ASRock Motherboard & CPU Combo Motherboards J3455B-ITX

My grandma asked me to fix her old computer she bought in 2006 (!) so rather than giving her that old thing back, I just bought her this to replace it. It's fairly snappy (with SSD) for a low-powered processor and has lots of great features in the BIOS. The SoC processor architecture is new enough that older OS do not work on it - Linux will need to be 4.8 or newer kernel, Windows 8.1 might work but to be safe go with Windows 10 - Windows 7 is too old. Would need a new copy of FreeBSD, I'm guessing 11 or newer, but I haven't tried it. Just look for Apollo Lake compatibility. Oh, and it has VT-D if you want to try and shoehorn ESXi onto it and have a little virtualized router/server box for a few appliance-like tasks (although it has a RealTek LAN, it also has a x16-sized PCIE slot running at x2 so you could put an Intel x4 Pro 1000 NIC in it and make that problem go away). Was my favorite reasonably-priced motherboard of this type - if you don't want to shell out for a server board, or just new a new efficient desktop or HTPC, definitely worth a look.

I'm using this board as a small server for some development I'm doing. It's running a Linux server with MySQL and several other services. The board is working great. It obviously doesn't perform at "Production Server" levels, but for development for a somewhat database intensive system, it's holding its own. I'm quite impressed. If you just need a dedicated machine running a few services able to keep up with a few people, this board works great for the price.

Works great as a budget board. CPU seems to run very cool and doesn't overheat at all (though I am running a case fan). We were going to use it as a Sophos appliance, but the Sophos installer kind of sucks. So now we have a Home theater pc, or we might make a nice wireless router. The board does come with some antiquated tech (PS-2 connections, Serial, Parallel) but if you are making a lightweight linux/unix based appliance, these might be considered features. It has the modern amenities as well USB 3.0 out the wazoo, gigabit, hdmi, decent integrated sound card. The possibilities are endless for this small form factor board. Definitely want to shop around on the PSU because you will only need the 24 pin and a few SATA power supplies so most EVGA and Corsair PSU's will be overkill.

Got what I expected. Not very fast but handles pfsense well.

This thing runs Ubuntu 18.04 flawlessly and is an amazing value for a new board and processor.Update:Board died after a year and a half. I tried everything, cleared CMOS, new ram, unplugged everything and reinstalled, default settings in UEFI. All other components in the build are working happily in other computers. Do yourself a favor, stay away from Asrock. I learned the hard way.

I purchased 4 of these for a very low processing power requirement PC for use in an office style environment. They were to be my replacement for Intel D2500CC Motherboards which use Intel Acorn CPUs that we have been using for years at multiple sites. On the positive side these run cool, have a reasonable Intel Celeron CPU, run Windows 10 Pro and have nice solid SO-DIMM Memory plug-ins. That is about as positive as I can be. The BIOS on these boards was written by a sadist on drugs. It attempts to fight you at every move and lacks all the normal forced setting features. All BIOS I have used for the past 35 years have a hierarchy for boot and it will allow selection of items even if they are not present, but not this one. If you want to load from a USB CD then you have to hit delete/F2 repeatedly with the CD plugged in and either over-ride the standard boot or temporarily set the boot to CD. This makes the board absolutely useless from a security viewpoint. I cannot give it to a user with the BIOS locked as they can only use the things plugged in when it was last accessed by an authorised admin. For example I can set the Intel D2500CC Motherboard BIOS to always look for a USB boot then a SATA drive boot and give the user a boot stick which boots and runs a backup once a week or once a shift. Not on this baby, the USB boot disappears never to be seen again once unplugged and you waste time and have to give a user access to the BIOS to be able to do an image. I also find it bizarre it has a parallel port, as I still have some devices that talk serial but nothing has talked parallel in the last 15 years that I have seen or worked with. Overall if you want something that is OK for low power computing you want a lot of frustration setting it up and then you aren't going to image it or touch it then this will probably work for you. However I probably won't touch this or any other ASRock product if they all have this weird hardware auto-selecting BIOS.

Works with two Samsung 1GB sticks PC3-10600S DDR3-1333. Needed it to run minimal Linux with parallel port in legacy mode. Don't forget to turn off UEFI options otherwise the board won't see the standard SATA drive booting linux. You may have to google the instructions. Hope I don't have to update this review in 6 months with less stars.

The CPU only works at a max frequency of 1.5, one of the cores will boost to 2.3 GHz, not much what is falsely advertised.Yet, this is very sufficient for a pfSense firewall, ad-blocking, & virus scanning router.I paired this motherboard with this card "IO Crest 4 Port Gigabit Ethernet Intel i350-AM4 Chipset"works flawlessly.As for Power usage, it is quite similar to my I3-7100 on Asrock Z270 mini-itx uses between 40-50 watt on average according to my power meter.UPDATE: 3 days into intensive usage in my pfsense firewall.Its barely sufficient for a 100mbps down-link as the CPU usage boosts up to full load on high internet activity& I'm not satisfied at all with the high power usage for a low end CPU.