AM4 board with IPMI, 10Gbpe

Hardware Hub Build a PC
,
1

I’m looking to do some upgrades to my current server built from a 3950x paired w/ an x370 motherboard and 64GB or RAM and two video cards for heavy computing capabilities, and a dedicated USB-C controller card from Sonnet. I wanted to add IPMI capabilities via a PAUL card, but perhaps there’s a motherboard with IPMI built in that I can swap around with? All I have found are ASRock Rack mini-ITX which do not have enough ports PCIe ports for my needs.

I am looking for both IPMI and 10Gbpe - do you know of any motherboards that can fit the bill? or should I look/invest into a whole new PC at this time? (I can see that this setup has still at least 5 years of life left at least)

PS: Some additional background context, I accidentally fried a built-in USB-C port by connecting a hard drive that ended up giving up the ghost, and for some reason decided to take out all that circuitry. The server still works as long as I don’t touch that controller.

2

AsRock Rack X570D4U-2L2T, only AM4 board with both. Very expensive these days.

It’s about lanes…X570 has 24 lanes and you can only get so many PCIe slots with it. One x16 slot or two x8 slots is the best you can hope for + some x1 or x4 chipset scraps. X470 has even less lanes.

German expressions often don’t translate well :wink: But the HDD didn’t survive the process…just so everyone is on the same page.

1 Like
3

Interesting - it already existed as Old English as far as I know (don’t know German). But yes the HDD died, but no worries there, I was running a DBAN to dispose the drive anyway.

As for the PCIe needs, I am not quite concerned on the throughput, but more on the expandability itself. This is a multi machine of sorts, and I have my storage in here as well, so I wanted to have the connectivity.

However, if I want to have 10Gbpe + IPMI, with all the storage connectivity that I have as of today, I may have to get out of AM4 altogether…

4

You just need a x8 slot for a HBA to provide 16 SATA/SAS connection. Board often has 4-8 SATA ports as well.

So any board with x8/x8 switch/split can house a HBA and a 10Gbit NIC. That’s rather common as far as homeservers with HBAs go. If the board has an x4 chipset PCIe slot, you can get a x4 10Gbit NIC although offers are limited.

Probably even anglosaxon then. Might have been passed down into english and old german, both deriving from the same roots. Although we Germans didn’t have french influence until very late in history.

5

I think that’s my current situation, I have 3 slots that need to be populated already, plus one more for an HBA

6

Extending a AM4 mobo to three or more PCIe cards requires luck (good bifurcation support in the mobo), ingenuity (finding cables and adapters as required) and a case/chassis to house all of the resulting frankenstein. I have a couple of these myself.

With your requirements it may be worthwhile considering upgrading to the HEDT platform of your choice that provides PCIe slots and lanes galore.

Re: IPMI/Paul - I found the use of a PiKVM cheaper and more flexible that IPMI.

7

Luke 23:46 -KJV

8

Updating an older post on a quick round up of non-desktop motherboard and cpu options
I think that both intel and amd have announced, and intel has shipped socketed CPUs and motherboards which fall into the categories of

Race car:
i9-13700 etc 13 gen and 14 gen
Ryzen, the whole line
Both of these have 2 ram channels without complete ecc, and reach high clock speeds.
up to 192GB of ram, 20 to 28 pcie channels

Semi truck:
xeon Scalable
Epyc genoa
8 or more ram channels, ecc, single or multi cpu, 1/2 to 2/3 the clock speed of the race cars. 100+ pcie channels. 16 to 192 cpu cores.
Good if you need lots of compute, or ram, or want to get one box which is ok at everything simultaneously. 112-144 pcie channels. up to 6tb ram.
Starts at $2k for epyc genoa CPU and Motherboard

work truck:
Intel w790 and 2400 or 3400
amd threadripper
Max clocks more than 3/4 the speed of the race car, ecc, 4 ram channels and 50+ the pcie channels.
Intel 2400 system Starts at $1.1k for 2400 CPU and Motherboard
Intel 3400 system Starts at $2.3k for 3400 CPU and Motherboard
amd thread ripper not released yet: cpu Starts at $1.5k motherboards unknown.

Delivery Van:
AMD Sienna
it is 1/2 the speed max of the race car.
CPU is 1/3 the cost
2/3 the connectivity.
96 pcie, 6 channels of ECC
This will make a great system for people who need an epyc lite. The CPU speed does not make this an ideal workstation, even though it takes up to 64 cores. It should make a great NAS or server that uses co-processors. Be they GPU or pcie devices. It will be an excellent replacement to an old server that cannot get funding to be replaced by a high end server.

I think that the pair of sienna on the server plus one of the race car or work truck cpus on the workstation makes for a very compelling system.

I need ecc on all boxes, which limits my personal scope. I have had so much ram over the years fail, usually before I arrive. And others are unable to contemplate that as a possible cause of their problems.

Personally I like AMD for a few specific reasons:
The only thing I value an intel for is quickassist, and that is available on the $300 8970 pcie x4 card. It doesn’t have high power or cooling requirements so I can run that off of a motherboard connector and slot adapter without sacrificing a pcie slot.

Intel Routinely engages in price gouging whenever amd falls a year behind. Amd has been up for the past 5 years or so, and has not set their processor prices astronomically high until competition becomes available. Until Ryzen Intel had a 60% margin on consumer products, and close to 85% margin on server products, and they sat on it not innovating and still gouging customers until amd passed them. After amd passed them, they did not gouge clients. Their high volume products were a fair price for the silicon area they occupied.
Intel CPUs usually work in Intel sockets for up to 3 years. AMD CPUs often work in AMD sockets for 8 years. Then long after you think they have moved on, AMD releases another CPU for your old socket.

Replacing hardware for a CPU or RAM is trivial. Replacing a motherboard, is annoying as it also means you have a bunch of software that you need to configure too. By this point I think that is often more grueling than fun. AMD makes it so that I get the fun parts more, and the greuling parts less.

2 Likes
9

There’s a ton of low-cost 1st gen EPYC mainboards+CPU combo’s on Aliexpress and ebay. DDR4 LDIMM ECC RAM isn’t that expensive anymore either. I already have 2, considering a 3rd full EPYC system. Downside of course is CPU speed, gamer CPU’s are obviously (considerably) faster. But for PCIe, you can’t beat a EPYC system (each system has 6 PCIe slots, 3 each of 16x/8x, all PCIe gen 3)

HTH!

1 Like
10

Been looking and I think I can get a used MSI X570 Creation plus a PAUL card and sort my issues as I can move all of the hardware to the “new” hardware and get a better lease on life from all of this equipment

1 Like
11

Due to the sketchiness of ordering an MSI X570 Creation board (eBay sellers will not answer), I have decided to downgrade/settle on a MSI MAG B550 Tomahawk. 2.5G should be plenty for the household for the time being, and then I can think of upgrading to something else altogether when rebuilding the machine when a new platform is on the horizon.

12

Might be a bit late but pikvm is also an option for remote Management.

You can add it to any board. Does not need any pcie lanes. I dont think pci lanes argument is even a good reason why x570 boards dont have ipmi. You need a second mini pc on your board why would that use up pci lanes?

13

Display without iGPU. And IIRC with AM4 only the G-series has iGPU. Otherwise, you need a dedicated display card (and you lose the PCIe lanes anyway).