Trying to build a NAS, but i’m stuck between a BD790i vs 8700G on an ASROCK board. I like the idea of the 8700G just because it’s on an asrock which i do know and trust, vs I’ve never touched anything by minisforum before.
The workload will be basic things like 4k transcoding, AI Chatbot, Minecraft Modded Servers, and some docker containers.
Anyone have any thoughts on it?
I think the obvious answer here is actually a question. Do you want to upgrade the CPU in the future?
If yes, go for the 8700G+ASRock mobo.
And yeah, Minisforum seems to be a fine company, Wendell seems to like them.
I’d lean towards the Asrock + some CPU option. Future upgrade potential, and more likely to have stuff on hand for RMA if you should need it.
Had a recent experience with one of their mini PCs that ended up taking ~2 months before the replacement turned up. Minisforum did make it right, in the end, but if it’s in any way a thing where someone will be angry at you about downtime? 
Something to keep in mind.
I suppose? I guess that is something i need to think about more as a thing.
Hmm, that was one of the things i was worried about yea. And fair point on the RMA thing.
Kk, think i’ma go with the 8700G, unless someone has a better recommendation. I was more just worried about the fact i’d be losing practically half as many cores.
That said though, going this route means i will be able to free up the PCIE slot, because the BD790 doesn’t have any SATA ports, so id have to buy a PCIE SATA card.
There are m.2->SATA port adapters that you could use with the BD790 to add them back and keep the PCIE x16 slot open for other things. Just have to be mindful of the fan clearance and appropriate cooling for the other SSD slot.
Recent thread that discusses using some of those (via a carrier card and bifurcation, but not needed here):
unfortunately the BD790i seems to have a custom cooler and bracket mounts which covers the M.2 slots. I wouldn’t have a way of plugging in the m.2 > SATA cards. Unless i Jerryrigged some weird cooler setup.
To my eye at least, the outermost m.2 slot wouldn’t be covered by the fan that one would put on the CPU’s heatsink. So a normal m.2 ssd could go on the inner one and probably get some benefit from the CPU cooler’s fan since it overhangs slightly… The big brick heatsink+fan for the m.2 is likely for a dual pcie 5.0 x4 SSD setup, slower drives tend not to need that kind of cooling. Depends on storage needs and how much wackiness one wants to try, though. 
Oh I was under the impression it was all one chunk. Hmm…
Oh well, already chose the 8700G lol. Still, the minisforum may have been better deal then in the long term. Oh well.
I’d have gone with the 8700G / ASRock board too… (my ~3 years old media NAS is an ASRock B550M Pro with a 5600G Pro (and 64 GBs of ECC) running TrueNAS SCALE).
What ASRock board did you decide on?
From the posts here in the forum, I am inclined to think that a lot of Minisforum’s firmware is rough around the edges.
Unfortunately the ASRock board got returned. It had an old bios and the mobo I had didn’t have a flashback. So I ended up with an MSI B650I Edge. And I only got that because it was used and cheap, but seems to be working really well after having to do the BIOS flashback to update it for AM5 processors.