Need recommendations on a Mobo/CPU - Thinking Epyc?

[Mochaka]

Hey all,

I'm building a new NAS, to replace my Dell R510 and Dell R810 that i'm currently running, but need some help making a decision on what to get.

I have a 12 bay server chassis that arrived today.

Was considering the AsRock Rack X570D4U paired with an AMD 5950x which would suit well but the IO on the motherboard is a bit lacking.

In the future i'd like to upgrade to 10GBe, i'd also like to install a GPU or two for transcoding and streaming games, and i need atleast one PCIe slot for the HBA.

So while this combo would work well, i'm limiting myself in the future. I don't mind spending a bit extra to get something that will last longer so i was looking at an Epyc build.

I did have my eye on the Gigabyte MZ32-AR0 and AMD EPYC 7313P combo deal from Newegg, but that CPU seems to be a bit older so i'm worried about losing out on performance and features.

I should also note that i live in Australia, so getting these parts are difficult. I will most likely have to import from America.

Hoping y'all can give me some advice!

 

[Sean Ho]

Lots of options you could consider, but just a quick note that QSV is much cheaper and more power efficient than NVENC for transcoding. You could do it with, e.g., a C246 board like X11SCA-F and any CPU with onboard graphics. Or stick with your AM4 plan but offload transcoding to a cheap uSFF/TMM box (7th gen or later).

 

[bayleyw]

Do you insist on official ECC support and IPMI? If not, there are much better X570 boards out there. The primary allure of the ASRock is IPMI, which is mandatory if you are remotely hosted.
The consumer platform can do what you want, but barely: you get 24 lanes, 4 of which are muxed into 16 by the PCH. With the right board you should be able to do x8 GPU + x8 GPU + x4 HBA + x4 NIC but the server itself might have to run headless depending on your passthrough setup.
The 7313P is still state of the art (it is the fastest 16-core enterprise CPU available) but it will be slower than the 5950x because it runs at conservative clock speeds. The platform will probably consume more idle power as well (server boards aren't designed to conserve idle power).