Reddit reviews ASRock Motherboard Micro Q1900M

I got this board to run java Minecraft just fine in 720p. Didn't get a chance to try 1080p though. Make surr to have plenty of ram though.

Baytrail systems are rated around 10W, and the J1900 is quad-core. That TDP wattage technically applies to the CPU, and not the board, so it'll be a bit higher. I'd recommend something like this. Spendy NUCs can be better, but the low-end dual-core Celerons are pretty much just rebadged Atoms.

Your biggest power consumption with a NAS could end up being the hard drives. If you're going to include multiple drives, it makes sense to get a system that lets you stuff them all inside a case. If you need lots of hard drives, an AMD Kabini might be a better approach, as they've got more ports for expansion. There's one board with 4 SATA ports. The system wattage is double, though.

Ich hab für sowas das board mit Ram bestückt und irgendein 80+ ATX Netzteil drangehängt: https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B00JO1DIIM?psc=1

Günstiger kommt man kaum zu CPU+Mainboard und die CPU braucht kaum Strom. Was soll noch neben NAS laufen? Sonst reicht ein alter 4GB DDR3 Riegel auch.

FYI, I'm planning on replacing / downgrading my own storage server with an ASRock Q1900M. It only costs $70 and can transcode 1x 1080p stream in case I need it but in general, I'm directly watching the videos since I have no bandwidth constraints (uncapped 30Mbps internet upload). The cpu only needs 10W and it really brings the total consumption down for a 24/7 system.

I bought one of these https://smile.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00JO1DIIM for my pfSense build. My battery backup shows a load around 7-10W. Seems impossibly low to me... might be worth your time.

This motherboard with embedded quad core is a good option for $70

http://www.amazon.com/ASRock-Q1900M-Motherboard-Micro/dp/B00JO1DIIM

Pair this with some ram, case, PSU, and an SSD. Total cost can be done for under $200.

In one of my HTPC's, I'm running a Pentium J1900 soldered to an ASRock Q1900M. The J1900 is a 10W chip. It works fine for Netflix, youtube, and watching steams from my networked TV tuner. I bought that board because it accepts full size desktop memory, which is what I had sitting around. I was pleasantly surprised when I noticed that it was also passively cooled.

My only complaint with the J1900 is that I can't seem to get Intel's drivers to let me adjust overscan on the TV.

You could also look at running something on AMD's AM1 platform. I built a small and cheap ESXi box with an ASRock AM1B and 25W Sempron 3850 for about $70. With a solid state drive, 16 GB of RAM, intel quad GigE card, and a crappy power supply, it's drawing about 30W while running.

For the same $70 of mobo+cpu cost, a J1900 offers better performance than a Sempron, but both are more than sufficient for what you're doing. AM1 motherboards and platforms are a bit nicer than what you'll get with a J1900, you could upgrade to a Athlon 5150 or 5350 if you needed more performance, and (strangely) AMD's Catalyst drivers seem more TV friendly than Intel's display drivers. The J1900 is a 10W part (15W less than AMD's AM1 chips), available passively cooled, and has excellent open source drivers for operating systems other than Windows.

I built my pfSense box around this motherboard.
AsRock Q1900M

Silent, but deadly. There really is no need for fans with this board, and power draw is minimal. 3 PCIe slots, so you can add as many NICs as you want.

There are also ITX versions of this board, if you don't need more then 2 NICs. AsRock Q1900-ITX This only has a PCIe 1x slot. Most dual port NIC add on cards are PCIe 4x.

Or, if you need a TON of NICs...Supermicro A1SRM-LN7F-2758

Huge difference. Primarily, J1900 is 64 bit, has more L2 cache and even supports virtualization. Here's more differences http://ark.intel.com/compare/78867,41411

I also saw AS Rock board for $70:

http://www.amazon.com/ASRock-Q1900M-Motherboard-Micro/dp/B00JO1DIIM

Be sure to get a good brick for it; you might get near peak load for it. What games do you want to emulate? If you aren't doing stuff like Wii or PS2 emulation, anything pre 2001 will run great on a fanless J1900 (or similar board) with your GT1030. Pretty much the same cost as getting everything else, (with some savings!). Also 8GB is more than enough for anything pre 2001 console like I mentioned. You can sell the other parts you don't need and the CPU to cover the cost of the board. Would this work for you maybe? What games do you wanna run?

(Some are ITX some aren't - poke around and see what you find)

Amazon(Intel):
https://www.amazon.com/ASRock-Q1900M-Motherboard-Micro/dp/B00JO1DIIM/

(AMD):
https://www.amazon.com/Biostar-Mini-DDR3-Motherboards-A68N-2100/dp/B00KXP4TR2

My experience using a Pi3 as a Kodi box have found that certain design decisions make it too weak and inflexible for the full-fledged media PC I want it to be. So I'm currently planning on building a small server to offload some of the tasks that the Pi is weak in (storing data, heavy network traffic, seeding various decentralized networks, etc.) and using the Pi as sort of a thin client. Hanging out on /r/homelab I've picked up on a few options for an x86 system I can use. x86 being more popular, I have more options, plus I can make better use of virtual machines and containers.

My current favorites are the Asrock Q1900M a $70 dual core processer with a 10W TDP or the Asrock J3455B-ITX, which may or may not be a refresh with a newer CPU architecture (thus higher IPC) but at the same price, same TDP, and roughly the same clock speed with twice the cores, its definitely tempting.

I would love to recomend smaller ARM boards, but I honestly know very little about them. Just don't forget that low-end x86 boards exist with low(ish) power usage exist. While more expensive up front, they do provide a lot more flexibility and expandibility if you end up going down the /r/homelab route with lots of self-hosted services.