So the only good news I have is that my n6005 6-port CPU looks to be a retail CPU.
Everything else is still confirmed bad.
The unit with a desk fan pointed towards it, and with a higher speed 40mm fan I had available in the case, without NVMe and just one 16GB proven DIMM... crashes.
Not only does it crash, especially when under Prime95, but it crashes HARD. Screen turns off, unit cools down, and it won't start back up even after unplugged for minutes.
Give it enough time (maybe more like 15 minutes) it seems that components fully drain (caps, etc), or something like that, and then the thing will boot up again. Rinse and repeat.
DO NOT BUY THE N6005 VERSION! This thing is not thermally stable.
Not good. This is the X6 N6005 right? This is the unit Topton said they will upgrade me to to replace my X4A N6005 “V1.”
I had a discussion with Topton about thermal loading, and they were insistent that they test every model thoroughly. Maybe by testing the units were turned on?
My experience with custom CNC chassis isn’t recent, nor is designing custom thermal solutions as standard chassis nowadays are mostly “good enough” unlike back in the day when it was more common for a subset of enthusiasts who had access to CNC made their own heatsinks, water blocks, and re-manufactured chassis for radiator support.
However with a small understanding of physics it isn’t that hard to figure out what the issue is. The Cu/Al “plug” doesn’t optimally, or even come close to doing an average job of transferring heat from the SoC to the chassis, which acts as the main heatsink. Furthermore, the mass of the aluminum chassis isn’t sufficiently “big enough” to fully sink the heat while dissipating the heat fast enough. Yes, I’m aware that it’s a big ask to demand a cheap chassis that can sink away and dissipate heat 24/7 while running full load. Yes, I’m aware that the expectation for a cheaper passive system is to be able to handle bursts before the SoC down clocks again. In this second important metric these passive chassis fail utterly.
Adding thick “ice thorn” fins doesn’t do much to radiate and dissipate the heat because the important thing about design is to increase surface area. This is why passive tower heatsinks have many thin fins, with heat pipes distributing the waste heat to those fins. Taking this into account, a better design would be more and thinner fins, with heat pipes from the SoC to distribute the heat. It would be better for example to have a slightly larger “smooth” sided chassis with many vents, and a fat thinly finned heatsink underneath.
The additional consideration is there should be a way for sink the heat from the NVMe to chassis. Better design and thermal pads are fine for this. There is typically a max thickness where a thermal pad would start to lose effectiveness, so for example a “10mm” thermal pad wouldn’t work that well.
By removing the two obvious sources of heat from the system, the RAM modules should be fine and within spec.