over/under/kill z87x motherboard?

[x130844]

Hi,

I'm currently running
z87x motherboard
intel i5 4570s
32gb memory (maxed out).
lsi card
10gb network card.

Freenas 11.x worked great.
I'm about to re-arrange my whole computer situation, upgrading other machines (workstations, etc)
I was considering upgrading this freenas server as well, but considering that the load is rarely over 4% for CPU and it works great and I only use this for local file server (I get great speed on freenas, (not so much on truenas yet) + only 2 small linux VM (for home assistant , piehole), and plex (serving only this house, no media conversion).
Confirm that there's no need to upgrade the hardware here for its usage. (stuck at 32gb because of the motherboard/cpu is ok too, right for my case?)
I'm not missing anything here, right?

PS: unrelated: if a platform for example: x570 mobs + ryzen says they have 20 lanes. but one motherboard includes natively a 10gb port, does that port take away extra PCI lanes that would have been available to me? or did they manage to "find" extra lanes for this 10gb port? How does that work?
The main reason is: Would I "free" up some PCI lanes if I buy a mobo with integrated 10gb, compared to if I had to plug a pci-e card which would take 4 pci lanes.


Thanks you!

 

[Nick2253]

If the server works great, why update?

Generally speaking, the only reason you should update is because your hardware isn't meeting your needs. That could be performance needs or reliability needs. Within the reliability space, you're looking at fault tolerance, failure potential, etc. With your hardware, I'd potentially be concerned about reliability given: no ECC memory, aging consumer hardware failure probability, insufficient HDD fault tolerance (only RAIDZ1). If those are not a concern for you, then there's really no reason to change anything.

Regarding your PS: in general, no. However, it really depends on how the specific motherboard is wired. I can imagine a motherboard that comes with or without 10G network adapters, and in all models only makes a limited number of PCIe lanes available via PCIe slot.

 

[x130844]

If the server works great, why update?

Generally speaking, the only reason you should update is because your hardware isn't meeting your needs. That could be performance needs or reliability needs. Within the reliability space, you're looking at fault tolerance, failure potential, etc. With your hardware, I'd potentially be concerned about reliability given: no ECC memory, aging consumer hardware failure probability, insufficient HDD fault tolerance (only RAIDZ1). If those are not a concern for you, then there's really no reason to change anything.

Regarding your PS: in general, no. However, it really depends on how the specific motherboard is wired. I can imagine a motherboard that comes with or without 10G network adapters, and in all models only makes a limited number of PCIe lanes available via PCIe slot.

the hardware seems to be meeting my needs, just that if I have better hardware around, I was thinking to upgrade it, but maybe not worth it, since i won't see any improvement for my case use. so I'll use my newer hardware and use it for something else since this z87 system is plenty fast I guess, I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something, some features, or speed that I didn't know or I wasn't aware.
For the PS; I'm reading that it depends on the motherboard? it could be that if they include a 10GBe port, they could be lowering the number of pci lane available to me? am i understanding this?

 

[Nick2253]

You can always make it faster/better/more, but like I said, the real question is, "why?". Better for the sake of better is a slippery slope that is quite unkind to the wallet .

In your shoes, reliability is very important to me, so I would not use your current hardware.

Regarding the PCIe lanes, to the best of my knowledge, no architecture today natively includes a 10G ethernet controller, so all 10G controllers communicate through PCIe. When a mobo manufacturer includes a 10G port on the mobo, they are also including a separate 10G controller, wired through the PCI bus. In other words, those lanes are occupied by that controller. However, that does not necessarily translate to "losing" lanes. It has always been common for mobo manufacturers to only wire in a subset of the available PCI lanes. It wasn't until dual GPU systems became common that all PCIe lanes started mattering.