I am upgrading from a 10+ year old Intel Intel i7-4770S And that was the last time I built a PC. So you can imagine how lost I am, considering how much has changed over 10 years. On top of that - this will be my first AMD machine.
This build will be my main daily driver and gaming rig. I intend to learn and switch from using windows to linux. I do know that I would want to use windows from time to time, but mainly linux. In what shape or form this will be, I do not know yet, but I am really interested to learn and try things out. I intend to probably try everything:
dual boot
linux host and windows vm
proxmox or unraid with both linux and windows as vms
Basically, as I am new to pretty much everything - the AMD hardware and Linux, I would like some help deciding which motherboard would work best in these scenarios. Which one would make my life easier? I did quite a lot of research before picking these 2 mobos, mainly because they should both be OK (both should have good IOMMU groups). But I do not completely trust my ability to make a good decision. Iām afraid I might have missed or simply did not completely understand the importance of something or otherā¦
I have already purchased most of the parts (including both motherboards) during the sales period last year. The return period is till the end of January, so I have only a couple of days left to pick and choose which mobo I keep and which one I return.
I cannot return the GPU - I bought it on Black Friday in 2022. Although I love my EVGA, so Iām quite happy with it.
Well one thing you might have missed is that the ASRock board has only the two PCIE 16x slots running in 16x/0x mode or 8x/8x mode.(or probably 4x4x4x4x on the top slot for NVME raid or some such somewhere in the bios)
The MSI board has an additional 4x slot(16x physical) that you can plug your 4x U.2 adapter board into, freeing up the second slot for another 8x card of some kind.
Canāt say I find either particularly appealing, though. The ASRock board has better LAN, but both are bad, and the MSI board has no support for M.2 2230 by itās own specification, but has 22110 support on one of the two slots connected to the CPU, with the ASRock board supporting only 2280 with the exception of itās 1 22110 slot that can go all the way down to 2230. Not sure which is worse, but probably having two M.2 directly to the CPU is an advantage overall, I guess; slow NVME M.2 USB adatpers are cheap as chips, and bundles of low-capacity steamdeck upgrades probably donāt need speed to be made useful.
Iām honestly shocked that I can be looking at a pair of $500 motherboards, and feel like Iām being shafted by product segmentation differently in both cases.
Neither of these boards packs a single 1x pcie port, which means eating a 4x or 8x slot or M.2 slot to run a network card if things go south. On the bright side, 40Gbit networking is cheap as ever lately.
If youāre planning on using two dedicated GPUs for your vms, thoughā¦ does your case have a place to mount another GPU? Are you even going to have somewhere to plug that StarTech adapter when all is said and done?
It is unfortunate you cannot return that 3080 in favor of a Radeon 7900 XT or 7900 XTX. Nvidia is notorious for not playing nice with Linux, leading to a lot of limitations that simply do not exist on the AMD side. Unless you really need to do CUDA or AI, Nvidia is the inferior option todayā¦ Though that might change in a year or two, if the current Open Drivers project is allowed to continue.
As for the motherboardsā¦ For that CPU, neither. I would go with a $300 board such as the MSI X670E Tomahawk or Gigabyte X670E Aorus Pro. I see no reason to go for any of the two boards chosen, just a waste of a perfectly good $200 which could be put into a secondary GPU for instance. And the Aorus Pro even has an Intel NIC.
Now, just because I do not see any reason to go for the Taichi or Carbon, does not mean there isnāt one. Double check PCIe lanes!
One very important reason (at least for me) why I chose to buy a bit more expensive tier of motherboard was they both have the Post Code Displays. Considering how inexperienced I am in this new era of hardware and firmware updates, etc. I feel I might really really need this help to troubleshoot. Having the display with error codes has helped me more than once in past. Hence I picked to spend a little to help me later, which I feel I will probably need. It is a shame that these only come with expensive boards nowdays.
Another reason I picked a bit more expensive boards is trying to future proof. I do not plan to go another 10 years between upgrades, but TBH - itās probably gonna be about 4-5.
As for the CPU - that is the good point. I was considering buying AMD Ryzenā¢ 9 7950X and running it ECO mode.
I could still do it, but do I really need it? Probably not. I might upgrade the CPU in a couple of years, ie: do a partial upgradeā¦
Oops, sorry - I missed your post.
I totally agree - I was shocked by the lack of PCIe slots on all the motherboards when I started doing research what to buy. I also agree, that Taichi having only 2 slots is pretty scary.
But then I have force myself to remember, that I have never used more than 1 slot in my current pc for the whole 10 years.
TBH, everything that needs the PCIe slots usually goes into one my homelab servers, and they have plentyā¦
As for the SSDs and the startech adapter - I probably should have removed them from the list. Iām not gonna use them all this rig.
I bought a bunch of SSDs during the Black Friday deals, because every youtuber was saying that flash storage prices gonna be going way up in 2024.
I bought those, and also 2x 870 EVO 2TB Sata and 2x Kioxia CD6-R 7.68TB U.3 and an Intel Optane 905P 960GB, just in case the prices go way upā¦ I also bought 3 or 4 different adapters for
I do not upgrade my main rig for 10 years, because I usually spend all my money on hard drives and SSDs
Thank you for saying this. I though I was not understanding something, or maybe going crazyā¦ Good to know Iām not mad.
Asus ProArt X670E-Creator is a pretty popular board here on the forums, Biostar X670E VALKYRIE also looks like a resonable board if youāre looking for boards doing 2x 8x + 4x. Iād be a bit careful about Gigabyte as their aftermarket support seems to be pretty poor in general including BIOS updates.
Agree. In fact, I donāt find the whole āpremiumā line based on X670E chipset appealing. The only quality I find consistently is that I find them overpriced.
I think youāll find that mobos with 650 chipset are offering everything you need today for less than half the price. Save the difference and upgrade mobo half way through your anticipated lifetime.
Mobos today donāt really need a code display. Most (all?) have leds that indicate issues in RAM, GPU, CPU during boot process, which is as helpful in troubleshooting.
While AMD CPU are generally better than Intel this generation, their chipsets are lacking, especially the āhigh endā x670e which is 2 asmedia chips daisy chained off a 4 x PCIe 4.0.
As for the ASRock Taichi vs the MSI carbon. I would choose the carbon as it has the extra x4 slot.
Likely fine.
I researched nothing software wise for my secondary machine, and the hardest part was finding a free USB drive for the install
Easiest way to do this: Find the full ISO of the distribution you want, then use the Fedora Media Writer to create the boot-stick.
I run Debian with KDE, looks and uses almost the same as windows, except you can get rid of dumb keyboard shortcuts and it does not randomly update.
Case is a cardboard box, I assume?
This.
Current desktop mainboards are for the typical GPU + 1 M.2 setups, not for enthusiast or high-end workstation uses.
For 200ā¬ more, you are in Threadripper-land, and the CPU costs 1500ā¬
Desktop, especially what pretends to be high-end price wise, is almost the same as the mid-tier boards, just with a more serious paint job.
Rant related:
And that was the last time I built a PC. So you can imagine how lost I am, considering how much has changed over 10 years. On top of that - this will be my first AMD machine.
