Hi all.
Have been slowly chipping away at buying parts for a new NAS.
This was to be based on an EPYC 7443P, on a ROMED8-2T from AsRock Rack, with 256gb of DDR4 ECC for ZFS ARC.
As the CPU, MB and RAM are by and large the most expensive items (I already have the pool drives from the current NAS I operate), I’ve been procrastinating buying them.
Unfortunately, over the last few months, the price of these components has shot up to a point where I can’t really consider them anymore. The RAM has tripled in price per stick, and the CPU is double its original price.
I initially looked at more modern AMD hardware, but the only parts in the original price brackets are awful performance-wise in comparison (to the tune of only 8C and turboing to only 3.0GHz), or comparable parts performance-wise are several thousands of GBP.
I already have the CPU cooler for the build, but it might just be collateral at this point.
Looking at price-to-performance, recent Intel Granite Rapids gear looks a lot better. A 6511P and a comparable AsRock Rack board with the 7 (iirc) PCIe slots (I did see one) seems like it may do the trick.
Any advice, inputs or things I should consider?
Asrock Rack also has server boards based on the AM5 platform. Paired with an EPYC4004 series CPU, or any AM5 desktop CPU, should make a performant system.
I need the lanes, sorry, I will be using 6 add-in cards
Have you considered used?
Sometimes you might find reasonable prices on bargainhardware.co.uk but some are not a real bargain, like ssd’s aren’t cheap
Some components are also reasonably priced from CEX via uk.webuy.com
I’ll look, though I always have some ick/distrust with used stuff
Edit: No dice on Bargain Hardware
Fair play…
I am a real skinflint…
The Intel isn’t a bad choice, its got ~20% more single threaded performance over the AMD processor you were considering.
I’d personally choose a different board vendor though, Asrock Rack isn’t bad but it seems to have more issues than some of the other vendors like Supermicro or Tyan.
I went and checked the mentioned board vendors, as well as Gigabyte, who didn’t have anything in LGA4710. Tyan/Mitac had a couple boards, though with only 5 physical PCIe slots (I’d like to avoid dicking about with MCIO and having to mount little PCIe socket breakouts in weird places for now). The board I found from Supermicro had 6 slots, though 3 of them were only x8 (which is acceptable for now, but not futureproof for this build) and the 6511P was not on the list of CPUs which support the 6th slot (though, it should be…), so it’s effectively 5, with 3 being x8. This does leave the AsRock board more suited to my needs 
This is interesting, I hadn’t looked into the PCIe lane configuration of GNR-SP before, but it looks like the “Rich IO” processor variants are repurposing UPI links for use as PCIe lanes. The 2S processors only have 88 PCIe lanes and the 1S “P” processors get 136 PCIe lanes by repurposing 3 UPI links.
I’m looking at the X14SBI-TF’s manual and it is explicitly and inconsistently making a distinction between the 6511P and the upper stack of the 1S processors:
Then 4 pages later:
at first it’s saying the 6511P will enable PCIe slot6 but not all the MCIO connectors; then later it’s saying the exact opposite.
I think your right that it is an oversight in documentation.
Also I think your right that Asrock are the only ones producing 7 slot (of atleast x8 electrical) LGA4710 boards right not, that’ll probably change when W890 comes out but who knows how long that will be from now.
I take it this is for a NAS build.
You need sufficient PCIe lanes, low-speed cores, and memory. None of what you need needs to be bleeding edge. Storage performance is not going to be significantly impacted by “faster” processing, “faster” memory, or anymore more than the requisite PCIe bandwidth for peripheral attachment.
Furthermore, you have expressed a need for affordable components.
Recommend you look at used dual-socket Intel Haswell-EP/Broadwell-EP on C612 platform.
Perhaps something like this (up to 72 Gen3 lanes across 7 slots):