I have an old home server that I want to turn into a NAS for my new duel home servers(Have not bought anything yet). I would like to buy two new PCs and have a two compute one store cluster. But I haven’t really been keeping up with things. If I went with AMD Ryzen 7 5800X’s can I use them without a GPU? Everything i’m reading say no. If this isn’t a good choice does anyone have a good recommendation? I’m not married to anything.
Thanks
Most of them will boot with no gpu. A lot of desktop specific boards will require fiddling with bios setting to get them to do so. Asrock is usually pretty easy to use as a server. They even have server specific AM4 stuff in there Asrock Rack line of products. They can get a bit spendy, and if the budget does not scare you away, used 2nd gen Epyc gear is a steal and is pretty perfect for home lab stuff.
The main question would be what is the purpose of the “cluster” as you mentioned I mean I understand that you want to have one server acting as a NAS and the other one is for computation but what is the second server actual doing? If you plan to just run a lot of home lab services like Plex, Jellyfin, Home Automation stuff and your development environment there you might not need a second server you can do all that directly on the NAS.
If you don’t just want to buy hardware for the sake of getting cool tech to play with you can also think about ARM SoCs like the raspberry pi to do the compute part they work like a charm for everything that is not IO heavy and are powerful enough for most of the home lab services that I see on the internet. It is also possible to build a cluster with multiple raspberry pi like mini computers if you want to do something with k3s for example (unfortunately they aren’t fair priced in the moment).
I am not sure with the Ryzen 7 5800X’s but I can say that a Threadripper can boot without any GPU and would expect that you get this also to work with ryzen processors otherwise if you don’t want to go with server specific hardware you could also add a very cheap GPU just in case.
I would be really happy to help with your hardware selection could you describe what you plan to do with your home servers?
Its a home lab. I’m a network engineer, but I end up doing automation and server work as well. If I need to do something at work and I’m not sure I just spin something up and play with it. Or if I see something interesting I do the same. I want to run a cluster with separate network storage just for the practice.
My current server is an old intel i5 6600k with 32GB’s of RAM. I think that should still be fine for a NAS. I wanted to spend around a thousand dollars, but I relies that’s not going to happen. So i’m thinking more like $1500 now. 5800x’s are going for like $200 right now. And i’m just using Proxmox for the hypervisor.
I haven’t done any PC building since 2016 when I did my i5 6600k as a gaming rig.
People like to use CPUs with iGPU for homeserver. Like the 5600G, AMD has a “G” at the end of those Zen3 CPUs with integrated graphics.Those offer basic graphics because you don’t get IPMI on non-server boards. I heard of people installing Proxmox with a dedicated GPU and plugging it out afterwards once you can manage everything via web interface. I don’t have any experience with this myself.
People usually go for -G type AMD CPUs or get a board with IPMI.
The new Zen4 CPUs all have integrated graphics, but judging from the debian kernel used in Proxmox, expect some problems with “new hardware”. But if you’re sold on the 5800x (which doesn’t have an iGPU), you may end up wasting a slot and power consumption for a mostly unnecessary part.
Do you think AMD Ryzen 7 5700G is a better choice? Why are these cheaper? Not overclockable?
They trade performance and some lanes for iGPU, low TDP and price over their normal “x” variant. Can’t say anything about overclocking, but you don’t buy a low TDP CPU in order to overclock it. It’s underclocked by design. Good and cheap Ryzen CPU if 6 or 8 Zen3 cores will do the job (which is the case for most home servers).
Because of the reduced amount of lanes, I think PCIe 4.0 NVMe are limited to 1 or it’s 3.0 only, can’t remember. And because of iGPU sharing main memory as VRAM, they don’t support ECC RAM.
You can get GT 710/730 1x pcie cards for not to much
He’s running Linux. The bottom of the barrel AMD will be simpler when it comes to drivers
Eh you just need a display out right who cares about drivers?
Some people just like how turnkey AMD is for when they make a Linux server. They don’t have to worry about any of the breakages
The point of my recommendation is that its a 1x gpu, so wont use useful slots. He was saying to use it without a gpu so this is prob the best GPU still (Low power doesnt use slots you generally care about etc) This would expand his option of mobo if the require gpu to boot.
Oh yeah I know I’m just giving him options. That said, the only thing that I really hate about AMD is they made it so that you have to have a graphics card to post on the consumer platform. I don’t know if that’s true for their server platform, but that’s pretty much bogus. I do not like that
I ended up going with 2x AMD Ryzen 5700G’s with 64GBs of RAM. The cluster is working great. I have 4x 2TB sata SSD’s in a RAIDZ on my old node also running Proxmox but passing all its resources into its TrueNAS VM and NFS mounting it back to Proxmox. Can migrate VMs between my two compute nodes with 0 loss.
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