I’m looking at some CWWK, topton, and oaknode boards online for an upcoming build. I’m throwing proxmox and OPNsense on this. There’s a ryzen 8845HS board I’m curious about but there’s also some intel boards I could drop an i5-14600T used CPU into that could work well too. Either way I would have an intel ARC GPU in the PCI slot for media decode/encode and a coral TPU in the E-key M2 slot for frigate object recognition.
But I get conflicting info online about these boards being a waste of time and money. I see things about them burning out, or having weird BIOS bugs that never get fixed. On the other hand, NAScompares seems to like these boards. Are these something I should avoid?
I don’t know that anyone has collected any sort of data on reliability. I have a CWWK board that’s been working well for about a year now.
How long is the warranty? If the warranty is through the company, how long is the company going to be around?
A cheap N100 or N305 mitx with more ethernet and sata ports already attached is one thing, but I wouldn’t wanna risk warranty hell with more money on the line.
Considering you are gonna add a dgpu I would look at a low tdp desktop cpu such as ryzen 7600/9600 from a trusted store instead.
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/topton-warranty-practices.40421/
I want zenarmor and suricata. Intel N series chips cannot handle that. The dGPU is just needed for handling media decode and encode, not actual rendering.
The quicksync built-in to the n100 PR n305 is more than adequate to encode/decode media. If that’s all you’re using it for, you don’t need an Intel arc.
Incorrect. The built in quicksync is adequate for a limited number of simultaneous streams. Considering I plan for frigate to handle multiple cameras on this machine I will need more streams.
The Arc actually makes sense here since OP mentioned multiple cameras for Frigate - QuickSync on N100/N305 starts to choke with 5+ simultaneous streams, while Arc A380 can handle 8+ streams with AV1 decode/encode as a bonus.
IPMI and ECC are not on your wishlist, correct?
ODROID might be an option
https://www.odroid.nl/Odroid-H4-Plus
They’re from South Korea, so likely better quality than cwwk
That is an interesting option but I’m not sure 4 gracemont cores could do full IPS in opnsense.
