CHF138.–
Jonsbo N3
Product rating for Jonsbo N3
Very compact design with a critical flaw
This mini-itx chassis provides room for 8 disks in a very compact design.
It even has enough room for a medium-sized GPU (I used a RTX 4060). The BIG problem is that once a (dual-slot) GPU is installed, it cannot be removed anymore, because the side of the chassis blocks access to the lower part of the GPU, including the locking mechanism on the PCIe slot!
Since the GPU itself blocks access to the screws fixing the motherboard to the chassis, one cannot remove the motherboard either. So, if you ever want to replace the GPU, you are literarily screwed!
Whoever came up with this design should be fired!
Pro
- Small size
- Good quality
- Well ventilated
Contra
- Very little space for cables
- GPU cannot be removed!!
Eh, thanks! what are you using the GPU for? transcoding? Just wondering.
What mobo did you end up using? I've heard that Intel ARC does a nice transcoding as wel. My build NAS is too small and my QNAP TS453mini died but still have he discs so thinking of reperposng theseModern CPUs can perfectly handle transcoding on their own, you don't need for a GPU for that.
I only installed a GPU in the Jonsbo N3 when I started experimenting with generative AI (Stable Diffusion). Given the limited space and power available in that box, I decided to move the server to a slightly bigger box (Fractal Node 304). It is during this move that I ran into the problem with the PCIe slot mentioned above :-(
After I finally managed to take out the GPU from the Jonsbo N3, I repurposed this box as a backup target for my primary server. For this use case, the Jonsbo N3 is hard to beat. You won't find many other boxes with 8 drive bays (with SAS backplane, another plus!) in such a small footprint.
To answer your questions: I am using an AsRock B650I Lightning together with a 12-core AMD Ryzen 9 7900 and 64 GB RAM.
