I’ve been lurking on this thread for a few months and I want to say a huge thank you to the people who have shared information on their experience with this motherboard and particularly those who shared detailed build information. It helped me a lot with my own build.
Like many others I wanted to build a small headless homelab server + future NAS, and the selection of this specific motherboard was primarily driven by the fact that I needed to fit everything into a 450mm depth network cabinet I have installed in my garage. This unfortunate past decision meant I basically had to use mITX if I wanted a Matisse CPU. I chose AMD Zen2 for PCIe 4 support and this motherboard also allows me to drop in Zen3 in the future. I don’t need a graphics card and so the PCIe slot will likely house an ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 Gen 4 Card or similar in the future when the 2nd gen PCIe 4 NVMe drives come out. Built-in 10GbE with the X550 is great because the X550 has a long track record in enterprise servers and good Linux support. The IPMI w/ graphics means I never needed to have a graphics card to get up and running and can use KVM if I really screw something up.
I piggybacked off many other’s part choices from this thread once I had settled on the motherboard.
Case: Fractal Node 304
Motherboard: ASRock Rack X570D4I-2T
CPU: Ryzen 5 3600
Cooler: Noctua NH-L9i
RAM: Nemix 64GB Kit 2x32GB DDR4-2933 PC4-23400 ECC SODIMM 2Rx8
NVMe SSD: WD Black SN750 500GB
PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA 650 GA
OS: Ubuntu
WD Black chosen because it was relatively cheap and will hold me over until the better PCIe 4 SSD come out. No HDD for now, but the case can fit up to 6x 3.5” drives. I’ll probably grab some Seagate Exos 8TB later this year.
Thanks to those who provided detailed information on the challenges mounting CPU coolers on this motherboard. I did buy some M3x20mm screws ahead of time but it turned out these are actually too long for the NH-L9i. When I tried to install them they ended up hitting the heatsink on the cooler while still protruding from the backplate. So I ran out to my local small hardware store and came back with M3x10mm screws (all they had were 10 or 20). These then had the opposite problem of not really threading all the way through the feet of the cooler so I felt like it wasn’t tightly attached, but still decently secure. As kcpants noted there is a gap between the feet of the cooler and the motherboard, which I just let the screw go across without any support. Regardless, I was kind of impatient and just wanted to boot the thing up, so I left it as is. The node 304 case is pretty tight inside, but since I had removed all of the HDD sleds and planned to keep them out for now, it wasn’t too bad and I could mess with the cooler again without too much disassembly.
Running the system like this, I noticed CPU idle temps around 70C which is too high, so I went to a different store and got some M3x14mm screws and swapped them for the 10mm ones. These are the best size for this cooler/MB combination and it seems to have helped as idle temps are now around 45-50C.
Running prime95
it still pegs at 95C so I think I need to totally re-do the cooler mounting solution at some point. Since that torture test is pretty much worst case scenario, I’m not too worried for now. Also, me and my family are the only users of this system, so I can take it out of service whenever I want. I’ll probably fix this when I start adding in more heat generating components like HDD and a PCIe card.
I too have the Nemix memory kit others have mentioned. I’m running them in the A1 + B1 configuration at 2933. I did run 5x passes of memtester
without any mce showing up and nothing in the logs otherwise so far, so I’m gonna leave it as-is and keep an eye on it. Perhaps they will show up later.
Thanks again for all the helpful information and discussion on the thread!