Pretty killer specs on paper. In my experience, these AliExpress boards have a bunch of minor annoyances that add up. Examples of those annoyances from my experience include:
a complete lack of support after the sale (you’ll never get a BIOS update, or if you do, you have to get it from some dodgy Chinese Dropbox-equivalent),
a lack of 4-pin chassis fan headers,
outdated SATA controllers that don’t let your computer reach higher C-states, and
non-standard CPU coolers that you’ll never be able to replace if they fail.
So true. I'd complement the first point to include a general lack of documentation. Sometimes, we can't even know some pinout schema without trial and error.
I own a Chuwi Larkbox X (another N100 device) and I can't tell it to boot up after a power failure in the BIOS. So that is another thing to keep in mind.
But yeah I've got an AliExpress X99 board, which threw all sorts of hardware errors, had no fan speed control (100% all the time), no working hwmon sensors, and I ended up buying a used Supermicro board instead.
The features sounded good enough for me to click with intent to buy (as a firewall/router), but no SFP and no PCIe expansion slot means I can't use it with fiber. And with just one 10Gb port, the maximum it will be able to pass through is 2.5Gb/s (assuming the rest of the board is up to the task).
Looks like it would be nice for a small home server.
Could be good as a firewall with PFSense or something. 2.5gb to the ISP and a 10gb trunk port. Would be an upgrade for me. All I would use is a drive in it though.