The research I’ve done so far makes A620 not seem very compelling. So far the boards that look interesting (GIGABYTE MC13-LE0, AsRock Rack B650D4U, Supermicro H13SAE-MF) are more than I wanted to spend but I’m still looking through the ASUS B650 and X670 boards.
Given my recent experience with Gigabyte and the “recent” trainwreck Gigabyte MW34SP0 Motherboard I’d highly consider avoiding Gigabyte.
ASRock boards looks pretty nice (probably much more expensive than its worth though unless you highly value IPMI) but the absense of BIOS updates would make me very cautious.
Don’t see the benefit with the Supermicro mobo at all unless you’re deadset on the brand.
The ASUS ProArt X670E-CREATOR is a nice board but might be a bit overkill depending on your requirements. The 8x/8x/2x arragement of PCIe slots is quite rare including PCIe support. Some MSI board have 8x/8x/4x but lacks ECC support.
The X670 proart board is overkill, the B650 proart looks interesting though. Keeps the 8x/8x/4x (gen 4 instead of 5) layout without all the features I don’t need. It’s also reasonable at $239.
I can live without IPMI considering the machine wouldn’t be living in a datacenter. Crucial also lists compatible ECC UDIMM’s and not only are they available but the price has dropped significantly from the last time I looked into DDR5 ECC pricing.
I’d lose some of the features and PCIE connectivity I’d get with Xeon/Epyc but get lower TDP, iGPU and realistically I don’t need to go ham with tuning ZFS on my home NAS. I’ll do some more digging but this might be a winner.
Yes, it may be a decent tradeoff but you probably want to add a NIC due to the Realtek NICs.
I already have a 10Gb SFP+ NIC, not a problem.
A little heads up, not sure how well AM5 fares on TrueNAS Core as they’re AFAIK still on FreeBSD 13.1 ( https://download.freenas.org/ ) possibly with some backports. From what I understand Scale is less reliable and also targets a rather old version of Debian/Linux kernel. Upcoming FreeBSD 14.0 (FreeBSD 14.0 Release Process | The FreeBSD Project) runs fine however, my box is currently on 14.0-ALPHA2 so it’s a bit behind last release ( New FreeBSD snapshots available: stable/14 (ALPHA4) (20230901 4c3f144478d4) ) but runs fine doing NAS stuff and a bunch of other things.
I fully intend to test before replacing my old NAS. I know a lot of people are moving to scale but I have a soft spot for FreeBSD + ZFS (and had all kinds of problems the last time I tried scale) and if it came to it could just manually do all the TrueNAS stuff in 14.
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A620 isn’t that bad of a deal for a SOHO NAS. The main difference is PCIe 4.0 instead of PCIe 5.0 (completely irrelevant for 10 GbE NIC and SATA drives, both which do not even saturate a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot), no overclocking support (you do not want to overclock a NAS and a 7600 is plenty powerful), no crossfire support (crossfire is dead anyway), fewer PCIe lanes (not a problem on mATX). And that Asus board even support ECC. So, for the use case I would say it fits, but naturally you can always pay more if you want to 
The best NAS option IMO would be an ITX board with one PCIe slot, two m.2 slots, 12-16 SATA ports and a dual 10 GbE NIC, but that is just waaaaay too specialized for most companies so 
If I only needed to add an HBA or a NIC it would work but I need to add both and as far as I can tell none of the ASUS A620 boards break the PCIE out as 1 x16, 1 x4. Might be fine for other use cases but a non starter in mine.
I did include this one in the build, didn’t I?
Those adapters in my experience are notoriously unreliable. The best worst case is drives dropping offline when the adapter overheats when moving a lot of data, same issue I’ve seen with PCIE > SATA adapters. The best one I’ve personally seen is the Silverstone ECS07 which has a heat sink but I can’t find a good reason to spend $50 on that instead of on a better motherboard when I already have a HBA. If for some reason I specifically wanted to build something small and it wasn’t going to be that busy it might be worth it, but neither of those is true in my case.
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If you have a HBA that’s not ancient there’s little reason to switch unless it causes issues. The major benefits going for lets say a ASM1166 PCIe card would be AHCI (no need to worry about drivers and firmware) and cooling as they tend to run a lot cooler being more “dumb”/less capable.
Like this one… ECS06
ASRock Rack do provide BIOS updates, though?
Maybe you’re trying to point out their velocity of updates due to there not being one in recent months, which, sure, they don’t really publish updates frequently (which I would expect is desired) and have been slow in releasing updates for new AGESA updates/etc., but they eventually do…
It even says “First release”, no updates for AGESA etc.
Compare that list to this one for example:
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So you are just referring to their velocity/frequency. That doesn’t mean they don’t provide BIOS updates at all, because historically they have (e.g. for their X570 boards) when it’s necessary.
These are server boards. Several others in this forum use their boards regularly, so I don’t really think the fact they haven’t published a new BIOS for a recently released motherboard in a couple of months is something one needs to really be cautious about. They’re just conservative about it afaict.
That said, I recall reading others contacting support to get newer/modified BIOS images with success to resolve some fringe issue, so that’s an option.
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AGESA for example is a crucial part of AMDs “chipset framework” not to forget microcode updates (I know some can be updated afterwards by the OS) and a few months is now 6 months. I would indeed find it odd to poke the manufacturer for expected aftermarket support.
I agree the B650 ProArt has a great feature set for a NAS or any homeserver. x8/x8 is very rare these days. Got that one on my watchlist for good reasons. ASUS recently added Kingston ECC UDIMM to the QVL (took a while until they added it, so they aren’t up-to-date everywhere).
Bummer it uses crab NICs though, one of the reasons I went with its bigger brother instead.
When looking for a consumer board as a server, I ignore the on-board NICs. The build I’m using this will have 25Gbit Mellanox, one of the reason why I like the x8/x8. You can upgrade networking without sacrificing all of your only (x16) slot. So 2x NVMe or HBA in the second slot is still possible and allows for more and better server builds depending on what storage you run. Or if you want a GPU in addition to proper networking
on-board 10G became exotic ever since Covid. AM4 had 300$ boards with 10G, now with Z790 and X670, you don’t get this <600-700$.
And x8/x8 split + 10G networking…well that’s unobtainium. I’m glad I got my x570D4U-2L2T before the board price hikes (payed 330$)
ASUS ProArt X670E-Creator currently retails at ~450$ (sometimes down to 400$) and comes with 10G (Marvell) and 2.5Gbit Intel for example
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