Been planning a Ryzen build for a bit now - But struggling with the motherboard choice… I require quite a few PCIe slots, so the ASRock Rack boards aren’t viable in my case.
ASRock B550 Taichi (Pros: ASRock - Cons: Only x1 Intel 2.5Gbit port for the same price as the ASUS board)
After watching JayzTwoCent’s and GamersNexus’ most recent videos about ASUS, I’m a little hesitant to go for the ASUS board, even though my personal experience with ASUS mbo’s (albeit nearly ten years ago at this point) have been nothing but good… Even though the dual 2.5Gbit NICs would be pretty nice, the issues with newer ASUS boards both GamersNexus and Jay have experienced scare me in regards to data loss in case of any issues. Anyone who’s got any input?
I havent really looked into the recent asus debacle. But it seems this involves the newer mobos ans the B550s are previous gens so my guess it should still be fine.
It’ll be used as my hypervisor as well (not really interested in virtualizing TrueNAS), just for some basic VM’s to play around with. Alongside Plex, which is why I will have a GPU too.
In total, I’ll have an HBA card, SAS expander, potentially a 10Gbit network card and a GPU for transcoding. Hence the need for more PCIe slots.
From my experience the proart really didn’t like you using all the pci-e slots at the same time, I can’t remember the specific quirk as it was about 6 months ago when I built the stream PC
The HBA and SAS expander are pretty old though, with the HBA being a Dell H310 flashed to IT mode. I believe it uses 8 lanes, while the SAS expander uses 4 I believe (RES2SV240). But you just made me realize that neither of the MBO’s I listed would fit all the cards I listed. Physically, I mean. I’m not aware of any PCIe x1 10Gbit cards, anyway…
Welp, seems like my search for a decent motherboard hasn’t come to an end yet. The more I search, the more it seems like I won’t be able to reuse my old Ryzen CPU’s.
I have I have X570 Creator in my two proxmox boxes, x570 taichi in my desktop. Pro art is tech the best but I wasnt willing to pay the price for the small feature gains.
If you need PCIe slots, what do you need as far as PCIe lanes? The B550 is considerably more limited in available lanes compared to say the X570. I’m personally going to be using a ASUS Pro WS X570-ACE, but I already have one so that’s not really a decision for me.
EDIT: And yeah, I wouldn’t buy ASUS right now if I was doing it again. Not a huge fan of the way they’re behaving in this AM5 SoC voltage oops. Like how hard would it be to say “hey everyone, there’s a bug in our BIOS, please turn off EXPO while we figure out the issue and we’ll have a new BIOS to fix the issue after we properly run it through our QA testing.”
The Intel RES2SV240 only draws power from the PCIe lanes. This specific card actually has the feature that it also can operate from Molex power. Hence, strictly speaking you don’t need a PCIe slot for it (you still need a place to put it, though).
As a NAS the machine will likely operate 24x7 and as such many people are concerned with power consumption.
The x570 based boards draw significantly more power on idle than their B550 counterparts - certainly the mATX sized mobos. I believe this statement to be generally be correct, but there are probably outliers. Just mentioning it for awareness.
I think the ASRock B550 Taichi will do nicely, given that it’s got an Intel 2.5Gbit NIC, alongside 3 full sized PCIe slots and a whopping 8 SATA ports for all my SSD desires.
I’m thinking of slotting in a GPU in the top slot for Plex transcoding and whatever else I can find it useful for.
And I’ve decided to try out a 9300-16i instead of the H310 and SAS expander, as it seems like a more elegant solution. Given that I’ve got room for 18 drives, two of them would be connected via SATA, which I presume is fine.
The third and final slot would be a 10Gbit network card, something like an Intel X550-T2.
And of course 2 NVME SSD’s in their respective slots.
In that case, I believe an ASRock B550 Taichi should suffice with the GPU and HBA being at x8, and the NIC at x4.
If this setup seems unoptimized or there’s any glaring issues I’m not aware of, then by all means, let me know
Double check the manual to make sure that it is 8 SATA ports and M.2 slot. My Gigabyte board needs the M.2 slots to be vacant so all 6 SATA ports will be usable… which is only specified in the detailed specs of the website.
Thanks - I checked the manual, quickly read through anywhere it said “SATA” and didn’t find any fine print about them not working when the M.2 slots are in use. But in any case, I likely won’t need all 8 ports. Would just be a nice-to-have just in case.
