iKoolCore R2 Max Internal Hardware Overview
In the bottom we get two doors labeled SSD and DDR. Thankfully, something is labeled.
Opening those two metal doors gets us to our SSD area and SODIMM.
The system supports up to two M.2 2242 (42mm) or 2280 (80mm) NVMe SSDs. These share a PCIe Gen3 x1 link, so assume you are going to get PCIe Gen2 x1 speeds, making them closer to SATA in performance. Our advice is to get low power and cheap SSDs. Low power will help them stay cool. Cheap because you do not need maximum performance PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs here. Still, it is nice to have redundant SSDs or simply to have capacity.
Since this is an Alder Lake-N platform, we get a single DDR5 SODIMM slot. Our system had an 8GB DDR5 SODIMM but there are options for up to 32GB. Again, you want DDR5-4800 here as there is little reason to get faster more expensive memory.
Under the four rubber feet, we have screws that we can remove and get to the motherboard where we can see the SSD and DDR5.
Liberating the motherboard was probably 10 screws, perhaps more. Once we found them all, we could pop the motherboard from the top heatsink.
iKoolCore did a solid job doing this design. We are showing you the fanned version, but the fanless is very similar.
At the top, under the small Winbond chip and between the ports and the TF card slot, we have the two Marvell AQC113C NICs. These are surprisingly close in size to the Intel i226-V NICs despite being 4x the performance.
The Alder Lake-N CPU is below that. You will notice that both the Marvell NICs and the Alder Lake-N SoC (in this case the Intel Core i3-N305) have thermal paste that is making contact with the heatsink lid.
There are two cold plates to help ensure the heat transfer happens between the chips and the chassis. This is better designed than many of the CWWK-based designs we have seen sold cheaply on AliExpress where some have had issues with the thermal transfer not happening due to air gaps. We have not had that issue, but in this case, iKoolCore obviously spent time on this. Even look at the channel for the fan cable to path through that is set in the lid.
At the bottom is our fan module. If one of these fails, it would be a pain to replace as it is around 20 screws to get here. On the fanless version, this is not an issue, but on the fanned version, it is something we wish was different.
Overall, it is clear that a lot of thought went into this design.
