CWWK AMD-7840HS CPU+Motherboard Combo Deep Dive - DiY NAS Ready?

Here are a few examples of where you can get this board online:

Video Chapters
00:00 - The Start
00:10 - GROW UP!
00:40 - Previously on NASCompares
01:05 - Hardware Specifications
01:49 - Price and Cost?
04:15 - Discussing the CWWK AMD Board Design and Hardware
09:12 - Building
09:45 - Test Bench Setup
11:51 - Checking BIOS
14:39 - UnRAID Overview
15:06 - ECC Support?
16:48 - Checking Hardware Allocation
17:55 - NVMe Write Tests
18:31 - NVMe Read Tests
19:15 - Coming Soon - UGreen NAS and Fake SSDs

MINISFORUM BD770i ITX Motherboard:

Amazon ￡264.64 Build:
Jonsbo N2 Build for Under/Around £250
Jonsbo N2 + TopTon Intel n5105 Celeron / Pentium n6005 Build (+$35)

Aliexpress links

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[udirt]

Ty for the review. That's a helpful board to have in some box for whatever random use case might come up

[kryko.]

These DIY videos are always an interesting watch, keep them up. Hope your cat is okay!

[andrewharwood]

I have done some testing with this MB and can confirm the following:
Support for 96GB Crucial 5600 - CT2K48G56C4685

Still investigating the performance of the onboard sata ports but initial tests show about a 20% drop compared to a SAS 3008 HBA

Server 2022 support but installing the drivers is a pain in the ass.

Power at idle Windows Server 2022 with 96GB + 5 SSDs:
High performance: 42W
Balanced: 35W
Power saving: 30W

[Prmium]

Could you please add the power consumption of the board? (Idle, load, max)

[sinisterpisces]

Glad to hear your cat is well and on the mend. :)

Great overview video. I wasn't aware of this board, so I'm really glad to see it here. One reason I haven't loved a lot of the CWWK (and Topton, etc.) boards in the past is parts of them have seemed kind of kludged together in the name of squeezing just enough ports on the board, nevermind whether there's enough PCIe bandwidth to support them all.

I feel like this board in particular is a big step up in that department. It seems like the engineers who laid it out really tried to be thoughtful about how to balance features and ease of use.

Not sure why there's one lone SATA port on the board. Maybe it's for a boot drive?


I like seeing the two MiniSAS HD connectors; the really save space on the board, get a full 8 drives (instead of the usual 4-6 on a mini ITX), and will simplify cable management. Fewer ports also means fewer points of failure and less confusion when working on the board.

I've had some bad experiences with some Asmedia controllers when working with TrueNAS in particular (the one in the QNAP JBODs won't work at all with TrueNAS and and a LSI SAS controller connected to SATA disks--SCSI errors forever). It's possible that was a combination of the Asmedia controller and QNAP's firmware, though.

That said, I'm interested in seeing how you find the controllers' performance and stability. Hopefully, they can support the full bandwidth of up to 8 HDDs, or 4 HDDs and 4 SSDs (not sure about 8x2.5" SSDs...that might be too much?). I'm also curious of your insights as to why there are two controllers. Is it a cost saving measure vs. one 8 channel controller?

[samo]

Eagerly awaiting the results of the ECC support. Please also measure power consumption please. Without hard drives and with if possible

[AinzOoalGwn]

you made the right choice to explore/expand the channel into nas diy. not to say you can't also keep doing the prebuilt nas brand models. but people that have done that want to move onto diy since they want to buy parts for cheaper price and do more than prebuilt systems are able to. then load it up with like either unraid or truenas typically.

since you are covering diy, plz also mention the ECC support options and the components to get that all to work for something like truenas. People would love to make a diy using parts you vetted as working so they can use that to make the diy truenas builds.

in your diy videos you often mention pcie expansion options which i appreciate, since i myself need the nas casing to be able to support those since i use a SFP+ 10g pcie (in order to install fiber optic transceiver), m.2 ssd expansion pcie card, and a graphics card. So any diy nas cases that only have 1 or no pcie expansion slots just ain't gonna cut it 😢

[mamdouh-Tawadros]

Thank you for showing us this motherboard and for the way you describe things. I imagine this board to be in a rack server, or tower server. Which negates the need for ITX form. This CPU is a workhorse as you mentioned. Thank you so much again.

[wedemandcookies]

Yes! -- Ugreen DXP4800 Plus next week is fantastic! That's the one I "pre-ordered" in form of that weird $5 for 40% off deal. I hope it is going to be good and we are really in fact able to use Unraid with it? Great content, thank you! :)

[djonkoful]

what about using this for proxmox ? .... any issue with device passthrough ? thanks in advance

[pincombe]

I like these hardware videos but personally I'm still not sure what direction to go in terms of software. I would love some kind of Unraid vs TrueNAS content. What I'm most concerned about is long term maintenance and running of the software stack. Switching drives, ease of updates, daily use gotchas that kind of thing.

[diablobarcelona]

My just arrived here in Spain today. Bought off the basis of your review. Arrived nicely and well packaged. Will be Saturday before I can put it in, but I bought it with the fan and cost me 400€ direct from manufacturer. Build looks extremely good to me (somewhat untrained eye as I only build new stuff once in a blue moon). I also got 64GB of DDR5 from Amazon for 333€ (2 x 32GB). First major hardware upgrade to my 11 year old TrueNAS build.

[JohnPonthecuff]

I installed the board with the 8845HS CPU and can't see the Network adapters in the BIOS (although they work). I will mention this CWWK and see if they update the BIOS. They did mention to me that they were fine tuning it before production. I guess they missed. The BIOS you show on the previous version is what I want....

[thomasgessert]

What I really would like to see in a NAS mainboard is one to two 10 GbE SFP connectors. Those 2.5 GbE connectors may be cheaper but its not worth it for most use cases today. SFP especially because you are free to choose between fibre or dac cables and tranceivers if you need to use copper. Most affordable 10 GbE switches have SFP ports and limitations on how much copper transceivers you can use. 9 SATA are great. M.2 is only useful for caching until you go for 25 GbE or higher. But all those NIC depend on a number of PCIe lanes a mobile CPU could possibly not provide.

[jhirschma]

Assuming this board does support ecc, I'd love to see a version with a 10GB SFP+ connector instead of the quad 2.5GB.

[cinemaipswich]

The more expensive option has the cables to SATA drives and additional NVMe drives. 2 years ago is was looking for something like this, and the offers were $900, without ram or break-out cables or NVMe or CPU cooler. Ignore the single SATA port and install your OS on 2 mirrored, and small, NVMe drives, and allocate cache to them. The HDD are the reason this board exists.

[Bauanga]

@nascompares Can you tell me where you find the info about bifrucation? My board arrived and I can't find an option for it.

I've installed one 32 GB Micron ECC stick. Sadly, ECC doesn't work. There is an option to enable ECC in the bios but it seems to do nothing. I'm really dissapointet right now, ECC was the main reason for odering the board. Did you have any contact with cwwk support so far?

[mndlessdrwer]

If this thing works without needing to jump through too many hoops for drivers then it may be the superior NAS/router/firewall motherboard of its generation. A low wattage, high performance mobile chip with that amount of connectivity is a great solution, particularly since it includes so many 2.5Gb network ports. The extra PCIe slot could also be used for GPU video transcoding for streaming purposes if you have a software that supports on-the-fly transcoding into a better format for streaming. Not sure if any of those applications have particularly good support for Intel Arc GPUs, but their video transcoding performance would really be ideal for that sort of application if they're supported.

[JohnPonthecuff]

I know it's late for this question, but: I have the latest version of this MB coming. Ordered it with the Jonsbo cooler, that they advertise. I want to put this in my Jonsbo N3. OK here's the question. Do you think it will fit in my N3 case with that Jonsbo cooler that they show (white one). I also have 2@ 25mm fans in the back and hope they don't get in the

[laszlo.jozsef]

It was funny to see, that when you plug in the Ethernet cable at 11:39, the green link LED will light up, but only after that will you plug the mains cable into the power supply. (It hasn't had time to fully discharge since the previous power off.)