Computing on Demand PC News & Reviews
Under the hood, the QNAP doesn’t occupy much space.
First the easy part, QNAP has outfitted the TS-470 with a 250W Power Supply produced by the FSP group and is 80 Plus Bronze Certified. The 80 Plus certification program is intended to promote more efficient energy use in PSUs. It certifies products that have more than 80% energy efficiency at 20%, 50% and 100% of rated load, and a power factor of 0.9 or greater at 100% load. Certified PSUs will waste 20% or less electric energy at load levels, reducing consumption.
The additional Gigabit Ethernet ports are provided by an add-in card. QNAP has outfitted this system with a card stamped N82575-G2. A quick internet search yielded very little, but we were able to find a similar accessory on QNAP’s TS-470 page.
QNAP doesn’t directly state that the RAM in the TS-470 is upgradable on its product page, but there is an open and available memory slot just waiting to be occupied. Finding it is easy. To get to it you have to do a bit of surgery. In fact, you have to take the ENTIRE NAS apart. In case you were wondering, yes this will void your warranty. The process is time-consuming and, to be honest with you, quite an annoyance. You have to remove the PSU, the Ethernet Card, remove the back of the NAS, the backplane, and finally the motherboard. This process gives us a good look at what the TS-470 is made of.
The Intel Celeron G550 CPU is cooled by a rather large and awkward heatsink. Two separate sets of fins are joined by heatpipes. While no direct airflow cools the primary heatsink, the secondary is fixed directly behind the fan in the rear of the unit.
Sound is handled by a dated Realtek ALC662 5.1 Channel Audio Codec. HDMI, by Asmedia ASM1442. Although this wouldn’t be my first choice, it can do the job delivering 5.1 audio efficiently and accurately supporting a sampling rate of up to 96kHz.
