So these CPUs at CES that are non-X. I am thinking 6 or 8 cores for a home server kinda deal, but also low power/sleep modes/etc. What might a good microatx board be? I’d love 6 or more SATA ports, many M.2 and as many full-size slots as possible. 2.5gb or faster onboard nic.
Has anyone seen anything really awesome? Ideally microatx but I’d take ATX as well I suppose.
Bonus if it can do ECC DDR5.
Link what you’ve seen, and heart anyone with a board someone else posts you think is cool. I’m going to try to get a few of these.
I’ll probably pick up a “budget” (pcie4) board thats oem or cheeeeep then do the off-label m.2 coversions or a bifucation adapter + the “serverish” options.
Thinking about posting some 3d printable files/adapters for cases like the pop air/uatx to make them suitable for “cheap low power home server” as the uatx version also fits nicely sideways in a rack.
Asrock taichi due thunderbolt is a benefit. A board with 2.5 or 10gbit is ideal. Or dual nics. Im using my x470 3950x as a proxmox build. Im usually more prone to repurposing old hardware for vms and container use.
I was just curiously looking at the Asrock Rack B650D4U-2L2T/BCM, which is the most featureful Asrock Rack offering, but to call it featureful is a bit of a stretch since it’s expansion options are pretty anemic. It does have dual Gbps and dual 10 Gbps ports, but with only 4x onboard SATA, a single m.2 slot, and one each of x16, x4, and x1 PCIe slots. The slots (m.2 and PCIe) are all PCIe 5.0 though, so if some nifty expansion cards that actually take advantage of PCIe 5.0 speeds hit the market it may be worthwhile. Will likely be overpriced and sold out everywhere for awhile though, just like the previous Asrock Rack Ryzen boards.
Wait a minute, the current B650 Asrock Rack offerings have multiple USB ports now? That was my main gripe with the previous X570/B550 generation…
I haven’t really been paying too much attention to AM5 since I steeled myself with the AM4+X570 board ecosystem for years to come, but the dearth of USB means I have to use a separate PCI-e USB controller. And it’s in an x1 slot, so I can’t use one of the x4 cards with multiple controllers to split up for use in multiple VMs. If the B650 boards are getting these I/O upgrades, are there possibly X670 boards in the pipeline with a similar design?
The addition of a DisplayPort also looks very interesting. It might even co-opt my need to use two discrete GPUs…and with the addition of extra USB, maybe there’s even a mini-ITX X670 board that could functionally replace my mATX system and allow me to go smaller? Dang. I guess time will tell.
I’m personally waiting for the Phoenix APU to land on the AM5 socket in the next 7000G series since it’s clear Dragon Range is just a BGA version of a regular AM5 CPU.
I think the requirements for a “home server kinda deal” for AM5 include
generational improvement over AM4
expansion capabilities
Low power seems to be a big issue with DDR5 / PCIe Gen5 technologies at the moment. 2.5GB/10GB NICs don’t help either, but each (depending on individual requirements for home server) are required to provide that “generational improvement over AM4”. Why would I pay a premium otherwise?
“Expansion capabilities” to me means at least 2 PCIe slots > 4x lanes (e.g. 16/4 or 8/8) with “usable” bifurcation support.
Within this set of requirements I am currently looking at:
Pros:
3 x PCI-E x16 slot, supports x16/x0/x4, x8/x8/x4 (all CPU)
M.2 XPANDER-Z GEN 5 DUAL included (for bifurcated support of m.2 storage. To me that means PCIe Gen5 speeds are usable for storage out of the box!)
8 sata ports. However only four of those ports run directly of the second chipset.
The other four ports run of the first chip set via an Asmedia controller.
And i believe two of those ports share the bandwidth with one of the m.2´s.
So this might be a kinda a downside maybe.
However you could of course use a m.2 pci-e expansion card.
ECC support. Yes.
Msi X670E Carbon Wifi.
dual pcie-gen5 slots. x16 / x8. cpu
The third slot is gen4 x4 chip set.
6 sata ports
ECC support? probably No.
Msi X670E ACE.
6 sata ports.
3 pci-e slots gen 5 slots. x16 / x8 / x4. cpu.
ECC support? probably No.
And yeah there is also the Msi X670E Godlike.
8 sata ports.
three full size pci-e gen 5 slots. X16 / x8 / x4. cpu.
ECC support? probably No.
dual lan. marvel 10G and intel 2.5G.
However that board is soo ridiculously expensive that it ain´t worth it imo. And i don´t think that Msi even cares about ECC support.
Same thing kinda goes for the ACE too expensive for the actual features it offers.
ECC on consumer parts is kind of lame tbch. ECC with rdimms is a server thing so you won’t see it on the consumer grade stuff. If I was going ECC it would be rdimms or bust
Hard sell for anyone looking to run Plex. Only one GPU or SAS Controller. Wish there was still SLI boards so the second PCIe slot would be gen 4/5 x8/16. x4 is a deal breaker.
Looks really good! I’d like dual 10Gbe, GPU and SAS controller. Not sure how that would work without doing a m.2 SAS adapter but it would be really nice to have the M.2 for a cache drive.
Since I like the AM4 version very much (ASUS ProArt X570-CREATOR WiFi) I’m going to look at the ASUS ProArt X670E-CREATOR WiFI when the 7950X3D becomes available locally with 4 x 32 GB ECC Micron DDR5-4800 UDIMMs.
But I’m a bug magnet so I’d be very appreciative if I had a competent third-party control user to iron out the likely BIOS issues with ASUS’ support to get this motherboard in top shape as soon as possible.