Mini-ITX: Asrock C2[7|5]50D4I vs E3C226D2I

[monarchdodra]

I need a mini-ITX board for my home server.

Useage would be just file storage, some plex, some transmission, and a local freebsd jail to play around with.

I'm having trouble chosing motherboards. I guess the 3 choices I have are (with the prices available to me in my country):
C2550D4l - 284€: http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=C2550D4I
C2750D4l - 400€: http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=C2750D4I
E3C226D2I - 220€: http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=E3C226D2I

Avoton boards have:
+ Passive
+ up to 64G memory
+ 12 sata
- Might overheat in a closed enclosure?
- Only 2 usb ports
- No USB3

The LGA board has:
+ 2 Extra USB3 ports + internal USB3
+ Easier to cool
- 16G memory
- 6 sata

The doubt I'm having is that I really can't place the boards in terms of relative compute power. I was going to go for the C2550D4l, but then I though: If I'm going to spend some money, I might as well buy the board that's nice. But 116€ just for 4 extra cores of atom cpu seems like a bad deal. So I started looking at the LGA board.

The thing is that if I were to go the LGA route, I have NO idea what I can/can't put on that board, and what the relative performance differences are. I mean, for the same price as the C2750, I could get a high i3/low i5. It's still half the cores, but overall, it would absolutely destroy what the avotons do in terms of power I believe.

Or would placing an i5 on that board be totally over the build's spec for heat (I would place it in a Node 304 with 2-6 HDD's (not decided yet))? Or maybe cores trump processing power for a NAS?

Kind of lost, need opinion.

 

[Jailer]

i5's don't support ECC memory so you can rule that out on the 1150 board. if you want something more than an i3 you'll have to step up to a Xeon.

The 1150 board you linked to only supports 16GB of memory so depending on the size of your pool and your usage scenario that may be an issue.

 

[marbus90]

s/64GB/32GB
if you really need over 32GB, an Xeon E5 system is ~30% cheaper...

As long as you don't use more than Gbps ethernet and over 2-3 plex streams, the C2750 is the best FreeNAS CPU in that segment.

 

[monarchdodra]

s/64GB/32GB

Really? The specks do say 64 though. Regardless, I was planning to get 16 right off the bat, and *maybe* upgrade to 32 if I feel I need it.

if you really need over 32GB, an Xeon E5 system is ~30% cheaper...

What kind of build are you thinking about? I didn't really find a single 1150 mini-itx board. And even then, auickly looking at the prices, it seems that the processor *only* might be 30 % cheaper than the board+proc I'm looking at...

As long as you don't use more than Gbps ethernet and over 2-3 plex streams, the C2750 is the best FreeNAS CPU in that segment.

Hum... It still seems horribly expensive for what it is. I'm currently looking at the i3-4150 (3.6Ghz, 54W) and the i3-4130T (2.9Ghz, 35W). From a processor point of view, are there any reasons to go for the C2750 over one of these?

I'm still on the fence, as the Avotons DO have 6+ sata, so I could go up to 6HDD + 2SDD...

 

[marbus90]

Specs say 64GB, real world prices say E5-1620 v3, an S.2011-3 board and 4x16GB registered DDR4 is 30% under the price of an C2750 with 4x16GB unbuffered DIMMs. That's no ITX stuff tho, mATX is the smallest with ECC support, but no IPMI.

Don't go T or S series CPU, you only lose with them. Artificial speed limiting to gain nothing in idle - where the NAS would be most of the time.

If you only use 1-2 streams with plex, you may be fine with the i3. anything above that and the C2750 and it's 8 cores come into play.

 

[monarchdodra]

I hadn't thought about Registered vs Buffered...

OK. Thanks for the feedback. I'm going to try to search around some more see if I can't find any cheaper re-sellers...

 

[jgreco]

The Avoton can theoretically take 64GB but those DIMM's are manufactured out of unobtainium and need to be manufactured in an atmosphere of 99.8%+ pure rainbow colored unicorn farts, so they're unrealistically expensive.

The Avoton's still a great choice because 32GB is a LOT more than 16GB, and gives you a lot of potential. The 8-core Avoton is slower than the i3 or Xeon choices (compared by benchmark) but when combined with more memory is overall hard to beat, since you're virtually guaranteed to have some cores free for "add ons" and with 32GB you can leverage that extra CPU a lot better.

I wouldn't trust "passive" cooling, you don't use an enclosure without fans, because heat is the killer of hard drives, and at maybe 10 watts each being dissipated, that's like creating a small EZ-Bake oven (or are you kids too young to have seen one?) So you plan for a chassis that causes the airflow to forcibly go over the drives and also the CPU. The LGA board is actually more DIFFICULT to cool because it has a higher TDP. This is all about design.

Performance-wise the i3 is likely to beat the Avoton on fileservice. You have to figure out whether "going fast" is important. For sake of comparison we have an HP MicroServer N36L here that does nothing but take NFS based backups from VMware at 200-600Mbps. That has a Geekbench score of around 1200. The Avoton C2750 is about 5x that speed but on a per-core basis isn't all that much faster. But the Avoton will have lots of headroom free to be doing other stuff.

 

[monarchdodra]

The Avoton can theoretically take 64GB but those DIMM's are manufactured out of unobtainium and need to be manufactured in an atmosphere of 99.8%+ pure rainbow colored unicorn farts, so they're unrealistically expensive.

The Avoton's still a great choice because 32GB is a LOT more than 16GB, and gives you a lot of potential. The 8-core Avoton is slower than the i3 or Xeon choices (compared by benchmark) but when combined with more memory is overall hard to beat, since you're virtually guaranteed to have some cores free for "add ons" and with 32GB you can leverage that extra CPU a lot better.

I wouldn't trust "passive" cooling, you don't use an enclosure without fans, because heat is the killer of hard drives, and at maybe 10 watts each being dissipated, that's like creating a small EZ-Bake oven (or are you kids too young to have seen one?) So you plan for a chassis that causes the airflow to forcibly go over the drives and also the CPU. The LGA board is actually more DIFFICULT to cool because it has a higher TDP. This is all about design.

Performance-wise the i3 is likely to beat the Avoton on fileservice. You have to figure out whether "going fast" is important. For sake of comparison we have an HP MicroServer N36L here that does nothing but take NFS based backups from VMware at 200-600Mbps. That has a Geekbench score of around 1200. The Avoton C2750 is about 5x that speed but on a per-core basis isn't all that much faster. But the Avoton will have lots of headroom free to be doing other stuff.

Nice info. I wouldn't use an "all-passive" cooling of course, I just mean that the CPU itself is passive.

With your new info though, I'm now wondering if I need those 8 cores at all actually...

[EDIT]In any case it seems like it will be a sure upgrade to my E-350 :)

 

[jgreco]

If you want to do anything beyond basic NAS, which you've already indicated, the C2750 is a better choice. It virtually guarantees that there will not be competition for cores (as long as you're not ridiculous about it). FreeNAS by itself can easily chew two or three cores, and while that will leave you thinking "that leaves me one or two cores for other stuff so I should go C2550", the reality is that more often than not the system will get busy for a little bit here or there, and jails and other stuff are ALSO likely to eat several cores when busy - which coincides with the time you're probably making heavy use of ZFS/NAS functionality too. Especially if you want something like Plex, it WILL also tend to consume pool and memory resources at random times. Also, the Avoton isn't going to be good at heavy transcoding, ever, but with the C2550 you can pretty much consider transcoding a nonoption.

I rarely suggest getting a system that's barely large enough for the workload. This is a situation where the C2550 will be very limiting the moment you want to go further than basic NAS. Think carefully. If you're spending a lot of money on a device like this, do you get "just the basics," or do you want to spend a little more to get something you'll be able to do a lot more with?