This mainboard is PERFECT for Home Servers // Minisforum BD770i Review

hey everyone Christian here and in my hands I hold the mini forom BD 770i a mini idx main board that comes with a powerful pre-installed MD ryzen CPU a passive cooler two nvme slots 2.5 GB ethernet on board and I know what you're thinking right now because I was actually thinking the same could this be the perfect Home Server mainboard that's what I've try to find out the last days and what I can tell you from my first impressions is this mainboard here is absolutely amazing for us home lab nerds it has so much power but it is still totally silent and also very power efficient honestly I believe this could be such a great choice for any type of Home Server build yeah no matter if you just need a small power efficient device for running a couple of cell fores applications or maybe you want to build a powerful Computing server that can run several virtual machines this baby here can handle it all and it also does that for a very fair price you can buy this for $399 right now but let us go through all of these stats one by one I will tell you my opinion about it and what I'm planning to do with this because I have a very cool project in mind you're going to see it the next weeks but before we start with the minis Forum mainboard I quickly want to talk about type AI a chat GPT powered iOS keyboard and this is such a useful application I'm using on my iPhone and on my iPad as well as you should know I often have to write text in English but since it is not my model language sometimes I just need to use an AI assistant for grammar and spellchecking or finding out how to correctly express myself of course it also works with any other language like German too but it is really amazing for translation as well as wording recommendations and autoc completion of text that it generates in real time you can also chat with the AI change the tone of a text all those cool AI features you probably know from chat GPT but the cool thing about type AI is that it seemlessly integrates into any of your apps on your phone without having to copy and paste stuff around different applications so do me a favor check it out click the link in the description box below for a free trial of type AI premium version and find out whether it's going to be useful to you too and now without any further talking let's check out the minis foron BD 770i some of you might wonder wait a second minis Forum they don't make mainboards because minis forum is a manufacturer that is probably a bit more welln for making smaller computers such as mini PCS probably a bit more desktop and gaming focused I personally never heard of this brand before but because they just recently added two very exciting mainboard products on their homepage they really caught my attention here so they currently have two models around this is the minis foron BD 770i that is what we're reviewing in this video it also comes in a bigger version the BD 790i both are AMD ryzen CPU based and they also have the mini Forum AR 9900i which is an Intel based main board which probably has a bit more performance but it's also a bit more expensive just a get it right out of the way this video is not sponsored by mini Forum in any way I totally paid for this product myself because I wanted to test it and I want to work on a new home lab project with it so just in case anyone is confused here but you can definitely see why this product caught my attention because if we take a closer look at the stats here you can see that the BD 770i comes with an AMD ryzen 7 CPU more specifically the 7745 HX which is actually more a laptop CPU that comes with 8 Cs and 16 Frets and the bigger model even features a more powerful CPU the 7945 HX this is a pretty powerful machine and because laptop based CPUs are usually built with a more power efficiency focus in mind I was really excited to see so how well it performs and how much power it consumes especially when it's on idle which is very important for us homelet people but also apart from the CPU all the other components and interfaces are also very much highend as you can see it is completely PCI 5.0 ready it has a full x16 slot to put in a graphics card or any additional pcie controller card for storage or networking it has two nvme slots also both PCI 5 and it even comes with a network interface that has 2.5 GB ethernet on board it even has a Wi-Fi card built in so it comes with an external Wi-Fi antennas also pretty amazing and also Al USB 3.2 on board HDMI display port USBC what you would typically expect from a modern main board the entire test setup that I've used consists of the Mis Forum main board of course two ddr5 s o memory modules from crucial each has 16 GB so I've got 32 GB in total a 1 TB nvme drive for storage which is the crucial P3 actually I also wanted to test it with a dual 10 GB SFP plus PCI card but yeah I haven't done that yet maybe I'll do that next week one thing that I just recently bought especially just for this one project was this open air bench frame where you can mount any ITX size main board together with a regular PSU which I've got from be quiet by the way and the reason why I've got this additional frame was I wanted to test this main board without having to put it in a real computer case because when you like to change something in a test setup you don't want to get it in and out of the case all the time yeah I'm a lazy dude I know this don't tell me but yeah this probably was the best decision that I've made because with this ITX mainboard frame it is super simple and easy to test and try out new computer components of course you need to assemble it first but it is very well described in the manual what you have to do by the way if you want to have a full list of all the components I've used for this build or you generally want to find out what else I'm running in my home lab then check out my kit page so here you will find everything from from the ITX mainboard frame that I'm using for testing this as well as the minis Forum BD 770i as well as all the other components and you get direct links to buy it on Amazon or any other shops so check out my kit page follow me there you will find a link in the description down below but yeah that's how I've tested this main board as for the operating system I probably went a completely different route than you would expect because I've installed the proxmox ISO on this RB which is a Debian based Linux Dro with the proxmox virtual environment that I'm using to run all my virtual machines in my home lab you know this pretty well I suppose but one might ask so why did I even run this instead of a Windows or another Linux Dro well the simple reason is because I'm going to install a new proxmox setup next week so I'm aiming to renite this minis Forum server here with my current proxo server as a secondary note and I was hoping that the minis Forum would be a bit more power efficient than my current server so I could easily just run this year 24/7 while only turning on the secondary node when I really need it that's the whole reason why I'm doing it in the first place but of course there are also some other benefits to this Choice as proxmox doesn't have a graphical user interface so hence the performance testing should be pretty much accurate and more realistic to if you really want to use it as a Home Server it wouldn't make much sense to test it with another system that is not Linux or has a desktop right the only problem I got with this was that I had an issue with the internal Wi-Fi network C of the minus Forum on proxmox because proxmox thought first that the Wi-Fi card would be the primary network adapter and for some reason it couldn't bring up the interface as the Wi-Fi adapter was the only member of the virtual Bridge interface so I needed to change this manually in the CLI in the network configuration files of prox boox it wasn't a big deal but yeah that gave me a bit of a headache once I try to connect it to my network but apart from this problem proxmox runs incredibly well on this Hardware it is super fast and I was really excited about the performance testing now the next question though was how do I do those performance tests honestly I'm not really good at Hardware reviews yeah I don't know any of those tools or programs that typical review channels use to measure performance or anything like this but it turned out it is super simple even on Linux first I executed the PVE perf command which is a proxmox utility to do a very rough performance test from what I've read it is not super meaningful what you get out but it can give you some interesting metrics such as the CPO BOGO mips which is a simple Benchmark used in the Linux kernel or the regular Expressions per second which indicates the performance at little now these stats were surprisingly pretty similar on the minis Forum from what I've seen on my current produ box server so next I I wanted to know what are the stats for commonly used performance benchmarking tools such as geekbench and since proxmox is actually just a Debian based Linux drro you can very easily install any additional program on the CLI such as geekbench as well and this for example here is the geekbench result of the minis Forum as you can see those numbers are very close to what we have seen on their homepage and since I didn't use geekbench before to be honest I had no idea what those numbers mean but because they are very much close to what we have seen on the homepage I was expecting to see those results so I guess I've done the test right and of course I wanted to know what the stats mean in comparison to my current proxmark server so I've simply just executed geekbench on my current system as well which is an Intel Core i7 12,700 with 12 course and 20 threats so you should actually expect a bit higher stats but surprisingly as you can see the single core performance is even lower though it really didn't make much of a difference here compared to the AMD ryzen on the minis forum and that did surpris me no I knew that the Intel i7 wasn't the fastest CPU anyway but to see it fall behind against an 8 cor and 16 Frets laptop cvu from AMD that is indeed pretty impressive I mean for the AMD of course but that tells me that this Mi for main board can totally run anything you thr it yeah if you want to run 10 20 any virtual machines all at the same time on this thing no problem however the higher the geekbench score that doesn't necessarily mean that better the Home Server because as you might know in a home lab we usually tend to run our systems all day all night so they are always turned on and do something but not necessarily High CPU intensive tasks so the more interesting question for me was if the performance on this minis Forum AMD CPU is so close to my Intel CPU on my current system would it then have a similar power consumption because my in 12,700 consumes somewhat around 40 Watts on idle which is not bad but it can go high over 100 Watts when it is really Under full load would that be the same on the mini Forum with the AMD 7745 a powerful laptop CPU since laptop CPUs tend to be a bit more power efficient than regular desktop CPUs I was super interested in this metric and I can tell you I was really surprised to see that the mini Forum with that exact configuration I've got consumes around 16 to 17 Watts on idle which is super low I mean this is similar to like three Raspberry Pi or three zema Bots but of course this CPU is much much faster than any of those smaller machines I've also done a stress test on all 16 CPU Frets with a program on proxo called stress and when the CPU is under heavy load so it's really at 100% busy it first boosts up to 110 Watts but then it goes down to about 85 86 where it stayed until I turned off the stress test and then it went immediately back down to the idle power consumption of 167 Watts so as a conclusion if I really compare this minis Forum that I originally bought just because I wanted to have a smaller not so power hungry machine to my current Intel CPU based proxmox is not only much much more power efficient no it is also equally fast and that probably should answer your question if this is really the perfect main board for a New Home Server in my opinion absolutely because you get a very powerful main board with all the modern interfaces that is completely silent for a very fair price and there are just a few things that I wish this thing would have first additional data ports or maybe a secondary pcie slot so I could really use this for storage builds or just generally increase the storage on their device however I've also seen it could be possible if you're not really using the envme cooler you could also add an nvme to SATA controller port and then you could in theory use the first nvme slot for an internal drive and the secondary one for connecting additional SATA drives of course I also want to test the 10 GB SFP Plus network card on this device in the future and what it means in terms of consumption but all that I will let you know once I got this thing into my new server case and connected it as an additional node to my new proxx cluster oh guys I really can't wait to play around with all this I'm super excited about it but yeah that's it about the minis Forum so please tell me what do you think about this device would you want to see future test videos for me like this really I want to know because I think I'm a terrible reviewer I'm not that good when it comes to Hardware stuff in it actually but maybe you find this super are valuable so just let me know and I might do future test videos and as always thanks everybody for watching if you want to support my mission creating all these free tutorials and tag videos for you consider joining our community on patreon that would be super cool and yeah let's catch up next week thanks everybody for watching bye-bye

Channel: Christian Lempa

Views: 74,961

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Id: SDXfkmJ9Y00

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2024