This would be awesome if it had ECC support and space for a 2nd 3.5in drive, be a perfect TrueNAS unit then! I do appreciate that's far from the market it's aimed for, would be a great little PC for more than just day to day usage. Nice find Wendell 👍
Asrock's page says you can mount a second 3.5in drive in the GPU area using those four little tabs that stick out. 5:32 has a clear shot of them. Though I don't know how much clearance that would leave for the GPU. Maybe only single slot.
@@josephcameron5294 The manual says you can't use a GPU if you put a 3.5in drive there, and only a single slot GPU if you put a 2.5in drive there. @Bikerchris The AMD version supports ECC, apparently.
One thing to note is that the PSU is custom with a reversed fan that sucks air into the case and exhausts onto the CPU cooler. Unless you can reverse the fan of another PSU or figure out another cooling solution, you're going to thermal throttle the CPU rather quickly. Anyway, great video! I ended up buying one of these and added a i31 2100f, RTX 3050, NVEMe drive, 16Gb of RAM, and an Intel AX m.2(e) card to get wifi6 (unit comes with AC m.2). Awesome SSF unit!
I think you hit the nail right on the head when you mentioned it's efficiency. It's not a fire breathing performance juggernaut but it is a well-performing efficient machine. I appreciate seeing machines like this. They make more sense than these tricked out hot boxes that look great, but heat up the house.
Super Awesome video share Wendell ! ! !... thoroughly enjoyed watching You toss, turn & flip the interior case (maybe to "find" the "TOP"??)... that's when my old standby tools are front & center for me, "scotch tape & sharpie"... short strip of tape down 1st & then apply an "Arrow/TOP" to properly orientate the case (or item needing it)... keeps it clean so when it's time to Sell/Trade, just pull off the tape and " WHA - LA ".. cleaner than a whistle!!
I've built many DeskMini X300 desktops for non-gamer friends and they love having their desk space back. I'll probably recommend the DeskMeet for the next friend that wants to upgrade their gaming rig. I wish you had reviewed the AMD version of the DeskMeet. The lower power CPU makes more sense in this form factor. Losing the second M.2 slot isn't a deal breaker.
I wonder how many 3.25 or 2.5 inch drives you could cram in it with some custom 3D printed brackets and enough room for a controller card? This Deskmeet has so much potential, super cool!
I feel like AsRock needs to get into making laptops. (do they already? I dont know.) Because i feel like they would make killer laptops for fair prices which would destroy the laptop market with all their overpriced bullshit. Imagine an AMD laptop that was both budget but powerful using the new 6000 series chips. man asrock could rock the market.
I considered this system (the X300 version) but I went with the DeskMini X300W with a Ryzen 5 4600G, 16GB G.Skill DDR4-3200 CL20 RAM kit, 1TB Crucial MX500 SATA SSD, 1TB WD Blue SN570 M.2 NVMe SSD, and Noctua L9a-AM4 Cooler breaking out to a Sapphire Pulse RX 6600 in an x16 M.2 Dock (for gaming at home).
You can literally upgrade the pc to the level of standard gaming pc, so its probably the last you ever need, im talking about 144hz 4k gaming, unless you are into competitive game
There is also a AMD Ryzen Version that might be a little cheaper, the Deskmeet X300. Its almost the same besides afaik it only supports 1 nvme SSD. But keep in Mind the GPU could be up to 2 Slot width without any head room over that! Another Option like the Deskmini, the Deskmeet also supports APUs like the 2200G and up and CPUs up to 5000.
So it goes the Dell way with the front IO, huh? But since it's ITX otherwise, I guess you could still replace it down the line should it fail/require an upgrade, as long as you're fine with either giving up on front IO, or printing some custom bracket for it.
not unusual in MINI pc's these are not your regular ITX/ATX/MATX motherboards/cases ;-) where Dell operates in the normal off the shelf but decided to use special crap noone can reuse
12:34 If I understood this correctly it is not a regular power supply though, is it? I think it is pulling in air from the back and exhausting it towards the CPU cooler while regular power supplys pull in air from the fan opening and exhaust it out the back. So when you put in a regular power supply you would create more of a negative pressure situation and make the CPU and power supply "fight" for air. To be fair, with low power components this will probably be fine, but still something to keep in mind.
I remember watching a recent video where Wendell was working with a case that had several 5.25" bays into which he installed adapters for 2.5" drives. It is is extremely hard to find any case companies that make units with 5.25" bays, since all anyone wants to buy these days are cases with as many glass sides as possible. So your collection of cases to choose from will be small and likely expensive since they won't be making them in as large of quantities. That is why I will be using the two old Thermaltake cases I have until they become unusable for whatever reason. They each have 3 5.25" bays. One has the rest of the space as 3.5", and the other has 3 3.5" and 3 2.5". They don't have front usb3 which can be a pain, but simply plugging in a 18" usb 3 cable to one of the rear ports makes it manageable. I'm not a 10yr old boy so I don't need or want RGB infesting my system, so as the saying goes, you will have to pry these cases from my cold, dead hands....
Could not get pricing or stock, but this is perfect for a middle-aged power user. With the density of today, you can get away with this factor thanks to both competent CPU and GPU. With LVM or rdiff you could get away with M.2 and SATA for expanded storage. VFIO for handling multiple platforms. Chances are you are not going to use the additional power of K CPUs if you build it with as your pet machine. The way we used to do things :)
You know, I used to keep a cone of gyro meat on my desk, rotating over an open flame. This ended in tragedy one day when my uncle came over to throw his piss jugs away and my pet monitor lizard got out of his enclosure and bit my uncle's face off.
Looks like a great alternative to the aged HPE Microserver Gen10+ for HomeLabs... Superior memory capacity, superior CPU, builtin M.2 for OS and caching, with space for 2 SATA 2.5" SSDs... would have been better if it had SFX PSU for more internal space for the cooler, though maybe some of the thinner coolers out there could be even better than the box one from Intel, I mean some slim Noctua or Cryorig etc.? Or to at least allow 4+ SATA 2.5"... it could make a huge difference... As to the GPU, the one you used is not a good choice - if it's desktop oonly, then OK, but you'd want something like the older Quadro T1000 instead for extra CUDA support or media-usage... Or maybe even better, once Intel GPUs are available, a pairing of such with the CPU/MoBo for the extended QSV feature-set since QSV still offers better quality/compressed-size than NVENC/VCE.
Bought the Ryzen (AM4) version. Right now I have a Athlon 2200G installed, but plans for a Ryzen 7 5700x or G and RX6600. Nice upgrade from my X300 DeskMini.
Wendell - seriously, you can't keep making comments about taking the mill to computer parts without actually doing it at SOME point! When do we get the unnecessarily labor intensive Level1 custom PC(...server?) build? Still have mixed feelings about Alder Lake, a bit iffy on it, but I do dig this build. LOVE what all ASRock does, some of the most interesting products on the market!
I was just thinking of that DeskMeet but an AMD model with 5600x/5800 and challenger ITX 6600, must be great for living room PC, if manage to find 12core 5900 (yes, it's only 65W !!! wiiiii), would be even great for little gaming/multimedia NAS-like box with two vmachines and 128 gigs
Planning on buying two of these. One with a 12100 and an X550-T2 for opensense. The other with a 12500, a single slot 6400, and an asus hyper m.2 card. Slap six 1TB m.2 drives for an unraid.
i have one of these! instead of mounting a 2.5 inch, I have it behind the graphics card + I put a noctua fan on the 3.5" mount! It works wonderfully and keeps everything well below 50 (sitting at 45 on the VRM right now!!!!). i've got so much thermal room i'm going to try putting an i7-13th gen in it and give it hell.
I'd be interested in doing this! What size fan did you use, and do you have any pictures? And would it still fit if I'm using a dual slot graphic card?
@@Tesseus i don't have any pics, and honestly if i opened the case it might ruin it because it's sort of held in by tension. you have to... 'massage' the ATX power connector and make sure you're not putting any untoward pressure on the RAM slotsg. it's a shame you don't get a lot of power delivery control on these boards because i've got this one nice and chilly!
haha it's funny, i was thinking of a place to put this i could use this beast and wanted to add it to cart when Wendell put it perfectly "i dont even need it"
The only deal breaker is the use of non-standard ITX, else it meets everything a SFF person wants (maybe except watercooling, additional RGB, and/or even smaller size such as those
Can you try to rotate the fan inside the PSU to blow air on the CPU and VRMs and check again the temperatures? Another very informative review! Greetings from Greece!
The other comments mention that there is an AMD version of this! With a Ryzen Pro CPU, (UDIMM) ECC should work afaik. (Might also work with a non-Pro CPU? But might also not.)
@@Blacklands Hm, that's interesting, thanks. So Asrock is the chosen one after all. Yes the spec sheet says that ECC is supported by the board so as long as CPu supports ECC it is OK. The non-PRO APUs can't support ECC because AMD has blocked that, but the PRO APUs do indeed work with ECC
I wish you had provided a picture of the inside of the box after you had the power supply installed. It seems like the cabling would be kind of ugly on the inside (as are most builds).
Seems like a great case but I hate a case that breathes through the bottom for the exact reason you mentioned. If you have to put the computer on carpet, a bottom vent will be negatively affected. Also, I hate feet on a computer. If I were on a boat, where the room could pitch in any direction then feet would be a good idea but if you have a stable floor then feet only make it hard to pull a PC out of it's location under the desk. And rubber feet are the worst because they tend to stick to the floor. The jarring up and down that the computer experiences (the washboard effect) when you drag it across the floor is really good (not) for it. And a computer with rubber feet on a carpet is un-draggable. I hate feet on a computer. The best cases have a little bump out in the floor of the case that smoothly contact the surface you set it on (whether desk or floor). Whether carpet of bare floor, such a case is easily slid into and out of position. If you're on a boat, however, feet are appropriate.
i saw some coverage on the ryzen version and immediately fell in love! its a very similar layout to the DIY 8L full custom cpu/gpu loop build i've made and am very proud of, but i used a B450i at the time and i'm particularly smitten with these 4dimm slot, 2x m.2 gen 4 slot motherboards! absolutely everything i could wish for in an exquisitely mini package! do they support bifurication? i'd love to build an igpu based server with one of the affordable 4x4NVME add in cards or similar. split one of the onboard m.2 slots into more satas, use an itx power supply and i think you could get at least 8 2.5" and 5 m.2 drives into this thing with printed brackets or double sided tape! its all solid state so its fine! shame its only got gb LAN, that might need a workaround too. but honestly as a little home use data center, wifi6 is probably ok right? ~swoon~
I tried the boxed cooler on my asus itx b660 board... would not work. The pins just screamed "NOOOO", and popped off.. I find the stock cooler hence - cr@p.
I really wish the general quality and company support / warranty services were better on AsRock. I generally avoid them as a company because of this. And no ECC? Hard pass. Plus their aftercare / BIOS / UEFI support is lacking on a ton of boards.
ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-kL9k7LHMwYc.html "Easy to work on with standard parts" Unless you need to replace the motherboard. Then you are also replacing the case. The case and it's form factor being the entire draw of the unit. I think it was a giant mistake to extend the motherboard to avoid case headers.
@@LiLBitsDK It was running cinebench r23 at 95 c.I back off to 4.5 ghz and went down on the voltage on my X470 Gigabyte motherboard to 0.096 and now it runs at 83 c on cinebench r23 i do have a new cooler coming today an ID-214 se 180 watt cooler should make a difference.
@@LiLBitsDK Well at first I thought consumer drives are at the largest ... like 10TB. And I thought this wouldn't fit too many of them I didn't think about enterprise drives at all. But again, even with 10TB drives. Fitting 2 of them should not be a problem with case this big. Or maybe I'm just not up-to-date about the harddisk drive size nowadays. All hdd I have are 4TB.
@@WutipongWongsakuldej well here they just list "harddrives" they don't differ between consumer and enterprise... they just list em all and you pick the one you want, pay for it and they ship it to you and they go up to 20TB it seems but quite a few different ones around 16TB nad 18TB as well
Wendell please (or whoever is the video editor). For the love of god. Not the "open mouth, shocking face look" on thumbnails. YOU ARE BETTER THAN THIS!