The AOOSTAR WTR Max now comes in a second flavor, swapping the original AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 8845HS for an Intel Core i5-1235U and shaving $100 off the entry price. The 11-bay network-attached storage box keeps the same chassis, the same connectivity, and the same six 3.5-inch SATA bays plus five M.2 2280 slots, which is what makes it interesting to anyone building a home server that runs TrueNAS, Proxmox VE, Unraid, or a plain Debian box with ZFS on top.
The Intel build leans on a 12th-gen Alder Lake-U chip with 2 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores, paired with Intel Iris Xe graphics running at up to 1.2 GHz. The AMD model keeps a real edge for users who care about it: 8 Zen 4 cores, a Radeon 780M iGPU, a 16 TOPS NPU, ECC memory support up to 128GB of DDR5-5600, and PCIe 4.0 lanes on every M.2 slot. The Intel version tops out at 96GB of non-ECC DDR5-4800 and drops the M.2 storage down to PCIe 3.0, which still leaves plenty of bandwidth for a stack of NVMe drives but rules out the kind of ECC-backed file system setup that ZFS purists tend to insist on.
Connectivity is identical across both versions, and it is the part that puts this box ahead of most off-the-shelf NAS units. There are two 10 Gigabit LAN ports powered by Intel 82599, two 2.5 GbE ports on Intel i226V, an OCuLink connector for external GPU or storage expansion, a USB4 port, three more USB-A ports, HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 1.4, and a microSD reader. Both networking stacks use Intel silicon with long-established mainline Linux support, the ixgbe driver covering the 82599 10GbE ports and igc handling the i226-V 2.5GbE side, which means all four ports come up without manual driver work under Proxmox VE, TrueNAS SCALE, or any standard Linux distribution. Cooling is handled by four fans and a vapor chamber heatsink, and a small front-mounted LCD reports live CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage stats. The chassis measures 249 x 245 x 195 mm (9.8 x 9.6 x 7.7 inches).
The Intel-powered WTR Max is available now starting at $559 (€515) as a barebones unit, with the AMD variant currently running $659 (€608). Buyers supply their own RAM, SSDs, and spinning disks, and there is no built-in wireless, so a USB Wi-Fi adapter is the only path to wireless networking out of the box.
