My old Asrock rack D2550D4I motherboard gave up the ghost after almost 10 years of service and shall be replaced. While doing that the workloads running in a second hand skylake based Supermicro board will be put into the same machine. The goal is in short to get the homesetup running again with much improved load times in Nextcloud, add AI based image tagging and improve general performance. All this at a much lower energy cost. Higher transfer speeds and better transcoding performance is a bonus.
Hardware thoughts so far
Asus ProArt B650 Creator or a TUF Gaming X670E-Plus
Ryzen 5 7600
32GB of ECC RAM
4 NVMe SSD for a ZFS pool “speedypool” (3 is also possible to survive with, but 4 would be better)
A second hand LSI 9311-i8 HBA
6 HDDs in a ZFS pool “tank”
A chassis I already have at home
1 or 2 SATA SSDs for OS.
At some point in the future there will be a GPU installed for acceleration of loads that can be accelerated, like the image tagging or AI I find useful in the future
Usecase
The box is used as a NAS and to host some web services with a mix of docker and Virtual Machines. It is only for use by the family. The services I want to run are
Nextcloud, with local AI powered image tagging
Collabora
Plex
Gitlab
2 - 3 Static Websites
Umami
Homeassistant
Unifi network application
Some other small things
NAS, probably TrueNAS Scale in a VM
The plan is to have the NVMe disk in one pool, mainly for faster IO and the HDDs for backups of the NVMe pool + bulk storage of less intense loads. My main problem is choosing a good motherboard without paying way to much money, and I am not seeing an obvious choice like I did when the I bought the D2550. Second hand server hardware has crossed my mind but what is reasonably priced is so old that I fear it will torpedo the chances for energy savings. I have come to the conclusion that I can probably buy the X670 based board and put the HBA in the 4x slot without really leaving any performance on the table as it is a PCIe 3.0 card.
Are there any obvious choice I am missing? It feels a bit odd to buy a consumer platform and shove ina closet for a decade, but the “cheap” server grade parts seems to be missing this time around. I have seen a lot of threads about the Asrock X470D4U2 boards but I cannot see it working with 3-4 NVMes and a GPU. It is also very expensive in my region at close to $700 so I do not consider that an option.
My other doubt is the CPU, if it is worth getting something with a better iGPU in the 8000 series to postpone the dedicated GPU or if that is just waste?
Why not ASUS ROG Strix B650E-E Gaming WiFi?
You probably want a better cooler than stock for the 7600 (or grab the 7700 instead)
You might want to consider a ASM1166 controller instead of hte LSI one if you just need 6 SATA ports.
That will also get you Intel LAN instead of Realtek.
That mobo looks interesting, and it looks like it can be found at a decent price right now. Wow is Mobo pricing a mess here, how can retailers that are normally close competitors have a price difference of $100 for the same board??!
Interesting note about the cooler, is it such a jump for the included between those SKUs? The 7600 is right now available for a good price so I can throw in a resonable tower cooler and still be much cheaper than the 7700. But I would probably try the included first, the thing is going to be in a closet so I do not care much about the noise
I have heard a lot of bad things about the ASM controllers so I think I will stick with LSI. It will also allow me to have a hot spare + I am considering second hand SAS drives that I can get for cheap. I know it is frowned upon in some circles to not refresh with new drives every 5 - 6 years, but I have had such good experience with retired enterprise drives that I am willing to roll the die. RaidZ2 and remote backup is needed anyway and with the money saved I can splurge on extra redundancy/spares
Now THAT is a big plus with that motherboard! Thanks for the advice
the first time I see that an Intel I225-V is a purchase argument.
I recently bought a Gigabyte board with the Intel I225-V, under Proxmox I constantly had the problem that the card dropped to 100Mbit, only after a firmware upgrade and as a passthrough to OPNsense the card is stable
I might be a bit out of the game. The last what, 3 times I have been shopping for PC hardware it has been “Intel Networking or enjoy flaky connections”. That is not the case anymore, Realtek is actually a reasonable choice?
I have no idea what the current status is with Intel I225-V and I226-V, but since the problem is not new I thought it was solved, so I didn’t worry about it when I bought the Gigabyte board.
I can only say from personal experience that it has been ages since I had problems with a Realtek nic, and the problems with the Intel nic are the first in years, apart from cable problems.
So just google “I225-V issues” and take a look yourself.
And as I said, the card is now stable with OPNsense, but with Proxmox I still have the problem.
In my experience the issue(s) are way overblown since the B3 revision which pretty much everything ships with since at least a year back. You have everything from “*sense”-boxes to motherboards using such controllers. The ones I’ve encountered have worked flawless and I still would rate them way better than Realtek which makes sense as it’s not something you see in network gear and higher grade setups.
Do note that you also get 2 more cores going for 7700 instead of 7600.
That is true, but it is almost $120 more expensive right now. The 7600 have good offers until today, the 7700 does not. It would of course be nice but I do not think I need it. The current setup is almost fast enough, and that is a Xeon version of a 2500k, 4 cores from what, 2013? I do not think I can justify that higher price for the workloads I am expecting