I am looking for a mini-ITX motherboard to use for a DIY home server. It has to be for an AMD CPU and preferably with 10 GbE networking.
Any recommendation?
What’s your use case? Just a NAS? You may be good with a Chinese N100 NAS board. Those tend to come with four 2.5GbE ports and six SATA. The performance is nothing impressive, and it is an Intel, but it’ll idle at just 10W and passive cooling is enough even under load, which is cool. It’ll also have an Intel iGPU, which is really nice for transcoding (ie Jellyfin).
Anyway, the best AMD mITX motherboard is the B650I Aorus Ultra. It’s also one of the cheapest. No AM4/5 mITX board has more than 2.5GbE, but you can add 10GbE using an M.2 or PCIe card.
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They have N250 N200 etc too and some come with a 10GbE and up to 8 SATA
I looked on amazon a bit for these while I decide if I want ECC or not. Theres lots of no name options on there like this
or this asrock that you can just stick a 10Gbe nic in
I second the B650I as a nice board, onboard wifi can be absolute trash depending on the revision you get so if you need it’s worth swapping for an intel AX2** (retailers except brick and mortar won’t tell you which one you get unless you look at the box). The 3 M.2s is nice but the first two on the front run hot in idle cause it pulls the heat from the VRMs to the M.2 riser heatsink. I consistently run ~55C on the front idle, up to 60 when CPU (just 7700x) is under load while my back M.2 only runs at 45C. Also a huge pain in the ass to get to the back M.2 so if you plan on running a Gen4 drive throw it in there so you never have to go through the pain of opening that backplate up again. If I were to buy it again I would go into microcenter and make sure the one I grabbed was a revision with a good wifi card (if that matters to you)
Might be a little hard to do this though. You have 2 M.2s on a riser card and the fan for the riser card heatsink is maybe glued into the fan header (yes I tried very hard to take the whole thing off and couldn’t). In Wendells video it wasn’t glued on, and he didn’t seem to have any trouble taking it off, but I couldn’t do it. I would take a look at this guys video and see if you have enough room to put an M.2 to 10GbE port or would need to use the PCIe slot.
Get some mini-ITX with decent VRM to have some longevity and PIe5 for both main slot and main M.2 stick.
And if you can get it, BIOS support for bifurcation of main x16 PCI
WRT 10G NIC, I’d wait for new Intel’s X610 NIC line. It makes no sense to hunt down a MOBO with 10G as it would come with meh Aquantia chip and price tag as it was made of gold.
OTOH with Intel’s new line you’ll be able to get NIC with 4x10G RJ-45 on modern process and with lower power consumption.
If you want to spare main PCIe slot for something else ( perhaps M.2 or SAS/SATA RAID card), you could hang it off, for example secondary M.2 PCIe4x4 slot with an M.2->PCIe adapter…
Thanks for all suggestions!
ASRock Rack has some interesting boards in the form factor “deep mini-ITX” that might work:
https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=AM5D4ID-2T/BCM#Specifications
https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=B550D4ID-2L2T#Specifications
Does anyone knows what “BTO” stands for? (In the header for B550D4ID-2L2T)
They come with a price tag, however, I look for something that will work reliably for a long time…
They are WAY too expensive IMO.
I can’t see a value in them, quite the opposite.
I find geizhals parametric search to be invaluable tool for such quests:
mini-ITX AM5, PCIE5 slot, M.2 PCIE5, 100A+ MOSFETS in VRM
This seems like a good start…
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I believe „Built To Order“
Good place for searching!
I think I want a motherboard that is focused more on being a server rather then something for gaming…