Topton 'NAS' motherboard.

[homebyte]

Interesting that these boards support staggered spin up. This could mean that their JMB585 firmware/optionROM implements the parts needed to properly integrate the configuration options in a way that's compatible with UEFI HII. Manufacturers rarely bother to do this.

Could anyone here with a MB like this dump the flash chip that's attached to the JMB585 with one of those CH341A programmers? (most likely the one above the heatsink, U29) Make sure to select the correct voltage.

https://i.redd.it/ssogtus6sgfb1.jpg

Would be interesting to see if flashing the contents onto another JMB585 board would also make the configuration options show up on other motherboards.


....also interesting: The JMB585 datasheet says:

That sounds like ASPM to me. Could it be that the manufacturers just forgot to properly configure it in the flash image? Are there any proper datasheets of this controller that document the flash map or controller registers?

Hello @artorias. Would you post this on the N110/N305 forum? (https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...ies-nas-motherboard-topton-cwwk.42432/page-10) There are similar discussion about the incompatibility with ASPM of JMB 585 (Which ASM 1166 is according to this 7 watts idle on Intel 12th/13th gen: the foundation for building a low power server/NAS | mattgadient.com)

 

[TobiasT]

New BIOS / Micro code for our CW-NAS-N5N6-CPU Board. Send to me by Topton on Friday.

 

[jamin215]

Anyone with this board N5105 N6005 NAS Demon Board know if This Bios is the proper bios file? Even better have it installed? There are a few variations of this board but it seems to be correct.

 

[xoxer]

Hi All,

I have BKHD BK-NAS-N5105 (BKHD N5105 1338-NAS).

At the moment I am testing this board based on Windows 11, but eventually I will put ProxMox on it. I am disappointed with the energy consumption. Like others in this group, I am far from a dozen or so watts.

3) power consumption is shocking 25W idle, 32W when nework+HDD are working (in xpenology CPU load is 6%). it is more then stadrard desctop consume with celeron CPU.

My basic configuration:
- one NVME disk (Adata)
- 32GB DDR4 3200 (Crucial)
- PCIE WiFi card (without a WiFi card, the consumption drops by 1W).
- 120mm fan (instead of the original one because it was terribly loud)
- 250W SFX 80+ power supply
- default settings in BIOS (factory reset after updating the BIOS to the version of 2023-08-04)
Here are my observations:
- power off (standby) - 4W!!! (my normal PC can take max 2-3W)
- boot (under bios and under system load) 25W-27W
- stress 33W
- normal work (browser, copy files) 25W
- idle 21W
- sleep 4W

I don't want to turn off the network cards, but I know that turning one off gives a gain of about 0.5W.

I checked whether it was the power supply's fault, but on another SFX450 Corsair the results were the same. My normal PC with I7-8700K in idle can go down to 24W!

During my tests, I had a situation twice when the system consumed 12W in idle mode and 15-17W during operation, but I don't know if it was then that the meter had a problem or if it was due to the fact that I turned on the board that had previously been in a cold room without electricity for a long time. . After hundreds of attempts, I was unable to repeat this situation again.

Please help me understand what this is about? Is this just the way this model is and there's nothing you can do about it? Are there any settings in the BIOS to reduce the consumption below 20W?
Can you share your observations because I don't know whether to search hundreds of pages on forums or accept this state of affairs.

I read on the Unraid forum that someone modified the bios, but the link to it no longer works. There are different models of this board (green, black), do all of them have it or only this model (BK-NAS-N5105) has it? I will be appreciate if someone who has this motherboard and has low power consumption could share with BIOS details.

 

[yoinked]

Not possible with that board because it has an JMB585 which prevents ASPM resulting in maximum C3 state

 

[vvkvvk]

Not possible with that board because it has an JMB585 which prevents ASPM resulting in maximum C3 state

Even if you disable the JMB585 in the BIOS and enable C-states, they're bugged and won't function. I got freezes after few days of uptime constantly. Disabling the higher C-states made it solid, but at the cost of power consumption.

 

[xoxer]

Guys, I'm not sure if this answers my questions. My board is BKHD, Model BK-NAS-N5105, Chipset 1338NP-NAS-MB and when I look closer I see on board Asmedia ASM1166 not JMB585.

I ran the ThrottleStop application (under windows) and it shows me that in idle the system uses level C6 at 90%. Tomorrow I will install some linux distro to run powertop and check what it will say.

 

[xoxer]

I just recently modded the bios to enable the PCIe settings, enabled Overclocking/Undervolting (well, turns out at least for me that was quite useless) and enable ASPM (C3->C8 succesfully achieved) - it works flawlessly. Maybe you'll need to change some settings in these menus - I'll shortly release my BIOS-Mod in the Unraid forums once I'm confident everything is ok - theoretically I could also update the microcode and replace the embedded firmware with UBU too but I didn't go that far yet (because there was no need). What I noticed is that even with the original BIOS the board won't boot after a reboot command triggered with the wrong settings enabled ... I guess the BIOS itself could need an update for some things, but these are just minor hiccups - nothing serious that I discovered yet.

...

I'm idling at 11.3W right now with 3 HDDs, 2 SSDs connected ...

I checked Unraid forum but link to bios file is broken. Is there any other place where I can find modded bios?

 

[yoinked]

You can create it yourself or manually set the option directly (requires booting windows though)

 

[xoxer]

I'm idling at 11.3W right now with 3 HDDs, 2 SSDs connected ...

I don't know how jit-010101 achieved this and I would be grateful if you could share what exact BIOS settings it has. I managed to modify the bios, upgrade the ASM1166 firmware, and set ASPM to be enabled. For now, I'm testing on pure Proxmox without any active virtual machines, after turning on powetop I can see that the system is running in C8 state. You could say it's a success, but the wattmeter shows me 17W in idle. I have NVME on the board, 2 SATA drives, 32GB RAM, without any USB/Wifi/Hdmi devices connected.

Powertop auto-tune hangs but this is probably a known problem. I have a whole Bad list on the "Tunabled" tab and I don't know if anything can be done about it.

Turning off Turbo in the BIOS does not change anything in the idle state, so I prefer to leave Turbo on.

I'm curious what power supply and energy meter jit-010101 uses.
As I wrote earlier, sometimes I get strange readings (half lower and I don't know if it's the wattmeter or the power supply's fault). For testing, I use Chieftec 250W SFX because I wanted to find out how much the entire system can consume at peak before I choose the target power supply. The wattmeter shows me the Power Factor value from 58 to 63 for 17W but I know that it is not the same as efficiency. According to the information on the website Обзор и тестирование блока питания CHIEFTEC SFX-250VS, such a power supply achieves 73% efficiency at 25W. Extrapolating, we can assume that 17W will be about 70%. Let's assume that PicoPsu reaches 80% at a lower level, a difference of 10% at 17W gives about 2W. Correct me if I'm thinking wrong, but these 2W of profit will be returned to me only after 3-4 years if I buy a Picopsu with an appropriate power supply (Used Chieftec costs less than 10 EUR!!!). So before I invest in an appropriate power supply, I would like to check whether I will achieve better results by changing the settings.

jit-010101, I would be grateful if you could take screenshots of your bios settings.

That are my results under proxmox:

 

[xoxer]

Small update:
I did one more test to check how many watts are consumed by devices that are not in use (no peripherals or video, sound card disabled in BIOS).
Disabling 3 lan cards: 16W (65PF) - 1W profit
Additionally, spin down 2 SATA drives (hdparm -y): 15W (60PF)
After physically disconnecting 2 SATA drives, I finally achieved: 14W (56PF).
From this I understand that one disk consumes an average of 2 watts when working and 0.5-1 watt when sleeping.
I wonder how much energy NVME consumes, it will be difficult for me to check it without reinstalling the system. Enabling/disabling CPU Turbo does not change anything in Idle.

 

[xoxer]

I will have to buy a new/better wattmeter. Again, the wattmeter started showing the consumption in idle mode of about 9W (60PF), but when I checked the voltage, it showed 187Vol ac instead of 230. So perhaps all my problems are caused by an imprecise meter.

 

[xoxer]

Anyone else running one of these experiencing insanely slow BIOS boot when sata devices are connected... with for SATA drives it takes nearly a minute to get past the A2 status during bios bootup. I bought via AliExpress from Topton.

This is really annoying, especially during testing and frequent launches. If anyone knows the solution to this problem, I would be grateful for help. Ultimately, this is not such a big problem because the device is supposed to run continuously, but it would be nice to speed up the boot process.

 

[OKyHb]

I did one more test to check how many watts are consumed by devices that are not in use (no peripherals or video, sound card disabled in BIOS).
Disabling 3 lan cards: 16W (65PF) - 1W profit

"sound card in BIOS" - do you remember in which BIOS section it can be found? And how did you disable lan cards?

 

[xoxer]

"sound card in BIOS" - do you remember in which BIOS section it can be found? And how did you disable lan cards?

I have modded bios right now so I have access to Chipset -> PCH-IO Configuration -> HD Audio Configuration
but disabling LAN should be accessible in regular BIOS under Chipset -> PCI Express Configurator -> PCIE LAN 1...4

 

[Marsh]

@xoxer

Please share your mod bios for the BKHD N510x board.
I tried jit-010101 bios , but I couldn't find ASPM enable option.

Could you please post screenshot of the BIOS setting related to ASPM enable.

thank you

 

[xoxer]

Hi Guys, I am on holiday now but I hope next week I will help you.

 

[aryshiry]

Anyone with this board N5105 N6005 NAS Demon Board know if This Bios is the proper bios file? Even better have it installed? There are a few variations of this board but it seems to be correct.

I have this N6005 board with the black PCB and JMB585 SATA controller, shows up as CW-N5105-NAS in BIOS, and I can confirm that the BIOS you linked from Changwang is the correct one and the most recent that I found (can be found on changwang.com, scroll to the bottom where it says "BIOS更新", navigate through to the 3. NAS folder, then the N5105/N6005 folder.). Latest build at time of writing is named "CW-NAS-N5105V10-LOGO-LANWakeup-20230830". The board when normally booting shows a CWWK splash screen. I have just booted into the iso with ventoy, which gave me an .efi shell, typed in 1.nsh which popped open the Intel Flash Programming Tool and begun the flash. Once the flash is verified and it prompts you to reboot, do so and let it do it's thing until it kicks you to BIOS settings or a bootable device. Your NVRAM will probably be nuked, meaning that your EFI entries will vanish to boot into your existing OS, but this is recoverable by booting into any Linux Distro (I used SysRescueCD) and using efibootmgr to point to your .EFI file on your boot partition to initiate GRUB or whatever you got goin' on. This helped me.

I believe Changwang/CWWK is the OEM for this board and that Topton/Kingnovy etc. are retailers and that there aren't variants beyond different PCB colours.

BIOS build when shipped to me, dated 31st August 2022.



Recentmost version, dated 29th August 2023. Haven't compared functionality or anything like that.

 

[TobiasT]

Thank you @aryshiry for reporting your findings.

I will update the BIOS next week when I find time to do so. I am curious if Wake On Lan (under Windows 10) will work with this new BIOS.

 

[big_andy]

Hi guys,

I have got the black board with the N6005.

I successfully updated my BIOS to this version: CW-NAS-N5105V10-LOGO-LANWakeup-20230830.iso

Update steps:
1. Download the ISO
2. Flash the ISO to an USB flash drive with Rufus
3. Boot from the USB flash drive
4. An EFI shell will appear, type cd EFI and press enter
5. Type 1.nsh and press enter
6. Wait till the flash finishes and reboot the device (first boot can take some time)

Another question for the guys who are running Proxmox or ESXi on it: I tried both, but I have a similar problem on both hypervisor systems. Linux VM´s are running fine, but I got issues while running Windows Server 2022 as a VM. The OS crashes randomly with kernel panic errors. Proxmox / ESXi is still running fine. So only the VM is affected. Does someone of you have similar issues and a workaround how to fix this? Thank you so much!

EDIT: Problem seems to be solved after the BIOS update!