PAST 30 DAYS

LOWEST PRICE

In Embedded Solutions

This is a great little board - the J5040 is not produced by ASRockRack, so I guess I get what I deserve. I'm using it as a small server motherboard running TrueNas with no issue. I know the requirements - must have your HDDs or SDDs ready to go, use a USB installer and immediately make one or two boot drives (my case mirrored), and max out the RAM. The way it is set up - only two storage drives are available, there is no easy way expand except for the puny PCIe 2 x1 on the board which gives me 2 more SATA links when I can afford them.There are a few RAID cards that will work with BSD and ASRock, but I'm running a PCIe 2.0 x 1 non-RAID card. I plan on upgrading to a full on RAID card down the roadk...You have to love this board - although it is only rated to 8 GB of DDR4 non-ECC, laptop sticks, it actually supports 32 GB (16 GB per slot) if you get the right DDR4 2400. Read up on it and try out the upgrade! The motherboard remains the bottleneck, not your RAM. Pros -- Great price when on sale - no need for CPU or Heatsink - all included!-- RAM capability greater than advertised! I'd have ignored this board if I believed their limits!-- USB 3.2 on board and with another connector - so welcome to 2021!-- ASRock dependability - built my system and put in wrong RAM - no screen!!! Realized the speed requirements (not 2666, but 2400) and put in 32 GB (2x16GB) DDR4 2400 and instant success! BIOS booted up!-- If I was using this for multiple screens, I guess I'd love the multiple screen interfaces, the decoding on the fly and so on, but I'm using it for NAS & Server function, not for individual usage. But it has that capability!