u/Daedalus308

Hi All,

I'm trying to build a rackmount NAS and purchased a CWWK i3-N300 integrated CPU/motherboard from an amazon reseller in order to keep it compact and low power consumption. Unfortunately despite my best efforts, troubleshooting steps, and even replacement board, I CANNOT get it to output video. The documentation and support on these boards is lacking and I'm hoping some of you have experience enough with these boards to help me understand what is going wrong.

These boards require ddr5 SODIMM ram, maxing out at 4800MHz speed. in the limited documentation I could find, it says that the supported RAM brands are corsair, samsung, and adata. I could not find any single stick 16GB ddr5 SODIMM modules from corsair, the ones i could find from adata were ECC only, but I was able to find 5600mhz from samsung. i also tried a 32gb 5600mhz stick from crucial (which is noted as being finicky), as well as a 16gb 4800 mhz stick from crucial (it's what I have access to).

I made sure to plug in both motherboard and CPU power.

I am using a renewed corsair sf850 (2024) to power it all, and i checked (via multimeter) all the voltages and they check out. It is missing pins 14 (-12v) and 20 (-5v). My understanding is that these aren't needed, but is there a chance this niche motherboards somehow needs them, despite using a modern (if low power) motherboard?

Only other things plugged in are the 8643 connectors to some hard drives, an M.2 nvme drive and of course the fan headers (i tried with an without front panel I/O)

I know there is a 3 pin jumper (which apparently bridging pins 1-2 and 2-3 have the same result?) which is an auto turn on feature. I have tried it without shorting pins, and shorting either set of pins. It seems to work as intended with turning everything on.

Either way I've tried these combinations with 2 separate cpu/boards and the fans, drives and whatever else seem to turn on just fine but nothing i do will get it to output video via hdmi or dp. i've tried 2 different known working monitors as well.

i've tried letting it sit on for 15 minutes and then restarting in case of a RAM setup thing, i've tried removing from power and clearing CMOS and trying again.

is my luck so bad that I got two bad boards with the same exact issue? am i missing a troubleshooting step, or something required to make these work? is there some niche hardware requirement/compatibility issue?

Any help would be appreciated, i'm at my wit's (and wallet's) end trying to figure this out on my own.