ganesh is our storage guru and has all the equipment for storage related tests, so I'd rather leave that in his court for a follow-up review rather than fumble through them myself.
No offense, but you have reviewed a rake as a back scratcher :)
With such massive storage capacity, dual gigabit onboard, up to 64 GB of ECC ram - computational performance is irrelevant, this product is all about throughput. While it may be viewed as somewhat beneficial to get concrete numbers, yet after all the numbers only confirm this product ain't neither about gaming nor about content creation, so if anything the review is useful at proving its uselessness, which makes it technically useful - which is quite a nice paradox ;)
It's not you. This is perfect to me for what this board is intended for - virtualization, NAS, home web server, backup, even good enough for a Plex or XMBC server. The review made it seem like it is for HTPC and gaming which it is not.
Drop the AST2300 for management. Drop BMC/SMB. Drop IPMB. Drop TPM. Drop COM port. Reduce fan ports (6 PWM to 4 PWM). Drop a SATA controller (12 ports to 8 or 10). Increase the size of the heatsink and/or add a fan.
Drop the price in half for a consumer version please!
There's a quad-core version of the same board at 3/4 the price. That should be enough for most home users. It's also a 14W part, so has less cooling needs.
Actually, for the SMB/Home version I was thinking more along the lines of keeping all the management, but dropping the TPM.
Dropping BOTH extra SATA switches. (No real need for these on a home Media Server, and honestly for many/most SMB, four 6TB drives would be more than enough)
Updating USB to 3.1 status
A digital video output.
Dropping the COM port
Thunderbolt 2 for external expansion (that way a SMB that was growing could add a storage chassis if needed)
And for Silverstone, a chassis with similar capabilities to the DS380, but with the following changes...
Drop 3.5" support. Ideally 4 Hot Swap 2.5" external bays, and one or two internal 2.5" bays.
An option for a Slim Optical drive.
Preferably a horizontal orientation to fit into an A/V setting.
Support for double wide normal graphics cards. This would probably necessitate a riser and horizontal orientation of the card.
Ian! A question for you. Do you have something that could test real time transcoding of Audio and Video? Both with and without a GPU?
Interesting as how Anandtech includes gaming benchmark for a storage centric motherboard, and with a decent card, it still be able to cope. What can you expect from a 25W CPU though
2. 43W idle for the 5350??? What the hell??? I think your values are totally wrong.... 50W for the C2758??? Look at that test with a similar Supermicro Mini-ITX motherboard: http://www.servethehome.com/intel-avoton-rangeley-...
Values aren't wrong, but the PSU is inefficient. Those values are also a full system build. I have to keep the same power supply across reviews for meaningful comparisons on the same efficiency curve, which I mention in the blurb above the power readings. I also mention that due to that fact, it's more a qualitative comparison than a quantitative.
I understand why you're using the same PSU for all your tests. But for really small/low power systems I'd suggest adding a second power test with a much smaller PSU, similar to how the old cast thermal tests for small enclosures were often done with both a big high power GPU and a small lower power one. The 1250W monster would allow for direct comparison with high power gaming systems; a second number from a ~250W PSU would provide a second number that would be more inline with typical use.
"Users have been reporting that in Linux and FreeBSD, high intensity read/write workloads cause the controller to reset and elements to any software array are lost."
Hmm. Not good. I see this with Sil3132 controllers, too. The PCIe x8 slot would let me install a modest controller like the old Intel/LSI SASUCI8, but that push the system price back into SuperMicro territory.
Yes, for that price and target market, they should have gone with an LSI chip. You don't see Supermicro or Tyan boards in that price range using Marvell.
I know it was said that the actual storage review is coming in the future but I think this article is a complete waste of time. You should simply let the storage review happen and not bother with this at all. More than half of the benchmarks are useless, the only ones of value might be encryption and compression.
What we actually want to see is FreeNAS thrown in there with a 16TB ZFS zpool and some IO benchmarks. :)
Could be perfect for anyone wishing to build a tiny box for virtualization, a task in which many a NIC, plenty of RAM and a multicore processor is most helpful.
I've wondered how one of these Avoton boards would compare to a Supermicro C2xx + Pentum G3430 (which supports ECC). This is the cheaper option if you don't need lots of ports, but once you add $100 for a sata card from Ebay, these options are similarly priced.
Could you please measure power consumption without the 770 as well? I have a HP Elite 8200 with a quad i5, SSD + 2.5" HDD, 32 GB RAM and an extra NIC as a makeshift box for ESXi and with 6-8 virtual machines running it draw less than 30 watt. It would be interesting to know how low this machine could go since any machine running 24/7 will add substantially to the power bill.
If I was using this in my home file server, I'd make a few changes to the board. The number of SATA ports is fine, because even though I've got 18 drives in mine, that PCIe slot lets you put in a SAS/SATA controller to get the total up as high as needed (16 port cards aren't hard to find, higher is available).
However, I'd change a few things:
1) Replace the CPU. Home file servers can often be bottlenecked by individual CPU core performance, because not all filesystem operations on ZFS are multithreaded (although it's far better these days). For the ~25W TDP, I would much rather have a Haswell part, even if it meant fewer cores. For that TDP, you could get a ~3GHz dual-core part, or a ~2GHz quad-core part. Either of those would be better suited.
2) Add digital video output. HDMI, DVI, DisplayPort, any of them. I'm not suggesting using this thing for HTPC use, but many monitors these days are digital-only, and nothing is more annoying than trying to diagnose problems with a headless system when your motherboard is VGA-only and all you have is digital-only monitors.
3) Drop two of the RAM slots, and use them for another PCIe slot. Four slots is excessive for anything but enterprise use. Two slots cheaply gets you 16GB of RAM, or 32GB if you're desperate, either of which is more than enough for a home file server. A second PCIe slot, on the other hand, could enable a variety of other options, be they multiple SAS/SATA cards, a discrete video card if you really do want to use the thing as an HTPC, a video capture card (this board in that Silverstone case would probably make a decent HD-SDI recording box), etc.
4) More USB ports, prefereably 3.0. If extra space is needed for the ports, ditch one of the three GigE ports; two is plenty.
5) An mSATA slot for a boot drive could be useful, although it would probably increase board complexity by requiring some of the board components to move to the rear.
"Two slots cheaply gets you 16GB of RAM, or 32GB if you're desperate"
My ZFS media rig has 19 drives (21 including the ZIL and l2arc), plus boot media and at 36Tb it _needs_ 32Gb of ram to work efficiently. It kept bottlenecking at 16Gb. The next round of storage will push well past the 32Gb requirement.
+1 on the video output, +1 on usb3 - but I don't think it needs more ports. That's not a good fit for the target, which is a storage controller. Ditto on the mSATA.
If you need fewer cores there's a quad-core version which is cheaper.
I'd prefer that they placed a lsi sas controller onboard and dumped the sata ports for minisas (an expander cable is cheap, tidy and positively locks into place to ensure no problems.) The downside is that a decent sas controller would add at least $100 and a port multiplexer as much again.
If I was designing, I'd think about 10Gb copper, but that adds 15W to the power consumption and $150 to the price.
This thing is expensive for prosumers and limited for enterprise, but compromises are always like that. Supermicro's version has similar issues and the fact that they don't use minisas makes me think that perhaps Intel have placed restrictions on what can be used.
well my zfs rig has 20 2.5" 2tb sata hdds (2x 16tb raidz2). no ZIL. no L2ARC. runs on a single 8GB ecc ddr2 dimm on a sandy bridge i3-2100T.
as a home fileserver this system rocks. it might be ram "bottlenecked" for high i/o tasks, but all i can see is that it performs at least as well as a single USB3 hdd... and it outperforms any consumer nas.
For a NAS or SAN build this seriously lacks 10GbE and USB 3 ports. All in all this board seems like a pretty strange amalgamation of random features, as there're better choices for about any possible use case around.
Agreed on the comments that this is a strange configuration of hardware. Would it have been better to incorporate either 3 4 Channel SAS controllers, or one controller and an SAS expander so you don't need to have 12 cables for the drives. It would then allow for better configurability for RAID. A USB3 header on the MB would be useful either with a separate hub, or for use with a flash drive for OS installation or as a boot drive.
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At $400 it's priced out of the core HTPC market; it's clearly intended as an entry level large storage server. As pointed out below, the spaghetti explosion from wiring a dozen drives with individual cables makes it unsuitable for most enterprise use (or prosumers who know better). http://sn.im/28v3ntg
I'm running a home server on an E3-1230v2 (even cheaper), and it handles storage, Plex transcoding to everyone's devices, offloaded Blu-Ray Rip transcoding, and hosts several VMs running minecraft servers for the kids. No way you could do all that with this board.
I've actually built a storage box recently using a fairly similar setup for a home NAS. I used the supermicro C2750 board however and added an IBM M1015 SAS card flashed to an IT mode LSI 9211-8i firmware for the disks. Then I have 8x4TB WD Reds in the Silverstone DS380. I'm still doing initial stress testing to make sure there are no dodgy disks etc currently so I can't comment about actual day to day use of such a system yet.
One thing I did notice with the DS380 is there appears to be a minor design flaw in the trays/backplane which is visible in the pictures here also.
The HDD trays have a clear perspex light guide built into the right side of them which allows an activity LED for the port on the backplane to illuminate to the front of the tray. This is the little square notch visible on the right hand side of the trays in the pictures here. However the activity light for the 4th bay from the top (5th from the bottom) doesn't illuminate on the tray properly despite it clearly lighting up on the backplane board. If you look at the picture of the backplane board and note the component labelled LED5 and its position relevant to the connector SATA13 and compare this to all the other LED and SATA components. The relative positioning on this bay is different and therefore is not aligned with the light guide on the HDD tray. I'm not quite sure how they managed to let that slip through the design stage but maybe Anandtech could feed it back to Silverstone.
Why would you test power consumption in that config? It tells you nothing as it isn't remotely comparable to what it actually uses by itself or how you'd normally be using it.
People are reporting that ASRock is pretty much treating this as a Windows-only board. If you have problems on other OSes, don't expect support from them.
And with a Marvell controller... we can expect problems.
It's worth saying that this motherboard supports up to 64GB of ECC memory. Thanks Ian, I think you just identified parts I will need for my FreeNAS build :)
1. It's interesting how the used the PLX chipset givint tha fact that the Avoton is a SoC ant tha NICs ar integrated in it. 2. To those yelling "drop BMC": this board is not for you; don't judge it for what is not. 3. I've been in the situation to chose between this board and a Supermicro A1SRi-2758F for a home server. I've choose the latter and paired it with an HP P400 with 512MB cache and BBU (50$ on e-bay). So now I have a preety decent box with 5 gigabit interfeces, IPMI via AST2400 and 14 SATA ports (6 onboard from the SoC and eight SAS-to-SATA from the HP controller backed-up by 512MB of DDR2 cache). I've attached one Samsung 840 Pro SSD to one of the SATA 3 ports for SSD caching on ESXi. An givving the fact that the board comes from a manufacturer with greater experience in the server market, has an upgraded BMC controller, management software, wider accessory range (cases, controllers etc), has all LAN ports available, four USB 3 ports (one is directly attached to the board).
Interesting build. I thought about this route as well and since I will be using KVM, the ASRock solution is good enough for me while keeping the part count as a minimal. Have I gone to ESXi and need more ethernet ports, that Supermicro + HP solution is the way to go with only a slight penalty in power savings.
What a stupid review. Find nothing about storage performance. You used storage motherboard and stroge enclosure to test gaming performance. Who is using his NAS server for gaming?
I know someone probably pointed this out, but running a default benchmark test against a system that is optimized to work on a dedicated role is a bit pointless. What about some data I/O tests on this one? I didn't see the test you guys take on HDDs/SSDs.
I guess the main reason for this product launch is to attack the almost identically featured Supermicro Atom boards (like the A1SRi-2758F) at a somewhat lower pricepoint (which does not necessarily mean "cheap" ! ;-)
Supermicro had almost no competitors in this very special segment before - or am I wrong there ? Let´s wait and see if reliability and software support catch up with the grandmaster of storage & Server boards ! :-)
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A5 - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
For HTPC, I'd think you would probably want to get a small GPU for decode help anyway, so that would be where your audio comes from as well.bernstein - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
yeah it's a shame this doesn't come with a hdmi connector... then i'd be sold. even though i wouldn't use any of the sata plugs and just hook a sas controller+expander up to it...hdmi + ecc + pcie x8 capability cpu+mobo for $400 would be a steal
slayernine - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
QNAP's Intel Atom models have HDMI.bernstein - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
yeah if only they had fanless 10+ bay models for less than $1000.bernstein - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
oh and one that runs zfsGralgrathor - Thursday, May 21, 2015 - link
10+ disks without cooling? They won't last a day... And why would you need a hdmi-connector on a server mobo?DanNeely - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
At $400 it's priced out of the core HTPC market; it's clearly intended as an entry level large storage server. As pointed out below, the spaghetti explosion from wiring a dozen drives with individual cables makes it unsuitable for most enterprise use (or prosumers who know better).Samus - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
For $400 you could put together a better HTPC/NAS combo solution with an AMD AM1 ITX system and an Areca SAS RAID card in a PCIe slot. You'd get a superior onboard GPU with HDMI, native USB 3.0, and a better RAID card, not some Marvell crap.Athlon 5350 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
ASUS AM1 ITX http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
Areca PCIe 8-port SAS http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
This motherboard is interesting and ASRock is a solid consumer OEM, but it's a little premature of them to be getting into rack space.
UpSpin - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
You don't have to buy the overpriced octa core board, but could buy the identical quad core version ASRock C2550D4I for $280.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
Your mainboard doesn't support ECC RAM and your SAS Controller only supports 8 SATA drives without further expanders. Together with the two SATA connectors on the mainboard you got only 10.
The quad core has an even lower TDP of 14W vs. 20W of the octa version. The C2750 has a faster CPU compared to your Athlon 5350.
The only disadvantage is the poor IGP. Considering that this is more a storage/server board, less a HTPC (who wants 12 noisy hard drives in the living room?) and the unbeatable price, it's a very interesting porduct in my opinion.
Samus - Friday, May 2, 2014 - link
Well, UpSpin, that would be why I said 'htpc/nas'If you purely want a NAS, there are probably better solutions than what I outlined, but for a hybrid (and who is to say the NAS wont be SSD's or 2.5" 2TB drives that are dead silent) this board, like Ian pointed out, is kind of a joke for an HTPC solution. It is VERY market specific, and virtually ALL AT readers aren't part of that market. This board is grossly overpriced, especially for something with ASRocks name on it. Even cold-storage servers should have USB 3.0 or eSATA. and quality products don't use some buggy $3.00 Marvell chipset that wipes arrays at random.
mars2k - Saturday, May 31, 2014 - link
I'm with you Up, how did this get sidetrac'd into HTPC, I'm looking for an alternative to some of the stock Qnap and Synology geer for use in my home. Want NAS box with lots of tru put. Not clear on why Ian says no NAS. Whats up with configuring as a NAS? Any other suggestionssamueldes - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
Before you buy: the Areca PCIe X8 card won't fit in the ASUS AM1 board with only one PCIe X4 slot.Ammohunt - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
Avoton supports intels visualization extensions with 64GB of RAM and 8 cores it could be a decent low powered KVM server sliced up in many different ways.stoatwblr - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
I have to say I'm surprised they didn't go with minisas connectors instead of a fistful of satas. Supermicro have done the same thing and it simply doesn't make sense.Samus - Friday, May 2, 2014 - link
yeah they could have saved a ton of real estate using mini plugs. Even full sized servers like HP's ML310 series use mini plugs to keep the board clean. Even more important on an ITX board. This board has a lot of oversights, which ASRock will learn is unacceptable in the market they're targeting it at.ericloewe - Friday, May 2, 2014 - link
Bad idea in this case, since they're using SATA instead of SAS. Someone would inevitably try to use this with an SAS expander...But I agree with Supermicro having made an odd choice. Their LSI2308-equipped motherboards would be perfectly equipped with SAS connectors.
speculatrix - Sunday, May 4, 2014 - link
if you're looking more for a media player you can plug into your TV, then one of the many other Baytrail-D motherboards would be suitable... there's a useful list and discussion of them here:http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php...
bernstein - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
i'm probably one of the core target prosumers for this, as for a few years now i've been running something similar at home...namely a sandybridge itx board, 35 Watt i3, ecc ram, supermicro low profile (lsi) sas controller, supermicro 24x (lsi) sas expander backplane, 400w passive psu, passive cpu cooler, 18 sata 2.5" hdds (5200rpm - WD scorpio blue / hitachi travelstar)
and while this board fits my requirements wonderfully while being cheap there is just one dealbreaker... 12x sata? wtf? no-one sane will run so many hdds without a backplane. it's just unmanageable.
the most simple backplane with 12 sata plugs + some power plugs & 12 correctly spaced hdd plugs woud do. and could be manufactured & sold very cheaply. but there is no such thing... (step up asrock :)
bernstein - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
to the point: give me such a backplane for below $100 and im sold. else thanks but no thanks.ZeDestructor - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
With 18 drives, you might want to consider a BackBlaze pod with room for 45 drives, especially now that we have 32 and 40 disk controllers. That with some ZFS would be quite an excellent NAS IMO, and I am heading that way, slowly.bernstein - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
not when you want to run it next to your tv in a 100m2 appartment :)ZeDestructor - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
I have a 48-port switch in my bdroom.. I fail to see your point :PIn your place, I'd run it under the TV, straight off the floor, with some quiet fans... 120mm fans are always quiet.
Guspaz - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
100 square metres is a pretty huge apartment, but the idea behind a storage server isn't to put it next to your TV or projector anyhow. I'm moving from a 34sqm apartment to a 65 sqm apartment, and I've got a 15-drive (18 drive if you include the boot/cache SSDs) ZFS file server for all my media. But it's a headless system, and even though it's pretty quiet (I've used nothing but low-power drives), it doesn't need to be anywhere near the home theatre setup. It's going to go in a closet somewhere. The only connection it needs to my home theatre is not an HDMI cable, but a Cat6 cable :)Of course, I don't have a dedicated HTPC either; my main desktop (an SFF system) will be in the same room as my home theatre, connected to my HDMI matrix switch. It can access files on the giant file server in the closet, while taking up very little space itself. If for some reason my desktop couldn't be near my home theatre, I'd probably just buy an NUC-like system for that.
bernstein - Thursday, May 1, 2014 - link
true it doesn't need to be near the tv... but at least my appartment doesn't have a closet. so its either bath, kitchen, living room or one of the sleeping rooms. or the cellar... 5 floors down. installing network cabling there is north of $5000... and wlan through multiple concrete thats just not going to do it.bernstein - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
yeah wouldn't have anything else than zfsextide - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
You can always buy reverse breakout SFF-8087 cableshasseb64 - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
10W less in IDLE compared to a standard/high performance Z87 MB and Haswell top CPU?I'll pass!
jwcalla - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Is there a Z87 MB that supports ECC ram?bernstein - Thursday, May 1, 2014 - link
noMarquis - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
The article states there are 4 fan headers, but there are actually 6. The aforementioned four next to the CPU socket and two more in the corner near the cluster of SATA ports that are all-white.Marquis - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Nevermind, reading comprehension FTW. The other two are mentioned later....bombshelter - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Your comment about the reason for using the PLX switch is wrong. First, the PEX8608 is an 8-lane switch and they are using it in a x4 (from CPU) to 4 x1s (to PCIe end-points) topology. The Avoton CPU actually has a total of 16 PCIe lanes, but can only bifurcate to 4 controllers. So the real reason they are using the PLX switch is to be able to have more than 4 PCIe end-points connected to the CPU. There will be no performance degradation or sharing of bandwidth due to the presence of the PLX switch since there is an equal number of lanes going into it from the CPU as as there are end-points connected on the downstream side.Ian Cutress - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Aha, yes my interpretation of the chipset diagram was a little off. Going to update the review.chang3d - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Supermicro has two similar board with a few differences of SO-DIMM, USB 3, 4 NICs, and 6 sata headers. It's also cheaper. I think the features of this board is much better than this ASRock board.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
ddriver - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Is it just me or was this review an extremely bad match to that product? What about NAS performance, which undoubtedly will be one of the major selling points? Instead we get gaming on a product as far from gaming as it gets. And content creation?Ian Cutress - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
According to users on several forums, this board has been the focus of many different types of build. I've done a brief analysis here of usability and interface, but Ganesh is our storage guru and has all the equipment for storage related tests, so I'd rather leave that in his court for a follow-up review rather than fumble through them myself.ddriver - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
No offense, but you have reviewed a rake as a back scratcher :)With such massive storage capacity, dual gigabit onboard, up to 64 GB of ECC ram - computational performance is irrelevant, this product is all about throughput. While it may be viewed as somewhat beneficial to get concrete numbers, yet after all the numbers only confirm this product ain't neither about gaming nor about content creation, so if anything the review is useful at proving its uselessness, which makes it technically useful - which is quite a nice paradox ;)
LastQuark - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link
It's not you. This is perfect to me for what this board is intended for - virtualization, NAS, home web server, backup, even good enough for a Plex or XMBC server. The review made it seem like it is for HTPC and gaming which it is not.DuckieHo - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Drop the AST2300 for management.Drop BMC/SMB.
Drop IPMB.
Drop TPM.
Drop COM port.
Reduce fan ports (6 PWM to 4 PWM).
Drop a SATA controller (12 ports to 8 or 10).
Increase the size of the heatsink and/or add a fan.
Drop the price in half for a consumer version please!
Rick83 - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
There's a quad-core version of the same board at 3/4 the price. That should be enough for most home users. It's also a 14W part, so has less cooling needs.S.D.Leary - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Actually, for the SMB/Home version I was thinking more along the lines of keeping all the management, but dropping the TPM.Dropping BOTH extra SATA switches. (No real need for these on a home Media Server, and honestly for many/most SMB, four 6TB drives would be more than enough)
Updating USB to 3.1 status
A digital video output.
Dropping the COM port
Thunderbolt 2 for external expansion (that way a SMB that was growing could add a storage chassis if needed)
And for Silverstone, a chassis with similar capabilities to the DS380, but with the following changes...
Drop 3.5" support. Ideally 4 Hot Swap 2.5" external bays, and one or two internal 2.5" bays.
An option for a Slim Optical drive.
Preferably a horizontal orientation to fit into an A/V setting.
Support for double wide normal graphics cards. This would probably necessitate a riser and horizontal orientation of the card.
Ian! A question for you. Do you have something that could test real time transcoding of Audio and Video? Both with and without a GPU?
SDLeary
Computer Bottleneck - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
I like the idea of the consumer version as well.Make mine a C2550 and no additional SATA controllers. (SOC has six native SATA).
LastQuark - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link
You're looking at the wrong board. Check Bay Trail solutions. It will be perfect for your needs.swizeus - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Interesting as how Anandtech includes gaming benchmark for a storage centric motherboard, and with a decent card, it still be able to cope. What can you expect from a 25W CPU thoughLastQuark - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link
+1. It was a gross oversight of what this board is intended for.-=Hulk=- - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
1. All recent Atoms (including Avaton's) support hardware AES acceleration:http://ark.intel.com/products/77987
2. 43W idle for the 5350??? What the hell??? I think your values are totally wrong....
50W for the C2758??? Look at that test with a similar Supermicro Mini-ITX motherboard:
http://www.servethehome.com/intel-avoton-rangeley-...
Ian Cutress - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Values aren't wrong, but the PSU is inefficient. Those values are also a full system build. I have to keep the same power supply across reviews for meaningful comparisons on the same efficiency curve, which I mention in the blurb above the power readings. I also mention that due to that fact, it's more a qualitative comparison than a quantitative.DanNeely - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
I understand why you're using the same PSU for all your tests. But for really small/low power systems I'd suggest adding a second power test with a much smaller PSU, similar to how the old cast thermal tests for small enclosures were often done with both a big high power GPU and a small lower power one. The 1250W monster would allow for direct comparison with high power gaming systems; a second number from a ~250W PSU would provide a second number that would be more inline with typical use.watersb - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Wow! Thanks for writing about this one! I build small-office storage servers, and this might be exactly what we need!watersb - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
"Users have been reporting that in Linux and FreeBSD, high intensity read/write workloads cause the controller to reset and elements to any software array are lost."Hmm. Not good. I see this with Sil3132 controllers, too. The PCIe x8 slot would let me install a modest controller like the old Intel/LSI SASUCI8, but that push the system price back into SuperMicro territory.
chekk - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Yes, for that price and target market, they should have gone with an LSI chip. You don't see Supermicro or Tyan boards in that price range using Marvell.cen - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
I know it was said that the actual storage review is coming in the future but I think this article is a complete waste of time. You should simply let the storage review happen and not bother with this at all. More than half of the benchmarks are useless, the only ones of value might be encryption and compression.What we actually want to see is FreeNAS thrown in there with a 16TB ZFS zpool and some IO benchmarks. :)
Calista - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Could be perfect for anyone wishing to build a tiny box for virtualization, a task in which many a NIC, plenty of RAM and a multicore processor is most helpful.RandomUsername3245 - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
I've wondered how one of these Avoton boards would compare to a Supermicro C2xx + Pentum G3430 (which supports ECC). This is the cheaper option if you don't need lots of ports, but once you add $100 for a sata card from Ebay, these options are similarly priced.Calista - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Could you please measure power consumption without the 770 as well? I have a HP Elite 8200 with a quad i5, SSD + 2.5" HDD, 32 GB RAM and an extra NIC as a makeshift box for ESXi and with 6-8 virtual machines running it draw less than 30 watt. It would be interesting to know how low this machine could go since any machine running 24/7 will add substantially to the power bill.Guspaz - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
If I was using this in my home file server, I'd make a few changes to the board. The number of SATA ports is fine, because even though I've got 18 drives in mine, that PCIe slot lets you put in a SAS/SATA controller to get the total up as high as needed (16 port cards aren't hard to find, higher is available).However, I'd change a few things:
1) Replace the CPU. Home file servers can often be bottlenecked by individual CPU core performance, because not all filesystem operations on ZFS are multithreaded (although it's far better these days). For the ~25W TDP, I would much rather have a Haswell part, even if it meant fewer cores. For that TDP, you could get a ~3GHz dual-core part, or a ~2GHz quad-core part. Either of those would be better suited.
2) Add digital video output. HDMI, DVI, DisplayPort, any of them. I'm not suggesting using this thing for HTPC use, but many monitors these days are digital-only, and nothing is more annoying than trying to diagnose problems with a headless system when your motherboard is VGA-only and all you have is digital-only monitors.
3) Drop two of the RAM slots, and use them for another PCIe slot. Four slots is excessive for anything but enterprise use. Two slots cheaply gets you 16GB of RAM, or 32GB if you're desperate, either of which is more than enough for a home file server. A second PCIe slot, on the other hand, could enable a variety of other options, be they multiple SAS/SATA cards, a discrete video card if you really do want to use the thing as an HTPC, a video capture card (this board in that Silverstone case would probably make a decent HD-SDI recording box), etc.
4) More USB ports, prefereably 3.0. If extra space is needed for the ports, ditch one of the three GigE ports; two is plenty.
5) An mSATA slot for a boot drive could be useful, although it would probably increase board complexity by requiring some of the board components to move to the rear.
stoatwblr - Thursday, May 1, 2014 - link
"Two slots cheaply gets you 16GB of RAM, or 32GB if you're desperate"My ZFS media rig has 19 drives (21 including the ZIL and l2arc), plus boot media and at 36Tb it _needs_ 32Gb of ram to work efficiently. It kept bottlenecking at 16Gb. The next round of storage will push well past the 32Gb requirement.
+1 on the video output, +1 on usb3 - but I don't think it needs more ports. That's not a good fit for the target, which is a storage controller. Ditto on the mSATA.
If you need fewer cores there's a quad-core version which is cheaper.
I'd prefer that they placed a lsi sas controller onboard and dumped the sata ports for minisas (an expander cable is cheap, tidy and positively locks into place to ensure no problems.) The downside is that a decent sas controller would add at least $100 and a port multiplexer as much again.
If I was designing, I'd think about 10Gb copper, but that adds 15W to the power consumption and $150 to the price.
This thing is expensive for prosumers and limited for enterprise, but compromises are always like that. Supermicro's version has similar issues and the fact that they don't use minisas makes me think that perhaps Intel have placed restrictions on what can be used.
bernstein - Thursday, May 1, 2014 - link
well my zfs rig has 20 2.5" 2tb sata hdds (2x 16tb raidz2). no ZIL. no L2ARC.runs on a single 8GB ecc ddr2 dimm on a sandy bridge i3-2100T.
as a home fileserver this system rocks. it might be ram "bottlenecked" for high i/o tasks, but all i can see is that it performs at least as well as a single USB3 hdd... and it outperforms any consumer nas.
Daniel Egger - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
For a NAS or SAN build this seriously lacks 10GbE and USB 3 ports. All in all this board seems like a pretty strange amalgamation of random features, as there're better choices for about any possible use case around.Gunbuster - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
14000 RPM Delta fans? No Thanks!I would have called it the AssRack. Sorry I couldn't resist!
samsp99 - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Agreed on the comments that this is a strange configuration of hardware. Would it have been better to incorporate either 3 4 Channel SAS controllers, or one controller and an SAS expander so you don't need to have 12 cables for the drives. It would then allow for better configurability for RAID.A USB3 header on the MB would be useful either with a separate hub, or for use with a flash drive for OS installation or as a boot drive.
lagozit - Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - link
Pardon my ignorance, but what is "cold storage"?DuckieHo - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
Write once, read few.OCedHrt - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
Since I just got my hands on this board, I do want to point out a discrepancy.The C2750 has very different BIOS options than the screenshots here from the C2550 (much less, in fact).
I'm also wondering if you would be able to test a Sil3132 card in the PCI-E slot. I can't get the board to detect it.
iwod - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
$400 for a MB like this.......Calista - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
Well, the CPU is almost $200 itself, another $200 for a small run design doesn't seem unreasonable.hallary - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
I found it quiet interesting ,Thank you for posting the great content on topic <a href="http://www.experttexting.com/sms-gateway/">... SMS Gateway</a>…I was looking for something like this…, hopefully you will keep posting such blogs…KermitBMendoza - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
At $400 it's priced out of the core HTPC market; it's clearly intended as an entry level large storage server. As pointed out below, the spaghetti explosion from wiring a dozen drives with individual cables makes it unsuitable for most enterprise use (or prosumers who know better). http://sn.im/28v3ntgSuperSpy00bob - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
No ECC support?jwcalla - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
Of course it has ECC support. It'd be useless without it.SuperSpy00bob - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link
Oops. I it's only mentioned in the spec chart, not in the article itself. It seemed like a glaring omission.JBVertexx - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
For home use, I don't know why you would pay so much for such a low-end processor. For $40 more you can have this (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... plus a Xeon E3-1230v3.I'm running a home server on an E3-1230v2 (even cheaper), and it handles storage, Plex transcoding to everyone's devices, offloaded Blu-Ray Rip transcoding, and hosts several VMs running minecraft servers for the kids. No way you could do all that with this board.
djb61 - Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - link
I've actually built a storage box recently using a fairly similar setup for a home NAS. I used the supermicro C2750 board however and added an IBM M1015 SAS card flashed to an IT mode LSI 9211-8i firmware for the disks. Then I have 8x4TB WD Reds in the Silverstone DS380.I'm still doing initial stress testing to make sure there are no dodgy disks etc currently so I can't comment about actual day to day use of such a system yet.
One thing I did notice with the DS380 is there appears to be a minor design flaw in the trays/backplane which is visible in the pictures here also.
The HDD trays have a clear perspex light guide built into the right side of them which allows an activity LED for the port on the backplane to illuminate to the front of the tray. This is the little square notch visible on the right hand side of the trays in the pictures here. However the activity light for the 4th bay from the top (5th from the bottom) doesn't illuminate on the tray properly despite it clearly lighting up on the backplane board. If you look at the picture of the backplane board and note the component labelled LED5 and its position relevant to the connector SATA13 and compare this to all the other LED and SATA components. The relative positioning on this bay is different and therefore is not aligned with the light guide on the HDD tray. I'm not quite sure how they managed to let that slip through the design stage but maybe Anandtech could feed it back to Silverstone.
azazel1024 - Thursday, May 1, 2014 - link
Why would you test power consumption in that config? It tells you nothing as it isn't remotely comparable to what it actually uses by itself or how you'd normally be using it.jwcalla - Thursday, May 1, 2014 - link
People are reporting that ASRock is pretty much treating this as a Windows-only board. If you have problems on other OSes, don't expect support from them.And with a Marvell controller... we can expect problems.
Krautmaster - Friday, May 2, 2014 - link
well, be bechmarks are a mess for a server board like this. Why not any VM benches or Storage Benches ...I used that board for Storage Tiering in Server 2013 R2 with 3x4Tb + 4x2 TB + 2x256GB SSDs see here http://www.computerbase.de/forum/showthread.php?t=...
Bronek - Sunday, May 4, 2014 - link
It's worth saying that this motherboard supports up to 64GB of ECC memory. Thanks Ian, I think you just identified parts I will need for my FreeNAS build :)copilusntil0p@ - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link
1. It's interesting how the used the PLX chipset givint tha fact that the Avoton is a SoC ant tha NICs ar integrated in it. 2. To those yelling "drop BMC": this board is not for you; don't judge it for what is not. 3. I've been in the situation to chose between this board and a Supermicro A1SRi-2758F for a home server. I've choose the latter and paired it with an HP P400 with 512MB cache and BBU (50$ on e-bay). So now I have a preety decent box with 5 gigabit interfeces, IPMI via AST2400 and 14 SATA ports (6 onboard from the SoC and eight SAS-to-SATA from the HP controller backed-up by 512MB of DDR2 cache). I've attached one Samsung 840 Pro SSD to one of the SATA 3 ports for SSD caching on ESXi. An givving the fact that the board comes from a manufacturer with greater experience in the server market, has an upgraded BMC controller, management software, wider accessory range (cases, controllers etc), has all LAN ports available, four USB 3 ports (one is directly attached to the board).LastQuark - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link
Interesting build. I thought about this route as well and since I will be using KVM, the ASRock solution is good enough for me while keeping the part count as a minimal. Have I gone to ESXi and need more ethernet ports, that Supermicro + HP solution is the way to go with only a slight penalty in power savings.dzezik - Thursday, May 8, 2014 - link
What a stupid review. Find nothing about storage performance. You used storage motherboard and stroge enclosure to test gaming performance. Who is using his NAS server for gaming?SallyannePaoloniuic - Saturday, May 10, 2014 - link
Snayperskaya - Monday, May 12, 2014 - link
I know someone probably pointed this out, but running a default benchmark test against a system that is optimized to work on a dedicated role is a bit pointless. What about some data I/O tests on this one? I didn't see the test you guys take on HDDs/SSDs.trampsvondepalz - Monday, May 12, 2014 - link
I guess the main reason for this product launch is to attack the almost identically featured Supermicro Atom boards (like the A1SRi-2758F) at a somewhat lower pricepoint (which does not necessarily mean "cheap" ! ;-)Supermicro had almost no competitors in this very special segment before - or am I wrong there ?
Let´s wait and see if reliability and software support catch up with the grandmaster of storage & Server boards ! :-)
http://www.supermicro.nl/products/motherboard/Atom...
S.D.Leary - Tuesday, March 3, 2015 - link
I may have missed it, but did Ganesh ever test this board?SDLeary
NilamBhate - Thursday, April 16, 2015 - link
What is the 1U rack mount case - make and model you used here ?