I’m going to be rebuilding my Unraid server soon, and I’d appreciate a sanity check on my tentative plan.
The heaviest load on my current server is usually Plex transcodes (up to 6 simultaneous) but I also run 20+ other docker containers including Immich, Nextcloud, Matrix, Home Assistant, Mealie, Stash, Arr stack, etc.
CPU: Intel i5-14500 CPU Cooler: BeQuiet! Dark Rock Elite Motherboard:ASUS Pro WS W680-ACE Memory: 2 x Kingston KSM48E40BD8KI-32HA (2 x 32 GB) DDR5-4800 CL40 ECC Memory Cache Storage: 2 x Crucial T700 4TB Gen5 NVMe M.2 SSD Case: Fractal Meshify 2 XL (+HDD Tray Kits) Power Supply: Seasonic Vertex PX-750 750W 80 Plus Platinum Case Fan: 5 x Noctua A14 PWM 140mm HBA:LSI 9201-8i Network Card:Intel X710-DA2 Dual 10Gbps SFP+
I’ll be moving over 10 x 10TB Seagate Exos drives from my current build. Eventually I plan to fill all 16 drive bays in that case.
I picked the i5-14500 because it is a re-badged Alder Lake and doesn’t suffer from the recent microcode issues, and I picked that expensive W680-ACE motherboard for the ECC RAM support.
I was originally looking at a rack mount case like the HL15, but I don’t really see what I’m getting for the $$$ that I don’t get with a Meshify 2 XL. (I guess the backplane, but I don’t think I need that with an Unraid build). In general rack mount cases just don’t seem optimal for big fans and low-noise. I want this thing to be quiet.
If anyone has thoughts I’d love to hear it. Thanks!
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7900 (use stock cooler)
Motherboard: Asus ProArt X670E-Creator WiFi
Memory: Looks good
SSDs: I would strongly avoid Samsung SSDs due to their firmware history, Cruical T500 would probably something I’d look at instead
PSU: I guess you’re reusing it since it’s EOL
Case fan: Depending on where you live Scythe Kaze Flex 140mm might be noticable cheaper and/or even better or at least on par
HBA: Given reports with newer models I’d honest consider an ASMedia ASM1166 based card instead such as Silverstonetek ECS06
NIC: I would strongly advice against getting an ancient Aquantia based NIC, look for a used Broadcom or Intel NIC (recent chipset) instead
Video card for transcoding: Arc A380
Look like a nice build.
Probably highly depending on what you pay for parts where you life.
In Europe I would guess (not checked, just a guess) that just buying a Supermicro Mobo that already comes with IPMI, 10GB SFP+ and or enough SATA Ports is cheaper.
Double check if ECC works, since wendel has showed us how wonky ECC has been on the AMD side.
Noctua offers great product and give you 6y warranty and a great service. But yeah, they are not cheap.
I’ve seen very mixed reports about Plex hardware transcoding on AMD. Some people say it works fine but Plex doesn’t appear to officially support it, and I’ve seen consistent reports that the quality of the encoding on AMD is nowhere near as good as Intel.
Since my heaviest load will be Plex transcodes I want to go with a CPU that is guaranteed to handle that well. I thought about getting AMD CPU + GPU for transcoding, but presumably that would increase the idle power use.
Didn’t realize they have a history of firmware issues. I’ll look into Crucial. Thank you!
Actually no. I was just looking at reviews and tried to pick something that’s very efficient. Had no idea it was EOL. What would you recommend instead? Low-load (~50W) efficiency is important to me since most of the time my server isn’t doing much.
Not a big price difference where I live, and Noctua has always been very good to me.
The ECS06 only has 6 ports, but I’ll look into this and see if I can find a 16 port card based on the ASMedia ASM1166. Thanks for the tip!
I’m trying to keep idle power low - and from what I see Intel Arc GPUs aren’t great on idle power efficiency. They seem to idle between 15W-40W depending on the details - whereas I see reports that even an RTX 3080 can be configured to idle as low as 8 watts in Unraid:
And since it seems like Intel’s iGPUs are just as good as a flagship GPU when it comes to hardware transcoding video in Plex I feel like my best option is to skip the GPU and go with Intel.
I’m in the US. I’ve been having trouble finding motherboards for LGA 1700 that support ECC. If you know of a Supermicro motherboard for LGA 1700, with ECC, IPMI, and 10GB SFP+ please send me a link, because I can’t find it!
This one is available in europe with 10gb RJ45, though an intel chipset. And IPMI. But it’s pricy and might be designed with rack chassis airflow in mind. Fewer PCIe slots but more oculink.
PSUs are hard to find out low power efficiency. 80 plus titanium rating has some low power efficiency criteria, but those are pricey. I got a corsair rm550x a couple years ago since it was known to be efficient at low power, but it’s also discontinued.
AM5 + 7900 is solid but idle power will be significantly higher, especially after adding the dGPU. Depending on energy costs cost of ownership will be significantly higher. Proart x670e has been confirmed to have working ECC by some users on the forum (use search), so that seems fine.
I’m also a bit wary of Samsung due to multiple firmware oopsies in the past. AFAIK 990pro has been fixed a while ago though. I’m not sure if you’d really need top of the line ssds for this purpose though, but depending on the price difference it might be ok. Any reputable brand tlc ssd should be fine IMO. Do check for ASPM support/low idle power though. I shaved a couple watts idle off of my server’s idle power by swapping a crappy Kingston NV2 out with an also cheap (but working well so far) Lexar NM790. Both are dramless though so perhaps not recommended for heavier use. Samsung is good for idle power IIRC. As are most of the top of the line SSDs.
Wew! That is pricey. Appreciate having another option though, I’ll check it out!
The Seasonic Prime 750 Titanium appears to have amazing efficiency! Looks like I can still get them new from eBay or refurbished from Newegg (Curious why Seasonic isn’t making these, or an equivalent, anymore). Changed my PSU to this on the build list.
I don’t agree. My 5$ Arctic fans were overpriced compared to my 30$ Noctua fans. Why? One was DOA, two began to rattle after 2 years. Then I have to open up my case, unplug them, get the screwdriver, unscrew them, order new fans, install the new fans… You get the idea.
I rather waste my time at work or in forums
It isn’t even close to Intel Quick Sync.
Is that still needed? Do you have poor upload? I am asking because I used to do the same. Then I realized that my users were just using the 720p default of Plex.
I switched to Jellyfin and disabled transcodes completely. Even the oldest client can nowadays run H.265. Transcodes are a waste of CPU/GPU cycles in my opinion.
Which SSD manufacturer does not have a history?
More important is how they handle the issue in my opinion.
The recent WD + 24H2 BSOD was communicated very poorly but at least solved within two weeks.
I think if you get something from WD, Samsung, Crucial or Kingston you are ok.
I would steer away from the “We buy a Phison controller and implement a buggy firmware for that” SSD crowd like Patriot or ADATA. Then you can end up with a controller that confirms sync writes before they are done.
Again, I don’t know your prices but this mobo is only 200$ more expensive than your suggested mobo where I am and you can buy cheaper RDIMM for it https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/a3spi-4c-ln6pf
Maybe I am a little bit biased, because I am very happy with Supermicro products, while I think Asus has become one of the poorest Mobo vendors.
The 7900 is a much faster CPU and you’ll likely run into fun (or interesting if you prefer calling it that) performance characteristics with “P and E-cores” mixed which isn’t really handled all the well in any scheduler for now at least. If you look at the pricing of the Intel CPU and suggested cooler it’s pretty much the same.
As for PSU, go for something that complies with ATX 3.0 . Just use Google Shopping or whatever, specify lets say 750W, sort by price and look through the list.
Regarding the fans, Amazon (yes, I’m lazy) lists Noctua at ~24$ and Scythe at ~18$, that’s 36$ you can spend on something else or “save”.
4 (mobo) + 6 would be 10 in total, I know it’s not 16 but covers it for now and if you want to keep efficiency down you’d want less drives not more and the LSI HBA/controllers aren’t very efficient at all.
Intel transcoding is indeed better than AMD however I would argue that transcoding kills quality anyway so end result is negligible. I also think you need a “true” 14th gen to get AV1 encoding anyway. It would however stay far away from 13-14th gen given the degradation issues/concerns and the fact that the platform is dead. That’s why I suggested the ARC GPU if it’s of importance.
As for NIC, get something that’s not EOL. You’ll have a much better time in the end. That would be something based on Broadom BCM57412 or I think 800 series (or newer) for Intel as I don’t have time to check right now.
Or just run transcoding on software and the CPU itself…best quality. Might need a bit horsepower in terms of cores, but keeps the room warm in winter as well. I’m always picky when it comes to non-lossless compression. And accelerators are rather inflexible with settings and quality, although they’re damn fast at their limited speciality.
If you can void IPMI, it can save you some money and will lower idle power use.
The iGPU can be used for setup, and then remote in, when running.
Get an intel NIC, like the x710 if energy and ease of use is a concern. With dual ports they can be used as one.
An odd choice. For lower cost, lower noise, and somewhat lower LGA1700 temperatures,
ID Cooling A620 or A720
PCCooler RZ820
Coolleo Etian P60T
Also 3RSYS RC1800 or RC1900 if you can get them. Or MA824 for about Noctua pricing. These are just the better LGA1700 options I’m aware of more or less offhand. There’s plenty of less well matched others, like Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120, that the D12L also fails to compete with on an engineering basis.
Might as well just use the stock Aspects. Or
Toughfan 14 Pro. About NF-A14 G1 cost, pretty much NF-A14x25 G2 noise-normalized airflow.
P14 PWM. Way lower cost, noticeably more noise-normalized airflow than NF-A14 G1s.
OCP probably wouldn’t trip but easy to redline with 16 drives active. Check your 5V rail budget and margins. It’d be kind of a silly reason to rackmount but reasons I haven’t build a Meshify 2 XL are the difficulty of finding ATX supplies rated for more than 25 A on +5 and lack of dual supply support for larger 3.5 arrays. The non-XL’s 10ish bays end up more practical for this reason.
If you haven’t already gone through the Exos manuals their power traces’ll likely be helpful.
20 A +5. Light load efficiency’s not that much higher than current gen RM750x anyways.
The market’s pretty much 850 W gold and 1000+ W platinum because the BOM costs go flat at lower powers. It’ll cost but for something in production look at FSP’s Hydro Ti Pro.
Variants with one, three, and five JMB575s (8-10, 16-18, and 24 ports) are readily available but usually the port multipliers are avoided for reliability and uplink bandwidth (six current gen 3.5s saturate 3.0 x2). Dual 1166s with the four chipset SATAs likely makes more sense, maybe triple or quad if you’re looking at Mach.2 or SSDs.
ASM1166s don’t run as warm as 9400s or 9500s (partly for idling a good bit lower) but they’ll get toasty if left at 1.7 GB/s for a bit. Silverstone doesn’t even bother with a heatsink on the ECS06 so I’ve avoided that one. (The ECS06 port layout looks like kind of a hassle, too.)
From what I can tell that’s the case for everything ASRock Rack does. The 9400-16i also assumes rack airflow (200 LFM). It’s unclear to me from the OP BOM what the HBA cooling solution is.
It’ll be mapped and graphed in the PSU’s Cybenetics report, along with vampire power and 5VSB efficiency. Fairly common Cybenetics also tables 20, 40, 60, and 80 W efficiencies.
If a PSU doesn’t have Cybenetics report it usually sits low enough on my parts stack the build ends up with a PSU that did pass Cybenetics.
+1. Current firmware 990 Pro has the dubious distinction of being one of the few drives I’ve returned for fragility in real workloads, though my use cases are substantially different than this build’s.
SN770 and SN850X have held up well for me, albeit partly because we haven’t enabled 11 24H2, which shielded the builds with SN770s.
“” ARL stuff packed up and ready to be sent back to alza :'-) Honestly, it is a beast of a CPU when the workload isn’t constrained by memory latecy, but for desktop uses that is the case more often than not. The high-load power efficiency also isn’t amazing, but not bad either. 1/2
If anything, these will make for absolutely amazing NAS boxes once W880 with ECC support is out and the firmware/software is a bit more mature, albeit not cheap.
You’re not getting better idle and low-load power consumption with this much PCIe anywhere else."
HUB also said the 245K is on par with the AMD in power and performance, less so in games."
The W880 boards, that are a newer version of the W680 may be worth waiting 2-4 weeks for, to see how they land. You should wait anyway to get black friday deals, as the 245 is not a bad CPU, but its overpriced for now.
My upload is great (5Gb fiber), but a lot of my family/friends are using crappy clients (Roku, LG OS, Samsung OS, etc). Unless I want to buy an Nvidia Shield for each of their TVs I think I’m gonna be stuck transcoding half my streams for a while.
That board has an integrated Atom C5315. Not really what I’m looking for.
I would love to get a Supermicro board if I could find something that meets my needs! My current Supermicro has served me very well even though I abuse it. Asus is only my top contender right now cause it’s one of the few I can find for LGA-1700 with ECC.
Hmm. See now you have me back at square one 2nd guessing the only thing I thought I had figured out. The 7900 was one of my top contenders when deciding on a CPU. I just don’t know if I want to mess with adding a GPU to the equation for transcoding.
Does AMD have a better selection of ECC capable motherboards? Because if they have an option with ECC & SFP+ 10G on board, then that just might clinch it for me. The power I’d save by not needing a NIC addon would probably cancel out the added wattage of an idle GPU.
Goddamn! The Broadcom is over $600 and that Intel brings up a $500 100-Gigabit card. A little overkill for my needs. There’s got to be a way to add a capable 10G SFP+ port that’s less painfully expensive.
I suppose that’s the way I’m currently operating. My current server has dual Xeon E5-2670 v2s - and I’m pretty sure they don’t support hardware transcoding. I guess if I’ve been getting by without it this long I could go with an AMD 7900 and just keep doing it in software…
I don’t really need IPMI. Its more of a ‘nice-to-have’, I could easily go without it.
So one of these dual port cards would be more power efficient than something like this (Intel 82599EN) with a single port?
I just went with what Noctua recommended on their site for the i5-14500. If I stick with that CPU I’ll look more into your suggestions - but now I’m not even sure if I’m gonna with the LGA1700 socket. @diizzy has pulled me back onto the fence between that and the AMD 7900.
Thank you for the recommendation! This looks like my new top contender. I love that it gives me plenty of overhead without needing to stress the efficiency on idle.
I’m not pulling the trigger on any parts until around black Friday, so yeah I’ll make sure to check back on those.
The thing is that it doesn’t scale all that well unless you can sacrifice compression ratio a bit. H.264 main vs high profile are still today have quite different performance characteristics when it comes to encoding.
Ok I’ve made the following adjustments per everyone’s suggestions:
• i5-14500 changed to Ryzen 9 7900 (@diizzy)
• Noctua DH-D12L changed to BeQuiet! Dark Rock Elite(@lemma- the ones you suggested don’t seem to be the quietest options, and this seems to perform in the same league as the A620/A720 while also being relatively quiet):
not sure if it was noted yet but iirc the consumer (gamer) grade Nvidia GPU’s tend to be “locked” in some way and have a limit on the number of simultaneous transcodes you can do. I believe the Quadro / pro grade cards dont have this. I just upgraded my Plex server to use RTX A4500, which is definitely overkill but I think its the style of card you might want to consider if you are using a dedicated GPU
also worth mentioning that if you have not already commited to Unraid, there are other options, I went with Debian + mergerFS + SnapRAID as described in this guide Manual Install on Ubuntu - Perfect Media Server
I am using the Fractal Define 7 case (non-XL), I got 10x HDD’s in it with room for maybe 2 more for a total of roughly 148TB storage space. I am using a U.2 Intel P4600 2TB SSD as the “download drive” for SABnzbd and a WD Red SN700 2TB as the “app drive” for docker containers who write a lot of data such as db’s. I have a separate basic SATA SSD for boot disk. I am using the LSI 9201-16i HBA, since it was touted as being “low power” while still having enough bandwidth for potentially 16x HDD’s. The CPU I am using is the Ryzen PRO 4350G. Got it on eBay for about $80. Motherboard is ROG STRIX B550-F GAMING WIFI II | Gaming motherboards｜ROG - Republic of Gamers｜ROG Global with 64GB ECC DDR4 memory. I dont have nearly as many simultaneous users as you describe so this setup has worked fine for me.
For the PSU its not clear to me if you have considered the SATA Power Connector situation. You are gonna need to make sure you get a PSU that has enough connectors for all the drives you might potentially have. IIRC on the XL Case they can go up to 16 drives, right? After all you got the 16 drive HBA, plus you might need a couple extra for SATA SSD or other devices. I went with the Corsair RM750, not because it is anything fancy but because it had enough SATA Power connectors AND it has extra cables available for purchase.
also, getting a 10Gbps NIC is kinda an interesting choice since it implies you have 10Gbps internet connection?
