I can’t see anything wrong with it really. I can only comment on the SSD because I got one (albeit on a Z97 motherboard) and has been working fine.
What about home on a SATA SSD? I don’t know what workloads are you into, but I’ve only had slowdowns editing multiple 4K 100Mbit clips using a SATA SSD. Other than that bottleneck is elswhere in the system but the storage.
Got the 980 in my laptop and I love the power states. basically zero power consumption and power on hours. I may use an NFS share from my server for the time being, but I want some beefy PCIe 4.0 NVMe in /home for all kinds of stuff.
I think I want a more cheap option. And I don’t necessarily need two ports as the board comes with 1x2.5G and 1x1G, giving me plenty of options out of the box. I probably get some 100€ TP-Link single port or so. Doesn’t need to be fancy as I run most virtualization stuff on my server (which indeed has dual x550. But I won’t say no to any cheap ebay enterprise alternatives. Just need RJ45 10G because I probably won’t switch to SFP+ at home.
While yes you could, cheapest SATA is $82 and cheapest m.2 is $109. In EU, gap is even narrower with €97 vs €109. So in the interest of saving money, SATA drives make little sense at this storage tier.
Really? Is that small the difference between a 2TB SATA drive and NVME drive?
I usually go for Samsung because they’re reliable and the difference between their SATA and NVME drive is larger.
I only have one NVME slot so my next storage upgrade is gonna be NVME only. If I had space in my SFF case I would be strongly consider a SATA drive once again.
Pulled the trigger. Noctua D15 wasn’t available at my usual retailer, so the whole package will be delivered in a week or so. I might take some photos while building and post some first impressions and benchmarks (5900x vs 7900x).
On a sidenote: I payed more for my 5900x than I did for the 7900x. And with all the new AM5 boards and DDR5 prices in decline, I don’t see that much of a AM5 platform hike anymore.
I had AM4 in mind for some economy build, but when I checked CPU and memory prices (DDR4 vs DDR5), I decided to go for AM5. Boards are still way more expensive for AM5 when talking feature parity.
I payed as much for my x570D4U-2L2T as I did for the x670E Steel Legend (both ~400€). Boards feel like a ripoff, CPU and memory are fine.
It’s basically non-existent at this point. The only advantage of SATA is that you can get as much SATA ports as you want as they are basically free. PCIe lanes for NVMe are much harder to come by in consumer boards. Oh and hotplug is a lot easier with SATA. I can see SATA SSDs shine in home server / NAS use or if you want more space and got no NVMe slots left (which is >8TB as most boards come with 4x M.2 nowadays)
That’s why I mainly chose AsRock. Almost all of their boards have a x4 CPU slot instead of an additional NVMe CPU slot. AsRock also sells a Thunderbolt AIC that is intended for these slots.
And the Steel Legend x4 slot is way down at the bottom, far away from the GPU slot. Really the best layout I could find outside the 600+€ boards with x8/x8 option.
A nice thing if you want 10GbE and don’t care about an additional NVMe 4.0 CPU slot
Yep, landscape as of Dec 2022 for cheapest drives at various tiers, using PC Part Picker list and Geizhals.eu (e.g. choose SSD/HDD and filter for capacity and price):
Capacity
m.2 ($)
SATA ($)
HDD ($)
m.2 (€)
SATA (€)
HDD (€)
512 GB
$29.49
$22.99
$17.75
€29.90
€25.49
€13.95
1 TB
$50.99
$43.99
$28.98
€55.39
€51.90
€27.85
2 TB
$81.99
$109.99
$38.13
€109.26
€96.90
€34.66
4 TB
$249.99
$209.99
$64.98
€315.00
€281.01
€70.80
8 TB
$1074.99
$651.89
$99.00
€979.53
€622.71
€145.88
16 TB
—
—
$225.00
—
€2039.00
€254.89
Only place you save any significant amount of money going SATA SSD over m.2 is in the 4TB and 8TB tiers - though, only the 4TB is even remotely price efficient at the moment. You need more than 4 TB capacity then it is time to invest in a NAS and/or HDD.
IMO 1 TB NVMe is the current sweet spot boot drive, with 2 TB boot drives being within reach for most US / EU consumers (and they currently drive the PC consumer market). 4TB are getting there, 8TB+ is “F*ck off pleb” territory for now. Let’s see if 4TB NVMe goes below 200 next year! If they do, then I for one will be glad to kick out my remaining SATA drives
But as you mention, m.2 slots still come at a premium, at the same time it should be possible to make an ITX board with one 8x PCIe 5.0 to a x16 slot and 4x m.2 slots - there is really nothing stopping that now. At the same time, it does take more place on the actual board than SATA - OTOH, drives are large enough these days that either 4TB is sufficient or you have a NAS somewhere in your setup.
I think within five years, SATA ports will be migrated to expansion cards for the most part, like SATA → m.2 adapters (not to be confused with m.2 → SATA). Old storage will keep working but just like IDE drives, support will dry up as the new interface takes hold.
Quick update: everything arrived (yay). Everything is running fine and well. Memory needed manual setup for XMP profile, otherwise everything was plug&play. Was able to install Tumbleweed via USB without any problems.
I don’t have my GPU installed yet as I have used it in my server to use in a “gaming VM” until now that served as my desktop the last months.
Zen4 iGPU runs well with 5120x1440@120Hz. No problems with Linux, just plug&play.
on-board Bluetooth connection is a bit wierd. Only has like 50cm range. Do I have to mount the WiFi antenna on rear IO? This is my first board with Wifi/BT and I don’t intend to use Wifi, I have 1G,2.5G and 10G NIC
Othwise I stress tested the CPU yesterday with some phoronix benchmarks. Really impressive. Ran a batch of zstd compression and y-crusher and performance is staggering. y-cruncher boosted temps to high 80s to low 90s °C (3x5min runs for 10b digits) which seems to be expected behaviour. 6-12 core load is 70ish °C in the tests I ran. I didn’t tweak any ECO/PPT things yet
Noctua D-15 and the Torrent case play very well together. Amount of airflow is impressive and the D-15 fin stacks get plenty of cold air from the front and bottom. Good choice which I can recommend to others in need of good air cooling.
Ok, I solved the 50cm bluetooth range. The “Hyper™” antenna that came with the board now lets me see BT devices from half of my district. Feels like searching for WiFi and checking the networks at the railway station or airport.
BIOS is a bit wierd. No dedicated ECO Mode option, but free form TDP/EDC/PPT setting. Says mW but I tested 65 and 65000 for TDP but didn’t appear to be working.
BIOS also has Platform first error reporting entry which appears to be there for ECC memory (2x64GB ECC stick upgrade soon?). Otherwise it feels like an AsRock BIOS and lots of similarities between the X570D4U from my server, well except for XMP and RGB settings and having 1080p UEFI menu.
Didn’t get fan control to work in the OS yet (some I2C-bus things? I don’t know how this all works). But fan curve editor in BIOS does the job just fine (called FANtastic lulz) but I prefer to see Fan RPM during work.
Also hooked up with my server via iSCSI and NFS (Tumbleweed Yast Wizard is glorious, definitely some USP from SuSE) and installed my GPU and Nvidia drivers (fairly easy with the community repo)
