Choosing a board

[ajschot]

Hi all,

I have a question.... i am thinking about changing my cheap FreeNAS into something good.
I had an AMD A8 system and it is working fine only in FreeNAS 10 VM's are not good supported.

I am now going for a Xeon E5-2630v4 because older ones are using more energy and here in the netherlands they are not that much cheaper.

Xeon E5-2630v4
Crucial 4x16GB DDR4-2133 ECC CL15 (first start with 32Gb) becuase the budget and want to extend
I have 8x4TB HDD (different brands (WD, HGSt, Seagate) for DATA pool, 3x3TB WD Red use for Time Machine and archive, 1x256Gb SSD for VM's and docker.

only thing a am not sure about is the board
I can get a second hand ASRock X99 Extreme 4 for €150 or choose new for
MSI X99A Raider (€215) but maybe i have to safe some more for a Supermicro MBD-X10SRI-F (€300 most places it will cost €400)
what would you do? For me the MSI and ASRock are having enough... only plus for Supermicro that it can take more ram so i could also buy 2x32Gb DDR4 ram (in future it could take 256Gb were the others take 128 which is more then enough for now... but in future maybe bigger disks you don't know what happens in 5 years...) and it has 2x Intel NICs onboard and 1 Realtek which means i won't need my Intel Pro 1000MT Server Adapter anymore, or is it better to use them instead? LAN Intel® i350-AM2 + Intel® i219V are on the board. But I already own the Pro 1000MT's

But the ASRock is the cheapest to get, however i find 150 a lot for the old version of the board secondhand while it new costs €240 but then the new version X99 Extreme4/3.1
For what i need now the MSI X99A Raider is maybe the best choice and i have an computer with an MSI Z97 which is working fine for 3 years or something and that pc had a lots of load in the past so quality wise i think it will be enough.

Would you pay around $90 (€75) more for a SuperMicro board or just go for the MSI or ASRock?

 

[joeschmuck]

Hum... I can answer it this way...

I would and have gone for the Supermicro board. I started out with an ASUS motherboard & AMD CPU (still working as a FreeNAS backup machine under ESXi) but realized that I wanted more fo my system so I upgraded (see my signature line) to a much better system for while I have no plans to outgrow in the next 10 years. If I were to replace it, the only reasons would be 1) It broke, or 2) I just felt like it. The upgrade would not be needed because it couldn't support what I wanted to throw at it.

The motherboard, CPU, RAM, and Power Supply are the key components for which you should never have to replace so buy good quality components here. Hard drives you should expect to replace every 3 to 5 years as they do wear out.

I think you need to look also at your use case, do you really need a 10 core CPU, I guess if you were doing a lot of VMs then maybe yes. Right now I see you spending a lot of money on a CPU, you should ensure that the rest of your components at least can support it properly.

Also, the risk with a second hand motherboard that was designed to be overclocked is you never know if someone overstressed the voltage regulators. Myself, I wouldn't risk it.

 

[CraigD]

Would you pay around $90 (€75) more for a SuperMicro board or just go for the MSI or ASRock?

Buy the board that is fit for purpose, SuperMicro's IPMI(-F) alone is worth the $90 (€75) more

Have Fun

 

[ajschot]

Hum... I can answer it this way...

I would and have gone for the Supermicro board. I started out with an ASUS motherboard & AMD CPU (still working as a FreeNAS backup machine under ESXi) but realized that I wanted more fo my system so I upgraded (see my signature line) to a much better system for while I have no plans to outgrow in the next 10 years. If I were to replace it, the only reasons would be 1) It broke, or 2) I just felt like it. The upgrade would not be needed because it couldn't support what I wanted to throw at it.

The motherboard, CPU, RAM, and Power Supply are the key components for which you should never have to replace so buy good quality components here. Hard drives you should expect to replace every 3 to 5 years as they do wear out.

I think you need to look also at your use case, do you really need a 10 core CPU, I guess if you were doing a lot of VMs then maybe yes. Right now I see you spending a lot of money on a CPU, you should ensure that the rest of your components at least can support it properly.

Also, the risk with a second hand motherboard that was designed to be overclocked is you never know if someone overstressed the voltage regulators. Myself, I wouldn't risk it.

The problem with my AMD is that like I wrote it is not supporting VM's well, on FreeBSD it is only supported for 1 vcpu, and then I found a Xeon E5-2630v4 on sale (shop went bankrupt) and I could et it for just a 1/5th of the price so it is cheaper then an i7. I don't think I need the cores right now but you never know.

I think you're right about the secondhand board, specially i found the price still too high for an old board that maybe run for 2 years already.

reading your recommandations and knowing this price is a really good deal for a new board from SuperMicro's I think I will go that way. MSI is more designed for a workstation, so is the ASRock I think while the SuperMicro's is being sold as a server board.

I want to run a lot of dockers and want to run Windows in VM and try to run OS X in VM (running it on my PC too just take's a while to setup right and it keeps me from the street). I did not think about ESXi but maybe I get into it.

Thank you all.

 

[ajschot]

Oh 1 more question .... how many DIMMS are minimal required for this SuperMicro X10SRi-F?
I can not find it and red somewhere it needs minimal 4 dimms

Oh and i forgot that in that shop prices are not with tax so It will be around $170 more expensive then a MSI X99A Raider board.

 

[joeschmuck]

Oh 1 more question .... how many DIMMS are minimal required for this SuperMicro X10SRi-F?
I can not find it and red somewhere it needs minimal 4 dimms

Oh and i forgot that in that shop prices are not with tax so It will be around $170 more expensive then a MSI X99A Raider board.

You should read the user manual for that motherboard. As I read it, only slot A1 must be populated. i would however purchase two sticks of RAM so they work in interleve mode, just install them in the correct locations.

 

[ajschot]

I thinking more and more to the Supermicro .... did not know about IPMI which seems to be a real great thing for me to also be able to change bios etc from kvm over LAN did not know about this! I only don't jnderstand one thing... does that also mean i don't need a graphics card?

 

[joeschmuck]

I thinking more and more to the Supermicro .... did not know about IPMI which seems to be a real great thing for me to also be able to change bios etc from kvm over LAN did not know about this! I only don't jnderstand one thing... does that also mean i don't need a graphics card?

Simple answer is you don't need a graphics card if you choose the correct CPU. Everyone should download and read the User Manual for the compnents you plan to purchase and find out for yourself what the motherboard supports, or doesn't support. It tells you the kind of RAM you need, CPU, etc...

 

[ajschot]

Simple answer is you don't need a graphics card if you choose the correct CPU. Everyone should download and read the User Manual for the compnents you plan to purchase and find out for yourself what the motherboard supports, or doesn't support. It tells you the kind of RAM you need, CPU, etc...

ok then i need it, i have a gt610 lying around so no problem but i thought there is on the website: Graphic ASPEED AST2400 BMC so it does not need a other gpu. but i will put in that GT610. Sorry English is not my native languages i already looked at the manual.

 

[joeschmuck]

ok then i need it, i have a gt610 lying around so no problem but i thought there is on the website: Graphic ASPEED AST2400 BMC so it does not need a other gpu. but i will put in that GT610. Sorry English is not my native languages i already looked at the manual.

If I looked up the wrong motherboard then I appologize. I've been looking at several user manuals yesterday, enough tto drive me crazy. You are correct, the X10SRi-F does have an onboard VGA graphics controller which is set to on by default.

 

[ajschot]

If I looked up the wrong motherboard then I appologize. I've been looking at several user manuals yesterday, enough tto drive me crazy. You are correct, the X10SRi-F does have an onboard VGA graphics controller which is set to on by default.

Does not matter, there are so many people not thinking about a graphics card when building because a lot of cpu's have graphics in in nowadays but specially a lot of 2011-3 boards don't have a graphics connection only some supermicro has an has a chip on board. How more i read about it the more i am thinking about buying one because the IPMI looks really great specially because my server is in the attic.
But i have to save some money first to get the board and 2x32GB DDR4 2400 Reg. Ecc ram from Crucial.

 

[ajschot]

Have it all working now. Still thinking about using ESXi and FreeNAS or just FreeNAS alone.

System is now Xeon E5-2630v4, 2x 32Gb DDR4 Reg. ECC 2133 RAM from Kingston, SuperMicro X10SRi-F, LSI9211 PCIe x8 SAS with 8x4TB (diff brands) RaidZ2 for Data, 3x3Tb RaidZ for TimeMachine Backups 1x SSD256 for VM-Dockers (maybe it will be the ESXi disk) 1x64Gb SSD (test ESXi)
Very happy with the board and processor. Maybe need some more memory for VM's but for now it will do the job.
Thank you all.