Experience with AM1 platform?

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

bmacklin

Member
Dec 10, 2013
96
5
8
Anybody have experience with AMD's AM1 platform?

The boards are basically cheap as can be. I'm worried about running them 24x7 for anything. Might fail in a month or two. They are also cheaping out on IO... 4 sata ports max, 1 NIC only.

And I'm not sure if the AM1 processors packs enough compute for basic windows file server.

Total cost is around $100 for board and cpu, but I would also have to add in extra DDR3 ram since I don't have any that's non-ECC.
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
12,511
5,792
113
Mine actually works pretty well. It is not something I would want to sit and do work on, but for a file server it is OK. I just ended up buying/ using higher end gear. One problem you will have is that they are too cheap to sell used so they will just sit around collecting dust if you stop using it.
 

cperalt1

Active Member
Feb 23, 2015
180
55
28
43
I have 1 with the lowest speed CPU 2650 I believe. I used it to run SmartOS with a zone running OpenVPN in 1 vm, Fedora in another, and a basic smartos zone in another. It is good as low power 24/7 ssh access that can do a little more. I have since repurposed it as a Windows 10 box that my son uses for his online school (3rd grade). But as Patrick said don't expect much from it.
 

Fritz

Well-Known Member
Apr 6, 2015
3,371
1,375
113
69
I have one running my ip cams. It runs 24/7 had has been rock solid for almost a year now.

MSI MS-7865 MiniITX MB
Athlon 5350 APU
8gb of DDR3
Thermotake MiniITX case

It's been rebooted once while troubleshooting a network problem that turned out to be a bad cable. I built this system to be a cheap power miser and it fits the bill perfectly. Runs Blue Iris without a hitch.
 

kroem

Active Member
Aug 16, 2014
248
43
28
38
So, what's the verdict on ECC RAM? I heard it might take it.
 

EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
1,394
511
113
I think most AM1 chips themselves are physically capable of running ECC RAM, it's just that most motherboards don't have the additional tracing put in to allow it to be enabled. According to a few posts I found the Asus AM1M-A used to "support" ECC but doesn't any more (so possibly a typo in the original manual), but custom boards like the APU2B4 come with ECC.

It's not an apples-to-tomatoes comparison but Storage Review have just put up a rundown on the QNAP 463 which uses a 4x2.4GHz APU. Given than it's basically running a linux distro with bog-standard software you can get a fair idea of the NAS performance, although their benches are kinda senseless as they only compare SSD-only performance to list theoretical maximums, and they use different drives for the NAS-to-NAS head-off.

In short, potentially a nice server platform but not really utilised at all well by the OEMs and ODMs, sadly an issue that has plagued AMD since the year dot.
 

canta

Well-Known Member
Nov 26, 2014
1,012
216
63
43
As amd does with am release...
The motherboard should support ecc.

I has am2 Asus mobo atx that support ecc officially
And am3+ biostar that unofficially support. The ecc menu shown up in the bios after ecc ram installed.

Basically. Ecc support depends on motherboard bios.

Another miniitx soc a4 5000 mobo. The bios does not support ecc. I am 90% the hardware supports ecc but bios does not allow ecc enable.
 

LasseKongo

New Member
Oct 9, 2015
14
3
3
48
Been using my AM1 setup with PFsense for almost a year, and it has been solid so far. The pros. are low price, low power consumption and support for AES-NI. Downsides are few sata ports, and just 4 PCI-e lanes in the 16X slot.
I´m about to upgrade my network to 10Gbe, it will be interesting to see how much the AM1 will handle, my guess is, not 10Gbe.
 

canta

Well-Known Member
Nov 26, 2014
1,012
216
63
43
Been using my AM1 setup with PFsense for almost a year, and it has been solid so far. The pros. are low price, low power consumption and support for AES-NI. Downsides are few sata ports, and just 4 PCI-e lanes in the 16X slot.
I´m about to upgrade my network to 10Gbe, it will be interesting to see how much the AM1 will handle, my guess is, not 10Gbe.
you will install 10GB card on 4X pcie slot?
handling is more than enough on AM1 side, but 4X pcie ... is the bottle neck :p
 

LasseKongo

New Member
Oct 9, 2015
14
3
3
48
you will install 10GB card on 4X pcie slot?
handling is more than enough on AM1 side, but 4X pcie ... is the bottle neck :p
Well, it´s a physical 16X slot with 4 PCI-e 2.0 lanes, and with PCI-e 2.0 giving a theoretical 500MB/s per lane I don´t think it will be a problem. My main concern is that the CPU itself will be way to slow, but I have never used 10Gbe in PFsense before so I´m not sure.
 

canta

Well-Known Member
Nov 26, 2014
1,012
216
63
43
Well, it´s a physical 16X slot with 4 PCI-e 2.0 lanes, and with PCI-e 2.0 giving a theoretical 500MB/s per lane I don´t think it will be a problem. My main concern is that the CPU itself will be way to slow, but I have never used 10Gbe in PFsense before so I´m not sure.
it would when you are running dual 10Gb :p........... and utilized most of the B/W
500MB X 4 = 2000MB
10Gb = 1250MB
2000MB > 1250MB +<overhead in pcie to card>.
since only one crappy realtek mostly on AM1, need minimally dual port nic or more port nic....
*I added dual NIC i350 intel, realtek is only for management access, running proxmox on a4-5000 quad core

quad core AM1 cpu is not slow, can be compared with braswel N series quad core :D.
but intel is 7W less power consumption...
 
Last edited:

sfbayzfs

Active Member
May 6, 2015
259
143
43
SF Bay area
AFAIK, for AMD consumer CPU ECC support, the CPUs have support for ECC in all variants of AM2/AM2+/AM3/AM3+ and laptop equivalents, but the motherboard also has to support it, which at a minimum, most Asus boards and some BioStar boards are known to support, plus of course the HP and Fujitsu microservers. Unfortunately the APU series' all seem to have dropped ECC support in the E350/E450 and the FM1 and FM2 sockets :(