NAS CPU/Motherboard help

Shura · January 27, 2016

Hi, looking for help to narrow down parts, specifically motherboard and cpu for a new budget ITX nas build; I was initially planning on re-purposing an i7 950 and got help from this forums regarding concerns but that build didn't happen so looking into a new one now. This time I want to build a small, low power quiet NAS and narrowed my decision down to three possible cpu/motherboards but can't seem to make the final decision, each has its own pros and cons.

1. Asrock Q1900-ITX - $122.99+tax

2. Asrock N3700-ITX - $159.99+tax

3. Athlon 5350 + Asrock ITX Board - $74.99 + $79.99

The 3 listed above are the 3 I'm considering, the Asrock Q1900-ITX is the oldest of the 3, it has a quad core running at 1.99GHz(Boost 2.4GHz) and a cpubench of 1895. The Asrock N3700-ITX is the newest, also a quad core running at 1.6GHz(Boost 2.4GHz) and a cpubench of 1867 and finally the Athlon 5350 is a quad core running at 2.1GHz with a CPUbench of 2584.

Initially I was gonna go with the 5350 since the cpu is upgradeable and had the strongest CPU but during CES few weeks ago AMD announced they would be switching all future processors to AM4 so not sure if we'll ever see a new CPU for AM1. Asrock Q1900 is cheaper than the N3700 while providing similar if not slightly better performance but is also 3 year old tech and the N3700 uses the latest tech from Intel for SoC but is slower and costs $35 more.

In case you are wondering why I'm even considering the Q1900 and N3700 when 5350 is more powerful, well it is because of emby media server; emby has a workaround that allows the use of Quick Sync on Intel CPUs, which basically allows the use of igpu during transcoding. From the results I have seen on the emby forums, on the Q1900 cpu usage went from 95%+ during 1080p transcoding all the way down to 60%. While there is no data for the N3700 since it is still pretty new, it has a much stronger IGPU compared to the Q1900, almost 3x stronger which brings me back to my initial problem, which of the 3 to go with. I'll be grateful for any help in narrowing down my choices, and open to new recommendations as long as it does not exceed $160 for cpu/mobo and it must be ITX

The NAS will be running Openmediavault, and will be used to backup data, run owncloud and as a media server; while most of my files are already encoded, I do need the system to be able to transcode 1-2 1080p streams if need be.

Thanks again and any help/input/feedback is appreciated