Motherboard Recommendation

[Ganet]

Hi,

I’m looking far a recommendation for a of motherboard to use in upgrading my current ESXi/NAS server may move to proxmox not yet made up my mind.

As its for home use (and I have a restrictive budget) i’m looking for low ish power consumption, with that I have been looking into the Ryzen 5 3600 or the Ryzen 5600X if I can actually get hold of one when they release and they don’t add huge amounts to the price.

I won’t be adding a gpu of any real note in it so off of a pcie 1x is no real problem for this and if I can totally remove after install great.

There is however a few bits in my setup which do require pcie so need to factored into the recommendation, 1st I have an old Dell FV12-NV7 that has been turned into JBOD enclosure with 16 sata drives 12 from the backplain which is only 3gig sata and 4 at 6gig sata, this is mainly for archive use and not always on, I worked out (I could be incorrect) that max throughput would be 6gb on the pcie lane assuming 1 card (will be replacing the card I have), I have been thinking about the LSI SAS9201-16e as they are cheap on ebay and as far as I can tell are good for TrueNAS (it will be past through to my NAS host), this card is pcie 2.0 so to get all the 6gb would need an 8x connection but i’m fine with 4x or if anyone can recommend a cheap pcie 3.0 controller card that would also be great.

I also want a dual port CONNECTX-2 VPI (pcie 2.0 8x) 40gb infiniband or dual port CONNECTX-3 VPI (pcie 3.0 8x) card for network connection, I currently have the CONNECTX-2 VPI and cabling but the 3 would be much better so I will look into upgrading it.

The final pcie I want is https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07PCKTL1J/ for some quick ssd storage pool this will need a pcie 16x, I will need some on board nvme for pool cache for my main storage (4 x 8gb in the main case) which will be off the mb.

Other random info I currently have 32gb non ecc ram (2*16gb 3200mhz) to use but with moving to Ryzen I will move to ECC but that will be a later upgrade and maybe 64gb, currently using ESXI with the free licence but I have a 4 core intel and i’m not sure if the amount of cores on the Ryzen will go past that licence if so i’ll be moving to proxmox which I have never used so will be fun.

Thank all for reading all that and thanks in advance for any help

Mark

[Ganet]

I just thought, with the 4 x 8gb drives (not yet got but adding) I put that they would be off of the mb but i’m now not 100% sure I can pass them through to the host in EXSi and if I can’t will TrueNAS (or ZFS) not like that, if so I may need another controller card.

[wertigon]

First off, since it’s for server use any AM4 motherboard will do. Install the system with a temporary GPU card, install SSH, then you can remove the GPU and replace with whatever PCIe you want.

If you want things to last, get a B550 motherboard. I will assume ATX/mATX form factor. This is one of the cheaper boards on my list that still ticks most of your boxes, the Gigabyte B550m DS3H

2x m.2, supports bifurcation in the top slot at the very least, ECC support and 3 PCIe slots (two x16 + one x1). VRMs are not very impressive, but since you will only put a 6 core in there they should be fine. You could use something like this as a throwaway card, would’ve preferred AMD since Linux build, but oh well!