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outdated SATA controllers that don’t let your computer reach higher C-states, and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