EU Found what I wanted

[MBastian]

Finally found a suitable board

Anyone got a reasonably priced W480 mainboard with two m.2 slots and three PCIe slots (x8/x8/x4) for sale?
As far as I am informed any of these would do.

• Gigabyte W480 VISION W
• ASUS Pro WS W480-ACE
• ASRock W480 Creator
• Supermicro X12SAE / X12SCA-F

I am also interested in a W-12X0 or, if the board supports it, a W-13X0 CPU.

 

[b3rrytech]

I bought a few Supermicro X12SCZ-F (and one X11SCZ-F) from this seller: Pardon Our Interruption...
X12SCZ-F

Doesn't have dual M.2 NVMe unfortunately but I still thought it was worth a recommendation. It also only supports W-1200 series and not W-1300 series. The W480 chipset in this board sadly wasn't enabled for W-1300 despite it's said to work with 11th gen Core (which is basically the same thing).

 

[MBastian]

Doesn't have dual M.2 NVMe unfortunately but I still thought it was worth a recommendation. It also only supports W-1200 series and not W-1300 series. The W480 chipset in this board sadly wasn't enabled for W-1300 despite it's said to work with 11th gen Core (which is basically the same thing).

Thank you, I could have worked around the single m.2 slot but both x4 PCIe slots are coming from the PCH and I can't use a riser on the x16 slot. Really a shame but I need two x4 or better x8 PCIe slots from the CPU for a LSI 9400-i16 and an Intel XXV710-DA2.

 

[etorix]

Looks like AsRock Rack W480D4U is what you want.

Any reason why you're focusing on W480 over other generations and/or AMD?

 

[MBastian]

Looks like AsRock Rack W480D4U is what you want.

Definitely an option but unfortunately nearly unobtainable and I'd rather have a x4 PCH slot

Any reason why you're focusing on W480 over other generations and/or AMD?

My current system is based on a Ryzen Pro 4650G, Asus ROG Strix B550-I and 2x32 GB ECC UDIMMs. To add both an 10G NIC and an HBA I need two x8 slots. To get that I'd need to buy a ATX sized x8/x8/x4 capable B550 or x570 mainboard, which are rather rare and expensive, and also either a Ryzen Pro 5x50G APU or Ryzen x5xx0 CPU. The later have a rather high idle power and I do not like to run a headless system anyway. Given the current prices I'd like to re-use my RAM. W480 systems are known for their low idle power and the Xeon W-1200 CPUs all have an iGPU.

 

[luckylinux]

Definitely an option but unfortunately nearly unobtainable and I'd rather have a x4 PCH slot

To be fair most of the Time you have a x4 PCH Slot (Mechanical at least).

It's however important to specify which PCIe Version you want the DMI uplink to be.

Several Supermicro x9/x10/x11 have a PCHx4 Slot, only for the DMI Uplink to be either PCIe 2.0 x4 or PCIe 3.0 x4 when you are lucky.

Shared with onboard SATA, 2x1gbps NIC, etc of course.

 

[etorix]

Definitely an option but unfortunately nearly unobtainable and I'd rather have a x4 PCH slot

E3C246D4U2-2T has this. And on-board 10GBase-T.
Look on eBay.

 

[MBastian]

E3C246D4U2-2T has two of these. And on-board 10GBase-T.
Look on eBay.

Definitely something to keep in mind as a Plan B. But having only 16 available CPU lanes and a serverely overbooked PCH ist not appealing to me.

 

[etorix]

Same for pretty much any Xeon E/Core/Ryzen/EPYC 4000 platform…
If 16-20 PCIe lanes are not enough, go for Xeon Scalable or big socket EPYC.

 

[MBastian]

Same for pretty much any Xeon E/Core/Ryzen/EPYC 4000 platform…

W-1200 hast 20 lanes and thus is my preference...

If 16-20 PCIe lanes are not enough, go for Xeon Scalable or big socket EPYC.

20 is enough and as I wrote, one of my requirements is to reuse my DDR4 ECC UDIMMs.

Edit: The Supermicro X12STL-F might be an option. Seems to be the only c252 board that would halfway fit my requirements. One of the m.2 nvme drives would need to go Into the x2 slot if I want to use my Optane 905p as an l2arc.

 

[MBastian]

W-1200 hast 20 lanes and thus is my preference...

Damn, only the W-1300 has 20 PCI lanes. The W-1200 has 16 and while most W480 mainboards can accept a W-1300 CPU with a BIOS update it's still designed for 16 CPU lanes. I can work around that by replacing the two m.2 SSDs for the OS with two 400-800GB SAS SSDs connected over the HBA.

 

[MSameer]

Have you checked e3c252d4u-2t? It has onboard 10G, a slot for your hba and another for a gpu (c252 has no igpu support).

EDIT: it's xeon e-2300 though.

 

[MBastian]

Another nice board that's actually available for sale would be the Asus P12R-E.
Thanks everyone for the hints. Considering the price I'd pay for a MB &CPU combination I'll better use my old setup with the HBA in the new case and forget about my network upgrades for now until I find a nice deal.

 

[Prof Theorie]

Thanks everyone for the hints. Considering the price I'd pay for a MB &CPU combination I'll better use my old setup with the HBA

Yeah, unfortunately due to the Intel shenanigans regarding ECC-Support newer platforms with the "full package" (>4c, ECC, iGPU) are basically unobtainium/ rly expensive, mainly the boards but also the higher-end Xeons

May I ask how many drives you want to connect to the HBA and what the third PCIe slot (you mentioned HBA and networking but ask for x8/x8/x4) would be used for?

Even at full 16 drives @ PCIe3 x4 you would end up with > 200 mb/s bandwidth per drive under full load and both your CPU* and board support x8/x4/x4 bifurcation so with a larger case, some additional support for the HBA/ networking card (I dont trust that single screw on the PCIe bracket) and a splitted riser you should be able to connect everything if you can live with the restricted bandwidth on your drives

* you mentioned having to buy a 5650/5750/5655/5755g but afaik both 4000 and 5000 Pro have the exact same PCIe layout and bifurcation abilities

If you are fine with dual 10 gbit that works fine on PCIe 3 x4 aswell so you would have 8 lanes for the HBA then

 

[MBastian]

May I ask how many drives you want to connect to the HBA and what the third PCIe slot (you mentioned HBA and networking but ask for x8/x8/x4) would be used for?

So far six SAS HDDs and at least four SAS SSDs. Originally the x4 slot was intended for an Optane 900p that's collecting dust playing l2arc for the HDD zfs pool. But since that's not very effective in my scenario I'll go the special metadata VDEV route with mirrored SSDs connected through the HBA.

you mentioned having to buy a 5650/5750/5655/5755g but afaik both 4000 and 5000 Pro have the exact same PCIe layout and bifurcation abilities

Edit: Oww, right. That was the 2000G APUs. How stupid of me, that changes a lot.

There is also the Gigabyte P12R-E, seems quite nice on paper but unfortunately a trainwreck for anyone who does not have a true rev 1.1 board.

 

[MSameer]

I found this Fujitsu D3617-A13 for 150 euros (C246). It claims to have 2x16 but from the photos and specs it's x8 x8.

It also has x1 x1 and 2 nvme slots.

Pardon Our Interruption...

I think it's the same board advertised here Fujitsu D3617-A13 mATX C246 Mainboard, 8xSATA, Unraid,FreeNAS,OMV
there's not much info I could find but there seems to be a german unraid thread about it. I am not german though.

 

[Prof Theorie]

Edit: Oww, right. That was the 2000G APUs. How stupid of me, that changes a lot.

Ye, just check if your board actually allows for bifurcation but you should be able to get x8/x8 or even x8/x4/x4. That would allow for full speed on the HBa, dual 10gbe and another x4 for whatever you want.

Protip if you dont mind fiddling with your hardware a bit: 32gb DDR4 ECC Udimm are significantly more expensive on the used market than 16gb. If you are going for a larger case and think you wont need >64gb I would definitely switch the mainboard for (m)ATX so you dont need to use some sketchy extensions but maybe do a side/downgrade to 4x16GB and youll prolly have a decent lump of cash leftover after selling the 2x32 and ITX board

I found this Fujitsu D3617-A13 for 150 euros (C246). It claims to have 2x16 but from the photos and specs it's x8 x8.

The better route for these usually is to just grab the corresponding machine and switch the PSU with an adapter if you want to connect more drives, its cheaper or the same price and you get some bonus hardware with it. I used to have that board in my Fujitsu W580 and even with the "bad" Bronze PSU I could get idle power unddr truenas as low as ~7w.

Another thing you can do if you are looking for boards for older hardware is to check the Lenovo parts sale - filter by mainboard, download as file then search through for keywords such as "desktop"/"workstation"/"cezanne" etc. If yoh can deal with weird formfactors and proprietary BS you can get some gems there for 25-50€ incl. shipping - 2011-3 boards that idle in Truenas under 30w with 16c+128gb RDimm (P410 mainboard + P520c platinum PSU) C-chipset boards from the P-workstations for sockets 1151, 1200 and sometimes even 1700, fully fleged ATX non-proprietary Z490 boards for under 30€ or A520/B550 boards for as low as 24€

 

[MBastian]

Thank you. I got a suitable replacement board. As much as I like to fiddle together unusual components I just don't have the time for that anymore.