The minisforums designs (like UM790 Pro etc) are getting increasingly impressive. They have had a bumpy road but they really have finally figured out getting LM to work in a production product. You can't open it but you don't have to - everything that's user-accessible is in a service bay. UM790 Pro is perpetually ~$519-539 or w/e, and they also have a newer version with an oculink in addition to the 2x usb4/thunderbolt ports.
[LM: liquid metal, gallium-indium alloy with high conductivity but liquid at room temperature, and conductive, which makes it tedious and exacting to apply etc, but it's the only way to keep pushing thermal density upwards to that degree. PS5 used it as well, and that's part of how they pushed form factor down a ton in a fairly high-TDP product.]
Minisforum also had a laptop CPU on a mITX board which frankly is also an underexplored niche, why is that one chinese company (edit: erying) the only ones putting tiger lake onto a socket etc? Atoms etc aren't the only way that low-end market can be tapped, and big chipsets with tons of IO don't make sense on that kind of product anyway. Even the ryzen desktop chips provide a "SOC platform" that can do USB, ethernet, and a few other things iirc - it's used in things like the DeskMini/Deskmeet X300 series, look at the addons they need, it does pull the mobo cost way down.
(AMD does not allow X300 to be used in this way, X300 mobos cannot be sold standalone, has to be integrated into a product which is licensed separately, can't lose the bundled sale. Imagine if those firewall appliances etc could run a 5700X3D or 7940HS instead of a 1165G7 or 1125G4 or whatever. that would be awful.)
Long-term support is not great (things fall off pretty quickly from what I've heard) and really ideally I'd also like to see them support ECC (7940HS supports it) to open up the homelab market a little more. Because they're doing these really zany powerful things, they crammed a 7940HS into a NUC formfactor and routed it out efficiently into things for people who want to expand, etc. They're cooking, and as the oculink and MCIO and other breakout ecosystems start to mature things are gonna get interesting for the NUC market. And they're already interesting for GENOAD8X-2T and so on too. People are realizing the need for this to be more modular than PCIe edge card/ATX allow in a regular tower form factor. The children yearn for PCIe lanes, they just don't know why or how.
(this can be extended to an interleaved network of 5 nodes, where with only 2 links per node you are tolerant to no more than 1 node failing yet only 2 hops to any other node) https://i.imgur.com/i56PdsC.png
Doesn't seem to be an issue for the X600. You may have seen this review [1]. The AM5D4ID-2T/BCM isn't cheap, but it doesn't have a real chipset either.
yee I did see that. another round of psychedelics for the boys at asrock, what an absolute crackhead design team, in the absolute best way. X99-ITX [0][1][2] and X299-ITX[3][4][[5] were both masterpieces in their own way too, and they've been one of the teams that has been cooking the hardest with intel and AMD both. Supermicro is there too but a lot more conservative at times, except[6] (look at the usb, and... audio...)...
good point, hadn't considered that board. I do hope they loosen up, but a high-end server market board is not completely the same thing either.
The Asrock Rack series are really really good now and I think both their AM4 and SP3 platforms are really appealing. ROMED8-2T is everything a motherboard should be. Except for SFP+, of course. But Asrock Rack's design teams really have a good pulse on what the prosumer/homelab/soho market wants, they have been pumping out a ton of great designs lately.
[LM: liquid metal, gallium-indium alloy with high conductivity but liquid at room temperature, and conductive, which makes it tedious and exacting to apply etc, but it's the only way to keep pushing thermal density upwards to that degree. PS5 used it as well, and that's part of how they pushed form factor down a ton in a fairly high-TDP product.]
Minisforum also had a laptop CPU on a mITX board which frankly is also an underexplored niche, why is that one chinese company (edit: erying) the only ones putting tiger lake onto a socket etc? Atoms etc aren't the only way that low-end market can be tapped, and big chipsets with tons of IO don't make sense on that kind of product anyway. Even the ryzen desktop chips provide a "SOC platform" that can do USB, ethernet, and a few other things iirc - it's used in things like the DeskMini/Deskmeet X300 series, look at the addons they need, it does pull the mobo cost way down.
(AMD does not allow X300 to be used in this way, X300 mobos cannot be sold standalone, has to be integrated into a product which is licensed separately, can't lose the bundled sale. Imagine if those firewall appliances etc could run a 5700X3D or 7940HS instead of a 1165G7 or 1125G4 or whatever. that would be awful.)
Long-term support is not great (things fall off pretty quickly from what I've heard) and really ideally I'd also like to see them support ECC (7940HS supports it) to open up the homelab market a little more. Because they're doing these really zany powerful things, they crammed a 7940HS into a NUC formfactor and routed it out efficiently into things for people who want to expand, etc. They're cooking, and as the oculink and MCIO and other breakout ecosystems start to mature things are gonna get interesting for the NUC market. And they're already interesting for GENOAD8X-2T and so on too. People are realizing the need for this to be more modular than PCIe edge card/ATX allow in a regular tower form factor. The children yearn for PCIe lanes, they just don't know why or how.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nu-GKq58Og
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IfArhUdAm8
(this can be extended to an interleaved network of 5 nodes, where with only 2 links per node you are tolerant to no more than 1 node failing yet only 2 hops to any other node) https://i.imgur.com/i56PdsC.png
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O08LG64fvqI
https://www.servethehome.com/asrock-rack-genoad8x-2t-bcm-rev...