I’m considering buying the new 200ge for a personal web server. I would combine it with a x470 motherboard and 2400GHz default DDR4 memory. I don’t need ECC. So there is nothing new here but the only thing I don’t understand is about PCI-E limitations. I’ve always thought I could plug wathever I want as long as there are physical slots available!
Wikichip says this chip has a total of 20 lanes from which 16 are DGP (I’ve searched this and found nothing. I assume it is for general PCI-E cards) and 4 for storage which can be NVME or SATA Express. The configurations listed are 1x8+1x4, 2x4+1x4. Doesn’t these configurations totals 12 instead of 16?
What I want to is to be able to use all the 6 SATA ports on the 470 and having one for a small but fast NVME which will be used for write log or cache. I also wanted to plug an extra quad Ethernet port (which I think is x4) and have at least a x8 free for some kind of future expansion like when 10Gbe becomes a common thing. Is this possible with the 200ge?
I understand the 1300 or even the 2200 can be a better option but 35W TDP is too good to ignore. I also don’t want to use intel CPUs.
The 200GE is weird and confusing because it actually only has PCIe 3.0 x4 for the PCIe slots, but it also has other PCIe 3.0 lanes dedicated to NVMe as well as PCIe 2.0 lanes for general purpose slots. SATA is unrelated to that.
So you’ll probably want to find a motherboard that has at least one slot wired for PCIe 2.0 x4. That way the 10 Gbps card can be in the PCIe 3.0 x4 slot and the quad 1 Gbps card can be in the PCIe 2.0 x4 slot. SATA has its own bus as does NVMe.
TYVM for the tips and sorry taking my time responding. I’ve took a while to gather the necessary parts for my build.
For the CPU I gave up on the Athlon 200ge and went for a cheap Ryzen 3 1200. The 200ge ended up not supporting ECC and since the prices between ECC and regular RAM were not that different I went the ECC route. I think this CPU will handle the load pretty well. I plan to upgrade someday if they ever release a low TDB AM4 CPU with ECC support.
For the Motherboard I’ve got an Asrock X370 Taichi. I really wanted to get the x470 ultimate for the onboard 10Gbe lan but they went out of stock in my country.
The system will have 32GB of 2400MHz ECC DDR4. ZFS ARC will be configured to 24GB max, a postgresql instance with 4GB and the rest for the operating system.
A GT 710 for graphics since its the lowest TDP GPU I could find. I’ll use it with the default open source kernel driver.
A Corsair RM 650x plus gold power supply. I really wanted a Seasonic power but they aren’t a thing around here. There is XFX which I heard are rebranded Seasonic but I couldn’t find any XFX plus gold for sale. Important: since my case has lots of hot swap PCBs I needed ungodly amounts of molex peripheral cables.
Stock Ryzen 3 Cooler and 4x Noctua NF-F12 should be enough to handle the temperatures.
For starters, I’ll use my previous home server 4x3TB spinning rust 7.2k HDDs and a 120GB SSD for SLOG. I plan to expand it in the future and use a really fast NVME as the ZIL slog.
An old Zalman GS1000 case. I have thing thing lying around with enough hot swap PCB slots for 8x3.5 disks.
I’m doing something different here since I want to max all the slots to storage: I’m booting from a 32GB USB drive which will be plugged from an adapter inside the motherboard (there are no frontal usb 3.0 headers coming from the case). The system will use the transactional server role so most of the system will work as read only with updates and changes being done to a BTRFS clone which will activate after next boot.
Software running will be pretty much samba4 as file server, nfs4 server with GSSAPI, the tracker addon, SSSD + Realmd against an existing samba4 domain, and some spotlight indexing and fruit addon for please my MacOS desktops.