Hi all,
I have a 6 year old TVS-872XT and have done quite some tuning/upgrading lately, ultimately reaching sustainable SMB transfer speeds to a Windows PC of around 2.5 GByte/s when copying large ISO files in parallel.
Upgraded to latest BIOS Q016AT19 and QuTS Hero
Installed an i7-9700T and 64 GB SO-Dimm
8x Exos M30 hdds and 2x1TB Crucial P3 SSDs (passive coolers on SSDs)
Installed a MellanoxConnectX-4 and 2xSFP28 AOC cables (Multichannel SMB)
connect to a QSW-M7308R-4X 25/100 GbE Switch
My PC (Ryzen 9 9950X3D) has an Intel E810 NIC with 2xSFP28 AOC cables connected to the switch, and Multichannel SMB also activated.
I just wanted to share - the I7 and the Mellanox card were really cheap via ebay, and so much worth the upgrade. Now my old TVS-872XT NAS feels like a top notch enterprise NAS :lol:
Mine had that failure too after around 3 years - and the motherboard was exchanged on warranty. Since then it runs perfectly - including the upgrades I have made about half a year ago.
I’ve got my TVS-672XT repaired by Nicks Electronics. I upgraded it to an i7-8700T. Works amazingly well. I have an i7-9700K that I would love to use, but as it consumes more power, I am hesitant to stick it in the NAS…
Yeah the 9700K is a different beast - definitely needs a very different cooler which sticks out of the case. Also not sure if the internal PSU can handle that. To be honest, I wouldn’t go down that route on your working system.
Is it really that different? The “T” versions consume roughly 35 Watts. The 9700K consumes 95 Watts. So it does consume 2.7 times more power. But the NAS has a rather good size heat sink for the CPU and has good fans. I’ve not been so worried about the heat. It’s more of does the power supply have enough capacity. I think the TVS-x72XT has a 350 Watt power supply. I’m not sure how much a hard drive takes. I’ve got six since it’s a 672. I haven’t taken the time yet to figure out the margins there and if the supply is sufficient.
This has been enough to give me pause about sticking the 9700K in the unit. I’m keeping my eyes open for another x72XT unit that I could get which I could experiment on. I really don’t want to damage the working unit I have. The 8700T is far superior to the i3 that I had in there previously.
People here upgraded to 8700K or 9700 non-K with 65W tdp. Common denominator is that a different cpu-cooler is needed and it would interfere with the case.
270% increase in power is nothing where you can just assume the stock cooler can handle. And no, the stock cooler is not very efficient. While it is big enough, it has way too few/small fins to really have a big surface for heat exchange, and that’s what matters.
I have not tested any -K cpu myself and can’t speak to it, but it seems that if you really put a 9700K under full load in a virtualization engine for example (not your typical idle / sporadic smb network access), you will very quickly reach the thermal capacity of the stock cooler and case. And apparently the qnap has no or no sophisticated thermal safety features.
I haven’t had a single issue with my 872XT after QNAP replaced the board years ago, but yeah, what a mess that was. I’d really like to swap the i5-8400T for a i7-8700T since they are only about $80 these days, but I also don’t want my luck to run out on that box either! @NA9D how hard was the swap? I assume I’d need that BIOS update posted on here as well?
And what about the reported instabilities? Anyone seeing that? Unfortunately I can’t see any posts about this on the old forum since they we so kind to just nuke it on us… Didn’t OneCD or someone archive it IIRC?
The Intel Core i7-8700T significantly outperforms the Intel Core i5-8400T in both single-core and multi-threaded tasks, delivering approximately 27% better multi-threaded performance and 17% faster single-threaded speed according to PassMark benchmarks.
*The primary advantage of the i7-8700T is Hyper-Threading, which provides 12 threads compared to the i5-8400T’s 6 threads, despite both sharing the same 6-core count.
The big gotcha — QTS 5.x firmware instability*
*This is the most important finding. One user reported the i7-8700T worked well with QTS 4.x firmware up through 4.5.4.2467 but failed after upgrading to the 5.x series firmware, likely by corrupting the DOM image, causing random reboots and shutdowns. Reverting to the stock i5-8400T resolved the instability.
*
As said, I installed the i7-9700T, the bigger brother of the 8700T. It was an easy swap, just apply some thermal paste, stock cooler and you are good to go. In 6 months of 24/7 operations not a single stability issue or anything except fans spinning up a bit more under heavy load. Tested for months on QuTS 5 and now 6. Just go for it - you have nothing to loose. I linked the bios above. Not sure if it is really necessary, but I just updated it to the latest version.
Yeah, it’s very easy to swap out. There’s not a lot of difference in performance between the i7-9700T and the i7-8700T. In fact, I think the 8700T has more threads.
Didn’t have to update BIOS or anything. Just be careful when placing the CPU in the socket. I didn’t work the lever on the socket correctly the first time and bent pins in the socket. Not fun. It should be a very easy and “gentle” replacement.
The 8700T has only 6 cores but supports hyperthreading (12 threads) vs. 8 cores of the 9700T and no hyperthreading. In a NAS environment, hyperthreading is less relevant. Cores matter more for background tasks. Performance of the 9700T is overall about 10% higher than the 8700T. Not huge, but both cpus are so cheap, why would you go for the lesser option?
I’m not sure I agree about the hyper threading. Maybe you are right. But there are more tasks that can be done simultaneously with a hyper-threading CPU.
I figured 10% more in CPU speed wasn’t enough compared to losing 4 threads.