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Intel’s Alder Lake-N and Twin Lake processors are designed to be affordable and energy-efficient chips that offer good-enough performance for a wide range of tasks. They’ve shown up in a lot of low-cost mini PCs, Chromebooks, and other laptops and tablets over the past few years.
But they also come with some trade-offs. One of the biggest is that these chips only have 9 PCIe lanes, which means that if you want to use one of these processors for a device with a lot of expansion options, you may have to sacrifice performance.
So last month when I wrote about a mini ITX NAS board with four 2.5 GbE LAN ports, 6 SATA connectors, two M.2 ports, and a PCIe 3.0 x1 connector, I pointed out that you could either use that PCIe 3.0 connector or the second M.2 slot… but not both. Now it looks like Chinese PC makers are offering another board that’s nearly identical in most respects – but it trades two of those LAN ports for a speedier PCIe 3.0 x4 interface.
That should allow you to use the PCIe connector for a wider range of devices (like graphics cards, network cards, or storage devices), and this board also has a microSD card reader, which the model with four Ethernet ports lacks.
Otherwise the two boards are pretty similar – right down to their $169 starting prices.
| NAS board with 2 x LAN + PCIe 3.0 x4 | NAS board with 4 x LAN + PCIe 3.0 x1 | |
| Processor | Intel N100 Intel N150 Intel Core i3-N305 Intel Core 3 N355 |
|
| SATA 3.0 | 6 x SATA 3.0 connectors (ASM1166) | 6 x SATA 3.0 connectors (JMB585) |
| LAN | 2 x 2.5 Gb Ethernet (Intel i226-V) | 4 x 2.5 Gb Ethernet (Intel i226-V) |
| PCIe 3.0 | 2 x M.2 2280 PCIe 3.0 x1 slots (storage) 1 x PCIe 3.0 x4 (storage, graphics card, network card) |
2 x M.2 2280 PCIe 3.0 x1 (storage) 1 x PCIe 3.0 x1 (signal shared with second M.2 slot, can only use one or the other) |
| RAM | Up to 32GB DDR5-4800 1 x SODIMM |
|
| USB | 1 x USB 3.0 Type-A 3 x USB 2.0 Type-A |
1 x USB 3.0 Type-A 2 x USB 2.0 Type-A 1 x USB 2.0 Type-C |
| Display | 1 x HDMI 2.1 1 x DisplayPort 1.4b |
|
| Audio | 1 x 3.5mm audio (Realtek ALC897) | |
| SD card | 1 x microSD card reader | N/A |
| Dimensions | 170 x 170mm (6.7″ x 6.7″) | |
| Starting price | $169 (AliExpress) | $169 (AliExpress) |