Recently bought an U-NAS 810a, which was running an older Asrock mITX board and an i5-6500. System had 4 x 6TB HGST NAS Drives and Windows Server 2019 on a Samsung 850 EVO. First build was super easy and ran very cool and quiet. Unlike most of the reviews I have read from folks, cable management was a non-issue and I didn't want away with any blood spilt.
After running for a bit and with the recent launch of the e-2100 series, I got the bug to replace my aging setup with something that could handle h265 decode and serve as a test/dev tool for work, well as doing double duty as my primary NAS, media server, etc. Needed to be quiet, perform well, sit in my little closet under the stairs where everything was home ran in my house. Since the e-2146g was impossible to find in channel, settled on an e-2176g. Chip came quickly, but waited on Supermicro to drop ship the board (X11SCH-LN4F) for nearly a month. In the meantime I collected the rest of the parts for the build, including 2 x Samsung 970 EVO NVMe drives, 2 x 860 EVO 2.5" drives, 2 x 10TB WD shucked Reds, and a Noctua NH-L9i. Memory consisted of 4 x 16GB Micron UDIMMs.
Finally all of the pieces arrived. I quickly tore down the existing build and was surprised at the size difference between the mITX vs mATX boards. On an intellectual level you know they are sizable different, but its still shocking to see just how small the mITX board is relative to the mATX board.
First challenge was actually getting the mATX board in the case. As others have stated, it is a VERY tight fit. The board uses ever centimeter of tray space for the board. There is zero margin. Almost immediately, I took a nice chunk of skin off my hand as the sharp edges of the case sliced me. First blood drawn. It was sharp enough I didn't even feel the cut and only noticed after I felt something sticky.
Due to the layout of the X11SCH-LN4F, cable extensions were necessary, whereas with my old Asrock mITX board they were not. As a result, cable management was more of an issue this time around.
There were some initial things to figure out around getting to boot to the NVMe drives since I hadn't used a Supermicro board in nearly 20 years (BX Chipset days), but overall it came together pretty well.
I am a bit disappointed in temps both at idle and under load. The i5-6500 was a 4 core 65W TDP part and this is a 6 Core 85W TDP part running at higher clock speed, but I didn't think I would be running substantially higher temps at both idle and under heavy load (burn-in). With the i5-6500 I was idling at roughly 33c and I am now idling at 48c, which seems high. During BurnIn with Passmark, I topped out at 88C on a 15 test (proc, memory, gpu, disk, network, etc). Nothing throttled and no warnings were hit, but it was much higher than I expected it to be. Heatsink seemed well seated when I put the board in, but might pull it to check. The i5-6500 was averaging high 50s under heavy load and it was running the stock intel heatsink.
Overall, solid build, and more than robust enough for my projected use cases over the next several years. Love the 2 x NVMe slots on board which don't impact the 8 x onboard SATA ports. Obviously wish the c246 platform supported native 10Gb, but it wasn't a requirement for me. Only downside to this board is that I wish it had an hdmi or displayport bound to the Intel iGPU. Onboard VGA is bound to the Aspeed controller.
Heed the warning of others though. While I really love the case overall, the build is much easier in the 810a with a mITX board and this case is super tight with an mATX board and will seek to christen itself with some of your blood!
Pics attached.
After running for a bit and with the recent launch of the e-2100 series, I got the bug to replace my aging setup with something that could handle h265 decode and serve as a test/dev tool for work, well as doing double duty as my primary NAS, media server, etc. Needed to be quiet, perform well, sit in my little closet under the stairs where everything was home ran in my house. Since the e-2146g was impossible to find in channel, settled on an e-2176g. Chip came quickly, but waited on Supermicro to drop ship the board (X11SCH-LN4F) for nearly a month. In the meantime I collected the rest of the parts for the build, including 2 x Samsung 970 EVO NVMe drives, 2 x 860 EVO 2.5" drives, 2 x 10TB WD shucked Reds, and a Noctua NH-L9i. Memory consisted of 4 x 16GB Micron UDIMMs.
Finally all of the pieces arrived. I quickly tore down the existing build and was surprised at the size difference between the mITX vs mATX boards. On an intellectual level you know they are sizable different, but its still shocking to see just how small the mITX board is relative to the mATX board.
First challenge was actually getting the mATX board in the case. As others have stated, it is a VERY tight fit. The board uses ever centimeter of tray space for the board. There is zero margin. Almost immediately, I took a nice chunk of skin off my hand as the sharp edges of the case sliced me. First blood drawn. It was sharp enough I didn't even feel the cut and only noticed after I felt something sticky.
Due to the layout of the X11SCH-LN4F, cable extensions were necessary, whereas with my old Asrock mITX board they were not. As a result, cable management was more of an issue this time around.
There were some initial things to figure out around getting to boot to the NVMe drives since I hadn't used a Supermicro board in nearly 20 years (BX Chipset days), but overall it came together pretty well.
I am a bit disappointed in temps both at idle and under load. The i5-6500 was a 4 core 65W TDP part and this is a 6 Core 85W TDP part running at higher clock speed, but I didn't think I would be running substantially higher temps at both idle and under heavy load (burn-in). With the i5-6500 I was idling at roughly 33c and I am now idling at 48c, which seems high. During BurnIn with Passmark, I topped out at 88C on a 15 test (proc, memory, gpu, disk, network, etc). Nothing throttled and no warnings were hit, but it was much higher than I expected it to be. Heatsink seemed well seated when I put the board in, but might pull it to check. The i5-6500 was averaging high 50s under heavy load and it was running the stock intel heatsink.
Overall, solid build, and more than robust enough for my projected use cases over the next several years. Love the 2 x NVMe slots on board which don't impact the 8 x onboard SATA ports. Obviously wish the c246 platform supported native 10Gb, but it wasn't a requirement for me. Only downside to this board is that I wish it had an hdmi or displayport bound to the Intel iGPU. Onboard VGA is bound to the Aspeed controller.
Heed the warning of others though. While I really love the case overall, the build is much easier in the 810a with a mITX board and this case is super tight with an mATX board and will seek to christen itself with some of your blood!
Pics attached.
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