This mainboard is PERFECT for Home Servers // Minisforum BD770i
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In this video, I will be reviewing the MinisForum BD770i, a mini ITX mainboard with a powerful pre-installed AMD Ryzen CPU. It offers great power and efficiency at a fair price! Also stay tuned for my upcoming project using this mainboard!
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Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
02:11 Minisforum BD770i overview
04:37 My test setup
06:18 Installing the OS
08:10 Performance Testing
10:33 Efficiency Testing
12:18 Final thoughts
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Holy mother of tech! I bought the exact same model and was hoping for someone like you to review for homelab!!! Love your videos btw! They are at such a good pace and don't worry about quality of your videos as they are more than enough. I hope the community for your channel grows as I've benefited from your channel ever since I got hooked onto homelabbing! Cheers to more tutorials from ya and can't wait to learn more from you!
Haha amazing! :D Thank you so much
Please slap 200% tariff on China goods. 🤣🤣🤣
I liked the video. I would be interested in seeing more similar content on your channel. Thank you Christian for your work!
Awesome, thanks for the demo and info, have a great day
Thanks, you too!
This is great! I think a video about "low power lab" challenge would be a cool idea, with this minis forum as a Virtual host and maybe an arm NAS, arm backup server etc etc
Thank you Christian for great review of this hardware, please make more videos about further testing different configurations and performance !!!
Thank you buddy! Maybe I'll do that :)
awesome thanks for reviewing this
Thank's for watching :D
super nice. I recently moved my main server to MinisForum UM790 Pro Ryzen 9 7940HS with 96GB of RAM and 2x2TB NVMe. As my main server it consumes in average 30W (average of 24h). I did not go for mainboard because all my storage in on separte TrueNAS server. As secondary server I deployed similar but smaller machine - MinisForum Venus UM773 Lite Ryzen 7 7735HS - and this one consumes only 8W on 24h average - mainly beacuse it is... always idle and only ready to take over when the main one dies.
Nice board. Looking forward to your 10Gb testing..
Please do some more videos on this, would love to see external JBOD connected to it using PCIe ports.
7945hx is almost in the same league as 13900k which is mind boggling. I wish we could have 7945hx3d on mini PCs. We can create our own mini pc with these boards though :p
Not only that, the 7945HX is the most powerfull mobile chip and is more efficient than intel alternative.
Very good video, well explained so i could keep up.
Thx!
Great video, thank you!!
Thanks for watching 🫡
Love it, gonna get 3 of these for the house then :D
:D
Thanks Christian.
Looking forward to see the board in the server case...
Stay tuned! Video is almost finished and ready for next week ;)
Hi) Great content!
Thanks!
Looks nice I’m waiting a bit for the ryzen 8700ge or the laptop equivalent just so I can use the igpu performance for av1 transcoding/some light local gaming connected to the tv with sunshine/moonlight
Great review as always! One thing holding me back on buying is the lack of a NPU.
Thank you! :D
I'm looking at both the Minisforum BD770i and the Minisforum MS-01 , it would have been nice if it had some usb 4 port or sata , but I think it may just be to do with pcie lanes ? .
😂I like the frame! That is really a useful idea!
It's amazing!
Can you replace the WiFi card for a PCIe adapter to add something else? E.g. a second HBA with already one in the 16x slot.
Interesting video. It would be nice if you could recommend a case and a power supply as well
Seasonic fanless? Expensive but silent. Running one since 2014 and a newer one since 2017 in another box.
Thanks for mentioning current price. ❤
np :)
Great review! How about upgradability? What if you want to upgrade the SSD, RAM or CPU? Or how long do you envision it will run before having to upgrade?
Thanks! You can easily upgrade NVMEs or RAM, but not the CPU
Amazing video Christian! I have been thinking of building a home server. Would you recommend a power supply that can go with this board? Thanks~
Any regular ATX will do, I'm using bequiet ones, cuz they're amazing ;)
I got Minisforum BD790i (the 7945HX) board with Crucial RAM 96GB Kit + M.2 NGFF PCIe B M Key 10 Gigabit RJ45 LAN + LSI 9201-16I SAS 2116 an result was a monster (mini)PC capable of Proxmox/Unraid/TrueNAS. This is one of the best power efficient server I have in my homelab. Probably i'll get JMT PCI-E 4.0 x16 1 to 2 Expansion Card to split the PCI in 2 (bios permits) and expand the tests with this beast :D
Has it biofication support? Or only 8x8?
@@piterbrown1503 has 8x8 or 4x4x4x4
What about the power consummption? As Christian showed the BD770i consumes less than 20W on idle
@@piterbrown1503All modes
@@MightyMauz very cool on website is 64gb support only? So you use 96Gb?
I am thinking about getting 3 of these boards and run a proxmox cluster with ceph storage, the 2.5 gig nic would be for management add 10gig SPF+ card would be used for the ceph communications. I would love to see how you make out with the SPF+ install. Keep up the good work!
Thanks! I'll do :)
very nice .... I have one of these ==> four sata drives via an m.2 sata adaptor and 5 nvme drives; one in slot 1, then 4 in a quad nvme pcie expansion card. absolutely. very interesting small package !
Can you tune it with powertop as much as possible in TrueNAS-Scale and or Proxmox? Any kernel errors?
Its really THE PERFECT BOARD for home server. You can virtualize everything, NAS (with sata adapter), entire homelab, even OPNSense router with 2 SPF+ NICs. Christian, did you tested PCI-E passthrough on it? My plan is: 1. Buy one of these beauties. 2. Get setup 1 NVME + Sata adapter or even 2 sata adapters as I dont really need NVME drive in homelab server and then I can have more drives. 3. Rebuild current Proxmox setup on it so: all my vms and my ZFS NAS setup (which is based on proxmox itself, no TrueNAS virtualizing etc + frontend in LXC container). 4. Virtualiaze OPNSense with dual SFP+ NICs with passthrough directly + bridge virtual adapter for proxmox and its VMs 5. Virtualize Access Point by passthrough WIFI adapter to OpenWRT machine. Perfect solution ♥ One more question: Does this motherboard supprots pci-e x16 splitting? some of motherboards have this ability so you can find adapter to split x16 slot into 4 x4 separated slots
Yes it supports PCI splitting (bifurcation). It requires newest BIOS.
Could you maybe create a video about hypervisor (like proxmox) to passthrough Graphic card so you can see on your monitors a VM directly when you start the server ?
Reminds me of an episode of ‘Sprockets’. 😉
This is nice! I would run with with Proxmox too. I wonder how it works sharing or passing thru iGPU vs Intel.
Please, add a av1 encoding test on the 780m. It would be the perfect final point for this mobo
@christianlempa Vice video, i would be interested if it is possible to split the PCI-E x16 slot with a PCI-E splitter into, for example 2x PCI-E x8 and if this is supported by the BOIS. Perhaps you would be interested in trying this out
Ye you can split it (bifurcation)
@@pabloszi so this is supported by the Minisforum Bios that you can split the x16, that's very cool.
Checked it out. All models sold out in UK store already.
Check out my kit page, there's a link to amazon ;)
Sexy mainboard ! Congrats for this nice video Christian.
Thank you bro!
Nice board, it was just a bit to expensive for me yet...and currently it is sold out 🙂 Does the PCIe slot support Bifurcation? Than it would be easily possible to add another 4 SSDs to build a nice all Flash NAS.
Check out my kit page, you'll find a link to buy it on amazon ;) I haven't tested PCI bitfurcation, but people say it's possible with the latest BIOS update
Does the 16x slot support bifurcation in 2x8 or 4x4 or 8 and 2x4? The intel variant has support for 4 SSDs. Worth checking out too!
Yes it does. I have the BD770i with 4xM.2 bifurcation card and NVME/SATA M.2 on it and it works very good as NAS running Proxmox as well :)
Dose this have AXV support?
Great opportunity for a Homelab. I think I need to replace my very old and power hungry former professional server hardware. Are there any plans for a remote management like ILO or similar? I think the Intel version has something like intel vPro with integrated remote management, right? I am looking forward for you new setup and some more interesting videos! Thank you and happy labbing :)
I haven't looked into remote management, yet :/
Would be great if the x16 pcie slot supported bifurcation into 8/4/4 or 4/4/4/4.
I would by it if it had 10gbe and more sata ports and just one m.2. It would be perfect for a Jellyfin server, a nas for copying files, and the gpu slot would be free for any LLMs you want to try with huggingface. And you could setup zfs with 4 sata ports. I could put that into my thorzone sff pc cases cuz the spines in the pc cases can accommodate large gpu height and small cpu height.
It is possible to add 10 gbe card and hba card together in way that in first m.2 slot you put OS drive , in second m.2 slot you put m.2 to pci adapter for nic and to x16 slot hba card. You can even use sas eparnder card - it only needs power, not pci lanes - so you can have as many last ports as you want.
This is great, i cant tell but is the IO plate standard size? as in will fit a standard case?
It does fit into my server case 🥳
I'm interested in this, but no one has been able to provide to me the height of the heatsink that is included. Size limitations so would be helpful to know before dropping $500+ on it
Will certainly be picking one ☝️ of these up
👍
Good review actually - because you do it differently and kind of more like what I would do as I don’t care about game performance so much. Do more !
Thank you! Maybe I'll do :)
What are you using for the power and reset buttons?
The buttons are part of the Benchframe I got
Maybe a test build with the m.2 SATA set up?
Follow up for the bifurcation question that was confirmed. How to mount cards on some bifurcation contraption in a normal big tower in the normal slots?
Perfect Homelab Server: MS-01 from Minisforum My own setup is about 80 W on idle (no, sadly not the MS-01), 3 node Proxmox cluster with POE switch and WiFi AP. If you are going for two Proxmox nodes, you may need a quorum instance. Especially if you want one node shut down most of the time.
That's also a nice one! But I don't have a current project I'd like to use it for
Tempting, I also want to replace an older server of mine. Thanks for the video
Go for it! :)
It catches my attention that it uses passive cooling for the CPU and active cooling for the NVME.
Just ordered the BD790i. Double the core count for 130€ more was still a steal in my opinion. I can't decide on the proper SSD and case though 😕 Will definitely be running in Raid 1, and my plan is to put it behind a UPS, so I figured I could get away with consumer grade M.2 SSDs.
Hi there, also working on a home server project with the bd770i. A question: Did you update the bios, yet? It brings bifurcation to the table.
I haven't tried it, yet.
@@christianlempa I am still figuring out how to update that bios without an windows installation (will probably just put a win2go on a stick if i cant find something usefull)
There is always this triflecta, huh. This sounds great, but I also want ECC and my case does not allow for a full fledge graphics card. The problem is that only the Ryzen PRO G series is both APU and compatible with ECC. It seems that with this chip, one can use ECC, but then one needs some sort of external graphics card to be able to use this (at least to install everything, maybe can be run then headless? I plan to access to it remotely only). Maybe there is a way to have a very cheap videocard with low-profile in the PCI (my case only allow for low profile PCIs, althought it allows for ATX format, so it is quite big in the other two directions), althought I would have preferred to use it for a 10gb. Any recommendation on how to solve this connundrum?
Cool Mainboard. Show us how you configure your cluster and what difficulties you had. Can it raid?
I'll do :D
@@christianlempa Mega! Freu mich drauf! :)
That's a nice board. Wouldn't lack of QuickSync support for hardware transcoding keep it form being the "ultimate" server board though? Pity there are seemingly no SATA ports. You'd have to use some kind of M.2 to 10G adapter and a LSI SAS card to use it for storage.
Keep in mind, we're talking about "Home" Servers here ;)
@@christianlempa Yeah. But I think about 8 Iron Wolf Pro drives in a Zpool will do almost 10G if I did my math right. At the very least, it should do WAY more than 2.5G. I think if you already had a TrueNAS Scale server for storage and you used this one for Proxmox along with say that Synology PCIe card that adds 10G and 2 NVMe drives, it would be great.
I feel like a mini ITX system with a laptop class processor should go even lower in idle power, tho I'm not sure how powertop/C-state works with AMD system as my system is Intel and I used Intel chips for its quicksync
What did you use as a PSU?
@christianlempa I'm running truenas scale on it and it draws 70watts average... I'm running 12 apps by truecharts and when my 4 x 3,5 hdds are not connected it still consumes 50 watts. Do you have any suggestions what i have to check in order to get a better idle power consumption?
Are you running the motherboard without a cpu fan? Other videos i have seen people are installing fairly large fan on top of the cpu heatsink. cons for homelab - no ipmi or vpro. only 1 ethernet. You could probably swap the wifi card for a 2 port sata card if needed or a 2nd nic.
I'm running it without the fan, I want to test if it works during summer, when it really gets hot :D So... we'll see
IIRC, I think that this board maxes out at 64 GB of RAM. I could be wrong, but I think that's what I remember. I mention this because if you are going to try to run 20 VMs on it, then each VM will barely get 3 GB of RAM. The lack of a second RJ45 NIC also makes it a no-go for me as well.
Please do a follow up on the option of using the 2nd M.2 Slot for this M.2 to SATA adapter. I could provide you with one.
Until now I haven't planned to add more hard drives to the server :/
Is it possible to expand this board with a GPU for AI and their LLMs?
Thoughts about a real case for this beastie?
what i would like to know if how other people run these things because for example in my home server i need a HBA, GPU and NIC and thats at minimum 3x pcie slots...
pls make video how to connect u.2 drives to mini pc like this.
Would it be more power efficient with a small 12v mini-itx PSU?
No idea :/
I was actually looking at getting this mainboard but wasn't sure if Proxmox and virtualization would work.
It does well :D
@christianlempa, does the PCIe X16 port support PCIe bifurcation like 4x4x4x4x?
No idea, haven't tested it yet
One more thing. Any thoughts about the quality of power delivery, capacitors etc. I have no idea about these kinds of things but leaking capacitors after 7 years usage is not something I want.
Idk 🤷
I bought protectli device. It has no fan but I added cpu fan because that thing needs it 100%
I have same BD770I and it failed as homelab server: 1) GPU in x16 5.0 can run on 1.0 x8 (my Nvidia Tesla P4 suppose to run on 3.0 x16) and can be difficult with other proffesional GPUs for ML. Nvidia 40x0 GPUs run on 3.0 x16 without bios update. current 1.05 fix some issues with 40x0 cards. AMD cards worked ok. But boards ship with 1.02, so update bios 2) GPU or any card in x16 mess up PCIe addressing. Tested with sata controllers, nvme x4 adapters, network cards. I installed GPU after initial install, it mess up pcie address binding on Linux (device names based on addressing and as result a lot of configs failed). 3) Proxmox iGPU passthrough is complicated. You need to dump iGPU bios and load it on VM config, without board passthrough iGPU but vm os cant intstall drivers. 4) Main issue is M2 slot.... controllers. I get x6 sata controller. It detected by OS but it's bios don't load propertly. You will not be able to use sata drives to boot (controllers bios dont boot with mb bios). OS don't init controller after because controller bios don't init before OS boot. As result I tried several controllers based on ASMedia chipsets (1096, 1166) it is on 90% all m2 sata controllers. I tried LSI HBA cards through m2 to pcie x4 adapters, same story. Minisforum support cant solve issue. No bios options, no fw update. 5) WIFI looks good on paper, but card is so slow on init that linux failed on timeout waiting. Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 init almost instantly. 6) Funny sensor reporting.... OS cant get CPU temp and I cant adjust CPU, SYS1, SYS2 pwm fans. It can be monitored inside bios, but Proxmox cant monitor it. For fans you can setup adjustments based on CPU temp. but if is a case fun and they fired up than cpu temp rise. 7) Options to run it without CPU fan is very limited. Don't load it. Don't use iGPU. Don't load NVME a lot if you choose to passive cool NVME drives. May be if your case provide air flow and you don't load it, than may be you can run it in silence. Some users report issues with thermo paste applications so they get issues without any load.... 8) 610M RDNA2 iGPU is so slow and I dont understand why there are no options with 7x0M RDNA3, a lot of minipc's already have it. So my small NAS with Nvidia GPU for ML and LLM project failed. No drives connected and GPU run so slow that ML almost non viable (i cant load GPU more than 20% of computational capacity). If you can push Minisforum to make some fixes to bios or some other it will be great for all users.
Hey hey, what was the decision making process in this one? Im concidering buying MS-01 from minisforum, which fits in the same class for workstation / homeserver, but is in case already. Did you needed / wanted to build in your own case or mabye add beefy GPU? If you can write me up quickly, thx :)
I just wanted to build a new "rack servers" :) But yeah, the MS-01 seems interesting as well!
Your Intel based server probably has about 10-15W more power draw based on having quadruple the memory of what you put on the Minisforum system.
what we all want to know is can you do bifurcation? Split the 16x slot into two 8x? Slap a GPU and 10gbe NIC in there?
Yes you can. Newest BIOS is required
00:20 "Could this be the perfect homeserver main board?" My answer, "Does it support ECC?"
Good enough for TV streams & IOT crap, but you're right that I wouldn't rely on these for semi-pro "homelab" stuff.
Nice Board .... I wish it had 2 NIC's and definitely IPMI port.
intel one is better for proxmox you get 4 nvme slots and more cores if you run the commands to properly run efficient cores. this is my second remark as i used it!
Could you please test how it works with Plex? This board looks great for a homeserver/NAS.
Would be an instant buy if it came with dual 2.5 Gbps NICs
what kind of rackmount case would you recommend for this?
You can see it in the next video ;)
@@christianlempa how sneaky 😛
I got 2 of them and 2 of the Intel version both are awesome I should make a video in it and dude it's pretty good!! Also if you run it with rx7600 or rx7600xt or even 4060 or 4060ti dude I am not hitting more then 100w power unless I got crazy that's max 110w
I would love to see this vs the ma-01 from the same company that has a i9 13900
I second that. The MS-01 looks very interesting. Christian, please review it with Proxmox!
For $400 that honestly looks like a steal. Main thing Im curious of is what the maximum amount of RAM it supports. My current proxmox server is running some much older CPU's but 128 GB of ram that is about 85-90% used.
64GB is the max supported amount.
I am struggling with the 0 sata interface and how it could make it a good home server board
As Christian said you can put in m.2 slot m.2 to sata card (it uses ASM 1166 chip) and you gain 6 sata ports or you put HBA card - 8/16/24 sata ports version in x16 pci slot.
You can put bifurcation card (4x M.2 with 4 PCI lanes each) and install on it eg. two M.2 SATA adapters (6 SATA ports each - 12 all together) + 2 additional NVME drives :) or any combination. So, up to 24 SATA port you can have :) I tested it in my home lab. It works pretty well and is still power efficient - MB of course ;)
@@pabloszi Using the PCIE port for a bifurcation card means you can't have a 10GBe card. Usinge a 6x sata adapter on one of the M.2 slot means that you can't have a RAID-1 for your NVME cache drive. I see your point and I am happy that it works for you but my home server needs to have 10GBe, 2 NVME for cache and 6 hard drives minimum.
@@mathieugoy2236 sure you can't have both. But who said that good *HOME SERVER* have to have 10G? Especially if you don't have Internet connection with 10G? ISP rarely give you more than 1G for HOME users - especially in my country. I use 2,5G internally and 1G for ISP, so for me built-in ethernet port is more than enough. What kind of data do you transfer at HOME with 10G? More important for me is to have SATA for NAS.
ECC support in CPU and BIOS?
no
If the board supported error correcting memory I'd buy 3 of them, but at least according to Minisforum Support it does not :( The CPU supports it in theory and there are SO-DIMM unbuffered ECC modules, but the mainboard needs to have the traces for it and the BIOS needs to support it, too :/
Why did you buy the AMD and not the Intel version? Or Eventually the MS-01?
Because it was cheaper :) And I wanted to see how the Ryzen performs in idle power usage
When I looked at the thumbnail I thought it has 8x QSFP ports till I figured that it's cooling holes 😂
Lol :D
Am I being paranoid? Are there any risks in buying these composite/integrated HK/China-mainland systems? In terms of pre-installed stuff on the firmware, I mean.
Can the x16 slot be bifurcated into two x8 or four x4?
I personally haven't tested it but some say it's possible with a BIOS update
Yes bifurication is supported.. tested it myself
16W seems high at idle. AMD is generally worse at idle than Intel, but I wonder if perhaps P-states aren't properly implemented, or maybe they weren't configured right in BIOS.
I tested plenty of MB and miniPCs and AMD always won power consumption competition. Except N100 CPU - which is very power efficient but also very weak...
Will this install in Mini ITX cases?
Yes
The issue is the lack of BIOS updates/BIOS stability. It's a really cool product, but I'd only buy it if a Taiwanese vendor like Asus, Gigabyte, ASrock Rack etc release it. 😬
Not exactly the same but Asus recently launched ROG NUC mini PCs.
ASROCK Jupiter B660
@@jabkowythat is not a board to easily stick a PCIe card in the board in a bigger case . Project tiny mini micro by serve the home has a series on similar mini PCs by HP, Dell and Lenovo
I have an older ASUS Z87-a board here with very unstable power management. It crashes when messing with powertop settings in TrueNAS. So Taiwanese brands are no guarantee. Not sure about the newer Asus stuff, but we had some "fun" with more recent MSI stuff.
go for minisforum page. In the meantime they released 3 version of new BIOS for this board...
Interesting board. But no SATA ports makes its a hard pass for those wanting to use this as a NAS. You could make it work with a HBA card. But then you give up the single PCIe slot for a GPU. The Intel version of this board would probably work better for a NAS - since it will have quicksync for transcoding. So the PCIe slot can be used for an HBA card.
I think it still gives you some options as you could use the 2nd nvme slot for nvme->sata controller and split the x16 into x8x8
ECC?
Can it run Nutanix?