Please check out the follow-up video, answering most (if not all) your questions: ukposts.info/have/v-deo/rqKmi6ONm5iQzn0.html

Thank you all for your interest in this video, I heard you all. I'll do a follow up video, will try PCIE bifurcation, try ethernet link aggregation, show power consumption under load and idle, try Proxmox on this motherboard and have TrueNAS and pfSense as guests. Please keep the ideas coming, I'll try everything you all mention here in the follow up video.

My office burnt down a few weeks ago, along went my PLEX NAS so im actually looking for new stuff for a NAS! Might actually buy this one, whenever the insurance money comes in!

Excellent board for a mini-DTX server, which is slightly longer than mini-ITX. What is important is the PCIe x16 slot supports bifurcation x4x4x4 out of the box allowing you to plug an adapter with 4 NVMe discs. Given this 5 NVMe drives are easily installed in the system. Very convenient and VGA output to set up the system with busy PCIe. On the board, apparently, the IPMI controller is a part of which is a VGA output, but there is no remote control itself, possibly due to the lack of software licenses. In general, an excellent compact board for the cheap Xeon E5 now allows you to assemble a compact, relatively inexpensive server with many streams, a bunch of NVMe and SATA and up to 64GB of RAM. This for a home server will last for 5 years, or even longer. Additional feedback: The board is chic. A few tips below. To select the built-in video or discrete choose in Bios: Intelrcsteup> miscellaneous configuration> Active Video To break x16 slot into other values (bifurcation), such as x4x4x4 for NVMe: Intelrcsteup> io0 configuration> iou0 (PCIe port 2)

There are real gems on Ali. My old mobo died. They had B75 based motherboards for 43$ shipped. Swapped mobos. Told Windows to reactivate. Boom done! It even has bootable m.2 4x lanes NVMe. Good video! 👍

My definition of "fun video"! Thanks for this :)

While I on one hand love these Frankenstein Chinese Xeon motherboards I would do a *lot* of testing before I trusted one for a NAS. Miyconst has done a lot of testing of these kinds of boards over the years and I've messed with a few myself and when they work they are generally okish but compared to Super Micro or Asrock Rack you don't get anything like the support (on an old chipset) or reliability, keeping in mind my current NAS runs a V2 CPU in a Tyan board so it's not like I'm against running older hardware. While you do get ECC support you could realistically get some newer hardware second hand for about the same cost and lower TDP but for this particular board the lack of PCIE lanes would be a deal killer for me, that said if it does work for your use case less than $200 for the mb/cpu/ram isn't bad at all assuming it's stable. Also if you hunt around ebay you can find x99 motherboards for some insane prices sometimes, I have 1 I picked up for $30 (supermicro) but like you mentioned you wont get M.2 onboard or other modern IO.

I always need to build NAS with xeon processor but not sure with power consumption and stability. Your video provide a lot information. Thank you.

Great video. Thanks for your hard work.

Please test 10GbE write speeds with much bigger files than 10G Byte. I suspect you have enough ram that it is simply getting it into ram but underlying ssd write speeds are lower, considering your read speed results.

I've actually been waiting for someone to do a review on this board. Been watching it for awhile. By the way, you picked up a new subscriber. The only thing I would like to know is what is the greatest sleep state does this motherboard goes into and does it actually support Restore on AC/Power Loss. Also I noticed you didn't test the msata slot (for wifi or dual Coral TPU)

Could you use this as a NAS and a PFsense router since your have this 2.5g slots? If so, how would your do it? And would it be worth it?

I was looking at this mobo for some time, due having v3 cpu and ram laying around, so glad someone finally took the gamble :) Also very interested in pcie bifurcation, ipmi and overall bios features for pci passthrough in proxmox. Does iommu groups separeted properly? Can you passthrough the whole sata controller?

Great find. If a proper network link speed could be created, this board would be excellent for a Ceph cluster. I have a few Xeon boards that are 35 watt TDP with ECC and SFP+, but they’re 4x the price.

I spoke to a Marhone Huang with BKHD and he said this board does work with ECC, but it has to be RDIMM or Registered ECC. He really pushed on it being 2400mhz. I hopes this helps PS: The way the conversation went, it doesn't seem like they plan on doing a bios update anytime soon. The latest is what's already on the board dated for December 2023.

Thanks for the review, looks like a great board but i have some questions: ECC RAM working? Can you install GPU on the x16 slotm Does this board have display without external GPU? What is the speed of the nvme? Which c-state this board using?

What's that thing beneath the M.2 SSD? Is that a SIM card slot or a micro SD card slot?

I may ask for too much but maybe it's good opportunity to make : "BKHD-C612NP-21 Part II" video with couple more test. Mainly with power consumption, it's quite interesting how does it handle C-states and show it in powertop. Also test with some ProxmoxVE and Unraid (i suppose that Unraid will work just fine if the Ubuntu work without any problem). The next case is Aspeed AST2400 controller, it should be a IPMI controller and support remote console for management for this mobo but it also may just use integrated graphic which is pretty poor even compare with some intel desktop processor integrated graphic. This mobo with some low voltage/TDP Xeon E5-2650LV4 might keep the power consumption in reasonable values - I living in Poland where currenty electricity bills is highest in whole Europe :( So power efficiency is extremely important for people making HomeLAB in my country.

I ordered one as well, because I am also curious. I've got a UNRAID Pro key that I would like to use for a backup NAS unit.

very impressively put together board, any chance of knowings what's the power draw at full capacity?

SUGGESTION: Make a VENTOY disk for USB3 as fast as you can, with all the ISO files you would need . PS: I used a 128Mb NVMe with external enclosure because I upgraded to 2Tb ones, and it flies when installing or copying from to the computer.

love the rat's nest of cables! Great video!

amazing board and you really have a lot of 8TB SSDs. wow.

Nice and complete review, were you, in a later fase, able to run proxmox on this motherboard?

Just put this motherboard combo on order. Wasn't originally going to order the CPU or ram with it but, since it's about the same price as ordering them separately off of eBay i figured why not. The Xeon they're offering was only a few dollars more than the motherboard + RAM.

Anything about Powerdraw in different situations? Idle, SATA Drives attached but in Spindown Mode etc. And it would be great to know, if this Setup is capable of various C-States for Energy saving. What about the SATA-Connectors? Are there Portmultipliers used? Or is every SATA-Port connected to it's own Controllerchannel? The fairly "slow" Reading-Speed of your fast Dataset sounds to me a bit like there could be Port Multipliers.

So how are you getting video output from the vga port? I've never heard of a xeon server cpu with an iGPU. Edit: Ok, later in the video, I see ASPEED, which provides basic 2-D graphics for management. Neat. Also, is this BKHD motherboard using an ASMEDIA or JMicron chipset to provide some of the 10 X SATA ports?

really really thankyou for this content

Beside the pcie x16 there seems a slot for msata ?

They don't include the button cell bios battery because of shipping restrictions afaik

finally someone made a video on this

Nice video!! Can you test if Wake On LAN works? I have configured other X99 chinese board and this functionality doesn’t work. Others complains about hibernation, change clock speeds of the memory and CPU. It will be good if you can test that!

So what really gives you better nas performance this old Xeon and this board or the more pricey AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS 7940HS 9-Bay NAS Motherboard. I have a micro and full size chassis I’m trying to decide what to build in 😂

I find this motherboard couple months ago. Almost bought it but I also think I may miss something :D I'm extremly curious what is power consumption of only mobo + this CPU and 10Gbe?

>best it supports is Broadwell oooooffffffffffff. I think we found the gotcha, man.

Great video! What would be your thoughts on a system build from the N100 development board from CWWK using the QNASMINI as a case and the ASM1061 controller for SATA ports? It looks to be popular in China. Would love to hear your thoughts and would be kick-ass if you think it merits to be build :) The board can be purchased from T which will be much cheaper.

what about link aggregation with the 2.5 ports

You could test if suspend-to-ram (S3) works.

Are all the NIC's the same brand/model? I only saw that you tested the one and TrueNAS is picky about drivers. I would want to aggregate them to make a 10GB link. With that CPU I am sure the energy consumption is terrible. Would be worth it though to buy the board with just the CPU and get a different one as well as some ECC memory. No ECC in a NAS intended for long-term storage, especially flash based, is a bad idea. Only concern I would have is longevity of the MB. Those cheap knockoffs are notorious for failing after a year or two.

Good price might almost even out the x99 chipset and platforms power usage on that ancient x99 platform and antique Xeon 😅 funny they took ancient c246 chipset and added some modern 2.5 gb ethernet PHYs and then got cheap used dimms and cpu from a hoster datacenter that phased these old platforms out and sold it all on aliexpress 😅

FYI typically these chinese x99 mobo's temperature sensors are off by about -20C. My Jingsha x99 motherboard is off by ~22C. I noticed when you stressed the system that cores only rose to 60C, with that small of a cooler and 14 cores/28 threads all beings stressed I think your mobo might also be off by a 20C delta. There are fixes to this with custom bios, and injected drivers. You might google miyconst hardware or bios engineer for some of those custom bios.

BKHD is the brand, thats the manufacturer

The gotcha with those Xeon motherboards is they take decommissioned server motherboards when businesses replace them and scavenge the chipset for new motherboards. The board is new. The chipset isn't. Also, these are made on a budget, so you're not gonna get the same functionality from a Supermicro, ASRockRACK or similar server motherboards. This motherboard you have uses an Intel C612 chipset, which was discontinued in 2019.

this is cool, maybe they could sell it without the cpu version so i can use a lower TDP xeon ones

Can the network ports be link aggregated?

TPM support? UEFI support?

But is that ECC ram? And where did you get the cooler?

where to find the original intel cooler?

Wow, how did you get so much stuff? Is this partly for work?

I use those hynix ecc sticks in my projects.

Most zion dont have igpu. How u started it without graphic card ?

Thnx!!

I just want to confirm that this is a Mini-ITX motherboard, because I might buy it. I see it on Ali-Express as "Home Nas X99 Motherboard Combo LGA2011 C612 for NAS Router Sever 6x2.5GbE I226 10xSATA Support Raid Intel Xeon E5-V3 V4 ". The combo comes with 32 Gb of RAM, but it can handle 64 Gb of RAM. If I decide to put in 64 Gb, do you have a link to those RAM cards? The specs say "2x DDR4 DIMM slots, up to 64 GB, supports ECC ".

what about mesuring power consumptions ?

I wonder if they have this with 3x M.2 on the board

the time control word is the brand of the board.

I ordered one hope it's not a fire hazard .

👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

Is it ECC memory compatible?

The reason it takes so long to boot up is the motherboard has to check everything, including all of the hardrives and everything that is hooked up, and then the actual boot takes place.

Ok, so youtube deleted my comment, but if you check the reviews for this board, there was a customer who verified that you need to make sure that whatever ram you get it has to be RDIMM ECC (if you want to use ECC) and 2400mhz. He tried to a higher mhz and then tried to under clock to 2400, but the system kept freezing.

Once i have some spare cash flow i think ill give this a go

If i throw a GPU in that Pcie slot can i game on it?

Ecc support?

I like what I’m seeing, too bad that towers for this type of setup are nearly extinct.

yeah old xeon are cheap due to it being a cpu from server farms. There always upgrading and the amount of stock they upgrade too is massive taking up warehouses and that something a server company doesn't want to do is be dealing with there old hardware and storing it and its way cheaper to sell this tech at pennies on the dollar with large stock pills. The upgrade it self is already saving server farms by providing more performance while using less power. Its just better to sell fast and cheap to not waste time money on old not used hardware witch gives us great deals on this hardware

el xeon tiene graficos esta estrano

Its a 12 year old CPU that supports only DDR3

That's not mini ITX form factor. It looks wider....

Not sure its that great a MB as the CPU is an Intel Xeon Processor E5-2680 v4 (ok 40 PCIe lanes) but it has a 120watt TDP and no Quick Sync and appears no intel processor with that MB socket FCLGA2011 support intel quick sync. You even mentioned Plex so now extra expense and power for a dedicated graphic card or all CPU transcoding?

It looks like the cooler in your PSU is dead! 💀

With all my respect to your work, I have to point out that the review is filled up with empty talking while missing crucial testing points. For example: CPU C and turbo states, idle/load power consumption, VRM temps, smart fan, wake on LAN, restore on power loss, ECC mode were not tested nor mentioned. It's also good to verify Intel ME integrity, BIOS read/write protection, American Mega Trends license for the BIOS supplied, and of course, IPMI if it's even there.

😱 But this board is a full crap, I’ve already seen it, I’m not even sure whether it will be possible to create an acceptable BIOS for it.

just add a bifurcation card to x16,split into two x8 or 1x8,two x4, add an 40Gbe NIC with RDMA ,use it as pure storage backend with 40Gbe cache pool and all can boom fast brainless.

BKHD Industrial Solution makes the motherboard.

Chinese communist spyware baked into the firmware bruh.