Looking for a motherboard with decent number of PCIe v4 (or even v3) slots

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CheatingLiar

New Member
Jan 20, 2022
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I need help in finding a reasonably priced motherboard which has at least 5 pcie x8 and/or x16 slots that I can pci passthrough independently to vm guests. pcie v3 will be fine for most of what I want to do, but I will not turn down v4. That is really my main requirement. I was going to say NUMA but I think you have to go back in time a lot to find MB/CPU combos that can only handle one numa node per cpu. You know, like my ASRock Z77 Extreme4, which I really like but it does not fit the bill.

As a starting point, I was looking at a Supermicro H11SSL since it has 3 PCIe 3.0 x16 and 3 PCIe 3.0 x8; I wonder if these slots can be used independently; I take it has a PCI switch to do port bifurcation? Some would argue it uses an older CPU; given my Z77, i can't complain.

Suggestions are appreciated.
 

gsrcrxsi

Active Member
Dec 12, 2018
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As a starting point, I was looking at a Supermicro H11SSL since it has 3 PCIe 3.0 x16 and 3 PCIe 3.0 x8; I wonder if these slots can be used independently; I take it has a PCI switch to do port bifurcation? Some would argue it uses an older CPU; given my Z77, i can't complain.
research the CPUs for these boards. there are no PCI switches needed. this is an AMD EPYC platform with 128 PCIe lanes from the CPU. and it's really not an old platform, Rome is 1 generation behind current, but due to the shortage and performance, might as well be considered current gen. Milan isnt leaps and bounds faster than Rome for most use cases.

Asrock EPYCD8 will give you 4x x16 slots + 3x x8 slots PCIe 3.0. there is an EPYCD8-2T variant that is identical but with 10G networking. this board supports EPYC 7001 and 7002 (Naples/Rome) processors. this board is significantly less expensive than the ROMED8 board.

Also the Asrock ROMED8-2T will give you 7x x16 slots PCIe 4.0, but make sure to read the manual and set jumpers appropriately for what hardware you're planning to use in what slots, as one of the PCIe slots will share bandwidth with other devices (M.2/SATA/OCU) and could be x8 or disabled depending on how you have the jumpers configured.
 

tinfoil3d

QSFP28
May 11, 2020
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Just a word of warning if you go down the asrockrack epycd8 or romed8 path there are lot of success stories there including mine and some weird magic here and there(also including my experience). In general you should be fine and there's a lot of knowledge on these boards on STH here.
I went from 7001 to 7002 on EPYCD8-2T board. My writeup if interested https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...-upgrade-from-gen1-naples-to-gen2-rome.33024/
 

gsrcrxsi

Active Member
Dec 12, 2018
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i really like these asrock EPYC boards. I have 3x EPYCD8 boards (with EPYC Rome), and one ROMED8 board (with EPYC Milan). I use them primarily for GPU compute systems that need the PCIe bandwidth. i've used up to 8x GPUs on a EPYCD8 (bifurcated one of the x16 stots to x8x8) and it's rock solid stable. I'm going to use one of these EPYCD8 boards to upgrade my aging Xeon E5v2 based home server. And cramming all of these features and PCIe connectivity into a standard ATX sized board is amazing. I'm not sure you can get a more feature packed board that the ROMED8-2T in standard ATX size.

the only thing i dont like, and it's not really a problem specific to Asrock as basically all of the board vendors have done this, is that they gatekeep the cheaper end boards from being compatible with EPYC Milan when there's no technical reason to do so.
 

zer0sum

Well-Known Member
Mar 8, 2013
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If you want to look at something on the budget end of the spectrum you might be able to use a Supermicro X10SRL-F :)
It's my favorite cheap board for getting lots of PCIe slots

PCI-E 3.0 x8
PCI-E 3.0 x8 (in x16 slot)
PCI-E 3.0 x8
PCI-E 3.0 x8 (in x16 slot)
PCI-E 3.0 x8
PCI-E 3.0 x4 (in x8 slot)
PCI-E 2.0 x4 (in x8 slot)