CWWK i3-N305 NAS mini-ITX board

I’ve been keeping an eye for a while on new boards based on the Intel N305. I’m a great fan of the Alder Lake N100, so a similarly low-powered offering with double the core count is too good to pass up. Recently this popped up on AliExpress:

CWWK 12th Generation I3-N305 N100 2 Intel I226-V 2.5G NAS Motherboard 6 SATA3.0 6-disk Soft Router 1*DDR5 4800MHZ Firewall

My what a lot of words! Since I already have the CWWK “Crazy” N100 mini-computer, I obviously hit buy on this near instantly. Not long (and one customs charge) after, this turned up on my doorstep:

I love this – it’s my kinda tech. You get a manual … for the cooler, but not for the motherboard. The processor is hidden under a shiny copper block. You get two NVMe ports, 1 PCIe and a bunch of SATA if that’s your thing.

First challenge – mount the cooler. This is actually not very obvious, I think CWWK bundled this without a lot of thought. It does fit but only really one way around, because the cooler fouls on some capacitors or blocks the power header in other orientations, and you have to figure that for yourself.

Even the way around that it does fit it’s almost touching a bunch of capacitors, so I added some tape to insulate. Next up add some insulating pads to the back of the board and install the cooler. There is some thermal paste supplied, which is a nice touch.

There’s a nifty little tool supplied to help you tighten the nuts. As there’s no metal back-plate here it’s best not to tighten these fully as it bends the board. Thermals aren’t a huge issue for this processor and there is a massive contact surface to the copper spreader anyway, so really not an issue.

With the cooler installed, I added a picoPSU and a 32Gb DDR5 stick.

Popping a 2Tb NVMe drive in and connecting up my PiKVM, I’m ready for a headless install:

First boot takes a loooooong time. So much so I thought the board was DOA, but it turns out it’s normal. When you chuck in new memory or reset the CMOS there is a fairly extensive memory training period that takes 2-3 minutes with nothing on the screen. Don’t panic! Eventually we get into the BIOS:

Now we’re ready for OS install!