INTRODUCTION

   Just like with every single device in the electronics industry there are different NAS servers aimed at different segments of the market not only due to the amount of available drive bays but also specifications and of course number of features. So although for most home users an 4 bay NAS server with a dual-core CPU, 2GB of RAM and a single RJ45 Gigabit port should be more than sufficient for their needs small business owners will most likely pick a more powerful model with at least twice as many bays paired with a quad-core CPU, 4GB of RAM (if not more) and at least 2 RJ45 Gigabit ports (for improved performance via link aggregation) or a single 10gbE port. Now if you've been following our NAS reviews then you should know that to date most models featured either ARM CPUs by manufacturers like Marvell and Broadcom or Celeron CPUs by Intel so since the very first AMD based models made their appearance not long ago we decided to take a look at one such model and specifically the brand new QNAP TVS-873E-4G.

   QNAP Systems, Inc., headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan, provides a comprehensive range of cutting-edge Network-attached Storage (NAS) and video surveillance solutions based on the principles of usability, high security, and flexible scalability. QNAP offers quality NAS products for home and business users, providing solutions for storage, backup/snapshot, virtualization, teamwork, multimedia, and more. QNAP envisions NAS as being more than "simple storage", and has created many NAS-based innovations to encourage users to host and develop Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and machine learning solutions on their QNAP NAS.

   The TVS-873E is among the top models released by QNAP in 2018 and so it's equipped with some of the highest-end hardware components we've seen to date (at least in a SMB model). So alongside the AMD RX-421BD Embedded R-Series SOC (quad-core/64-bit/2MB Cache/2.1Ghz base clock at 15TDP - 3.4GHz max clock at 35W TDP) and its Radeon R7 GPU (800Mhz clock / 8 compute units / 4K encode and decode / supports DirectX® v12, UVD v6 and VCE v3.1) we also find two 2GB SODIMM DDR4 RAM modules (clocked at 2400Mhz @ CL17 / expandable up to 64GB) and a 512MB flash memory DOM. In terms of expandability the TVS-873E features a total of eight 2.5/3.5" SATA III drive bays, two PCIe 3.0 x 4 slots and two M.2 2260/2280 slots and as for available connectors it sports one USB 3.0 host port (micro-B type), 4 RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet ports, 4 USB 3.0 ports, two HDMI v1.4b ports, 2 dynamic microphone jacks and one line-out audio output jack. Worth pointing out is that the although for some strange reason QNAP send us the 4GB model the TVS-873E is also available with a total of 8GB DDR4 RAM (2x4GB SODIMM modules) directly from the factory.