home server build: ryzen ASRock X470D4U vs atom A2SDi-8C-HLN4F

[bintravel]

Hy,

I'm looking to upgrade one (of my two) home server from intel atom 2558 to either a ryzen build or atom 3758 build.

The home server will be used as one of two proxmox nodes (not clustered). They carry a few containers and vm's each (only linux). I have a lsi adapter card (pci-e) which i may not need anymore, 2 usb DVB tuners, 1 z-wave usb stick on the old server.

Are there any caveats i should watch out for these builds? Reasons why 1 of the 2 is more preferred?

Kind regards for any advice!

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

Well I guess the ball's in my court as I have server builds based off both the A2SDi-8C+-HLN4F and the X470D4U.

Both of them have fairly limited USB IO options - two USB2 on the rear of the Atom, two USB3 on the rear of the X470D4U so you'll want to check you have enough mobo headers (and a case or PCIe bay ports that'll take them) or to use a PCIe USB card. If it was just DVB tuners I'd have a look if there are still PCIe ones available but that's mostly my latent fear of USB going wrong, perhaps things are much improved these days (been about a decade since I used DVB-T on linux).

The Atom gets you marginally lower idle power draw, much lower maximum power draw (especially if you're able to not use an HBA) but I found it pretty slow for VMs (mostly because the single-threaded perf of the atom is slow) but if you're not doing anything performance-critical this might not be a problem for you. If you're happy with the performance of your existing C2000s then there's no real need to go full bore with something like a ryzen and the C3000s should be a notable step-up in performance anyway.

I wanted something more powerful to replace my old haswell, and at the time anything Intel >4 cores cost more than the 8-core 3700X (I do a lot of video encoding so it's nice to have the power there when you need it) so I figured I'd take the plunge. The ryzen board was certainly more quirky; it started off fairly wobbly (and the current BIOS still doesn't support PCIe passthrough as far as I'm aware) but as of BIOS v3.20 it got to be a stable beast for me at least; there was nothing that could touch it in bang-for-buck if you wanted to consider it as a Xeon E3 equivalent. There's a whole thread about it here if you fancy some bedtime reading (fair few posts in there from me). Mine's currently been running without a hiccup for nearly 200 days under debian.

Ultimately I'm using the atom board as a lowest-possible-power option at a remote site where it's only used for very simple replication/file-serving duties; the ryzen system is now my main home server simply because it gave me the best balance of price vs. performance vs. power usage.

 

[bintravel]

Thanks for the feedback!

I'm not too worried about the USB connectivity, but 4 ports are needed. So i will have to take a look into it.

I'm not doing anything performance-critical, but i would be happy to be able to transfer some video encoding to the system, which i didn't do off course on my current atom system(s). I do value power savings a lot, but if the idle power is comparable, i would be inclined to go for the power when needed.

What is a bit of a bump, is the lack of PCIe passtrough. It is one of the reasons i'm looking for an upgrade. On the atom 2000 series this was a no go.

Thanks for the link to the thread. Was indeed bedtime reading ;-). Pleases me that most of the quirks are gone.

If i understood correctly, you have to be carefull when choosing a power supply?

I don't know if there are other ryzen mobo's that offer ECC for the ram?

As i understand, intel atom systems are server builds that can last a really long time. Is a ryzen build (on this mobo) 'server' grade?

Thanks!

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

Lot's o' Q's here so replies inline;

I'm not doing anything performance-critical, but i would be happy to be able to transfer some video encoding to the system, which i didn't do off course on my current atom system(s). I do value power savings a lot, but if the idle power is comparable, i would be inclined to go for the power when needed.

That was my reaction as well, and I'm happy to report that the idle power of my Ryzen is (or rather was) comparable to that of the C3000. The X470 is much less power-hungry than the X570 most Ryzen 3000 users are using.

What is a bit of a bump, is the lack of PCIe passtrough. It is one of the reasons i'm looking for an upgrade. On the atom 2000 series this was a no go.

It's certainly in the pipeline as far as I can tell, it's apparently working again in the latest beta BIOSes (v.3.35 and up) but as and when we see the final version going public is anyone's guess (the BIOS releases won't break any records for speed). Suffice to say people have reported getting PCIe passthrough working when using the beta BIOS.

If i understood correctly, you have to be carefull when choosing a power supply?

Not that I'm aware of, unless you're referring to the spurious PROCHOT asserts some people had? I never experienced it myself and I'm not precisely sure what the circumstances around it are but as I understand it this was a BIOS+IPMI bug that was sorted out in recent releases.

I don't know if there are other ryzen mobo's that offer ECC for the ram?

As far as I'm aware the majority of ryzen boards offer ECC, but read the fine print carefully. All ryzen CPUs (with the exception of non-pro APUs) support ECC but you need the motherboard and the BIOS to support it in hardware and software and not all manufacturers might support both. ASRock's consumer and workstation/server ryzen boards all support ECC wherever possible though.

As i understand, intel atom systems are server builds that can last a really long time. Is a ryzen build (on this mobo) 'server' grade?

A lots of atom systems (and plenty of other boards too) get included in appliances or other embedded applications with >5yr lifespans so a fair few of the C3000 boards come with stipulations of hardware availability for 10yrs or more.

I'd call the X470D4U "server-lite", more or less the equivalent of an E3 xeon. It's about as server-esque as you can be when using the ryzen platform (which is very limited in the amount of IO it can provide). As a replacement for my previous home servers (E3 xeons in either Supermicro or ASRock motherboards) it's a direct equivalent, only getting me to a lot of high-power cores very cheaply.