I need a motherboard for a small home business server, where I’m trying to pack a lot of features into one machine. Looking for a board for <= 350€ or so, I’m going to be using a 5950X for the CPU, and 4x32GB ECC DDR4-3200, and I need to support the following:
Boot from 2x (replicated) USB SSD with keypad (256GB Verbatim Store ‘n’ Go Secure SSD Portable)
At least 1 GPU for VM passthrough (likely 1030 / 2060)
2.5GbE networking, and it would be nice to have a secondary 1GbE port as well
Would also like to have at least one more full PCIe slot available for other things just in case
TrueNAS Scale
The options I could easily find using Geizhals filters myself were:
ASRock B550 Taichi
ASRock X570 PG Velocita
ASUS ROG Strix X570-E Gaming WIFI II
ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming X
Anyone know if any of these are particularly good choices, or other choices I should consider? IOMMU groups are always worrying when I want to do passthrough stuff.
I’m a big fan of ASRock’s Pro 4 series, e.g. : ASRock B550 Pro4
You can set the two x16 Physical slots to x8 electrical for both for the GPUs, and still have two x1 slots.
I also recently stumbled across this at Microcentre’s web-site ($120 USD): ASRock B550M-C
It’s only microATXm, but has 4 full length physical PCI slots (with single slot spacing).
From the manual:
*PCIE1 (PCIe 4.0 x16 slot) is used for PCI Express x16 lane width graphics cards.
PCIE2 (PCIe 3.0 x16 slot) is used for PCI Express x1 lane width cards.*
PCIE3 (PCIe 3.0 x16 slot) is used for PCI Express x1 lane width cards.
PCIE4 (PCIe 3.0 x16 slot) is used for PCI Express x4 lane width graphics cards.
Whatever mboard you pick, you can also an M.2 to (6x) SATA adapter to get all the SATA ports you need (or a x1 PCIE slot), and a 1x PCIE slot for a 2.5 GbE adapter…
FWIW, I’m a big fan of Ryzen with ASRock motherboards as inexpensive servers…
In addiction to multiple systems using B550 Pro4s, I also have multiple servers running 24/7, including:
ASRock Rack X470D4U with R5 2600 - 32 GB ECC - TrueNAS main server
X570 Taichi with R9 3950x and 64 GB ECC - Proxmox for VMs
All have 10 GbE NICs installed, with HBAs, etc… and have run for multiple years - on air coolers -without problems (and hopefully will continue to do so - touch wood…)
I have the x570 Taichi, and it doesn’t have a 10Gigabit ethernet port. At least, I think it doesn’t. It’s been a year since I used that computer because I destroyed the power supply in that computer. @Lietu, if you decided you want a motherboard that has good IOMMU and the ability to create virtual machines inside a virtual machine. The X570 motherboard is excellent for creating virtual machines inside a virtual machine.
Found a way to expand my options a bit, there are M.2 to SATA adapters based on the JMB585 -controller, that allow me to take a 3x M.2 M-key mobo where only 4 SATA ports on-board work with all devices connected, and still use 8 SATA devices on it and all those other things.
So now my list of ideas is:
GIGABYTE X570S Aorus Elite AX + JMB585
GIGABYTE X570S Aero G + JMB585
GIGABYTE X570S AORUS PRO AX + JMB585
ASUS ROG Strix X570-E Gaming WIFI II
Out of those the Aero G and AORUS Pro AX have Intel I225-V 2.5GbE NICs, but there seem to be reports of that not working on e.g. Ubuntu 20.04. I’m using TrueNAS Scale 22.02.3, kernel 5.10, people seem to say support was included in 5.8, so I think that should be good. The others use RTL8125BG/AG, where people have reported having to install some custom driver from Realtek’s website which sounds iffy at the very least.
AORUS Pro AX seems to need me to think about conflicts the least of those, all M.2 slots always in use regardless of PCIe population, has 3x full size mechanical PCIe x16 slots, and 4 of the SATA ports will be available when all M.2 slots are in use.
Right now heavily leaning towards that AORUS Pro AX + JMB585.
