ASROCK DeskMini X300w kits

[Pvee]

I really like these kits. I have built computers since around 1985 or so. But A couple years ago I got interested in building or assembling small computers.
Started assembling Intel NUC's. Found some good uses for them. At Church they drive a couple bulletin board Monitors in the foyer and are useful for classroom's were you need a pc for demo's, teaching etc..

A couple years ago I discovered the Asrock desk mini's, AM4 versions. For a PC with a 4X8 inch footprint they can pack a lot of power and storage.
They support a M.2 nvme boot drive and have room for two 2.5 inch drives behind the motherboard. I started out putting Ryzen 5 2400g and 5-3400G cpu's (apu"s) in them.. One location needed a small pc for backroom support of a business. They were happy with an Athlon 3000G four core cpu in theirs. One person who is a crypto coin miner has four of them for personal use and supporting roles in the mining business.

For my personal use, the last six I built I use at home for our main PC's or hot spares in a backup role. Had to put a Notchua cpu cooer in one due to the Ryzen 7 5700g being in that one.
Most of them have ryzen 5 5600G 6 core/12 thread cpu's in them. I have one with a Ryzen 7 5700G, 8 core 16 thread cpu. That cpu scores around 23000-24000 on passmark.
At first I worried about reliability but so far, no failures. They are limited in the graphics area because you have to use an APU, a cpu with graphics on board but that has not been an issue for us at all..
I'm not a gamer, but I do run MS flight simulator, because I ran a USAF flight simulator many years ago. and that runs fine.

Mine are all at the 1.70 bios level and they all support windows 11 with a cpu on the official win-11 approved list.
Pete

 

[freakdiablo]

Yeah, I haven't used the Asrock units but grabbed a Celeron based Asus unit about a year ago, and grabbed a Zotac bookshelf PC (a NUC before NUCs were a thing) back in college.

How are the thermals on the Asrocks? My Asus seems to go into thermal throttle 5-10 minutes of moderate continuous load.

 

[Pvee]

The little fan that comes with it works ok with the ryzen 5 2400G and 3400G. it's noisy under load but I have run a couple of them on silent mode with a Ryzen 5 5600G that's used for general every day computing. With the Ryzen 7 5700G I recommend installing the Noctua- L9 ah-am4, very quiet under load. I also used that cooler in one with a ryzen 5 5600g because the fan that came with the Asrock mini was rattling under load.

 

[Woomack]

If you don't need thunderbolt and need higher performance then it's better to just build small ITX PC yourself. Something like new Core i5/Ryzen 5 and Noctua NH-L9x is quiet and doesn't throttle. Case like InWin Chopin or similar with built-in PSU (I hate external PSUs as they make small PC significantly larger than expected).
The mentioned thunderbolt controller is usually only available on very expensive motherboards and it's also in nearly every Intel NUC, but almost never on other brand small PCs.

 

[Pvee]

Yes, I agree. I built several itx pc's during the last three years also. thanks for the info...

 

[freakdiablo]

Well, I'll admit I jumped on one.



Supposedly this model can support Cezanne CPUs.

The little Asus NUC I mentioned IMO isn't good for much, so I'll strip the RAM and NVMe drive to build this unit out. May even replace the NAS in my sig as I only use it for media streaming these days.