Switching from i7-4790k to what?

[Nimrad]

I'm running an unRAID server for various stuff, but mainly for Plex. I have an ASUS Z97-AR mobo, i7-4790k CPU & 32GB RAM in a Fractal Define 7 XL with 12 HDDs that are going to be 18-20 HDDs in the future. It is plenty fast enough for my use, but as its age is nearing double digits running 24/7 I am starting to plan where to look for upgrades. I am not in a rush, but I plan to upgrade in the coming year or so.

Performance wise I currently don't need anything significantly more powerful than what I have but I would like it to be future proof. Power use is not that important as I heat up the house anyway like 8 months of the year, but for thermal management I would like to keep it reasonable.

My specific needs is where I don't know where to start looking:

1. I need/want at least 2 m.2 slots for cache drives.
2. I need 2.5 GbE.
3. I want a bit of PCIe expansion, and this is where I'm quite confused. Seems like many mobo's these days only come with 1 or 2 slots, and one of them might be disabled(?) if I use all the m.2 slots? Also back in the day when I was into PC hardware they were all the same size, but now some of them are super short? Currently I have an HBA(LSI 9212-4i4e 6Gbps SAS HBA) and a Quadro P400 GPU for Plex transcoding, but I'd like another one available for future upgrades.

I don't have a set budget, but I would like to go for consumer cards unless you have a very good argument to get something else. I live in Norway and local availability is not very good for finding reasonable pricing on Supermicro etc.

 

[i386]

I want a bit of PCIe expansion
...
consumer cards

You means consumer cpus? If yes then you are out of luck as most consumer cpus have max 24 (amd ryzen) or 16/20 (intel i7/i9) pcie lanes.
The good stuff starts with 40+ pcie lanes with "workstation" cpus like certain intel xeon skus or amd threadripper

 

[Nimrad]

You means consumer cpus? If yes then you are out of luck as most consumer cpus have max 24 (amd ryzen) or 16/20 (intel i7/i9) pcie lanes.
The good stuff starts with 40+ pcie lanes with "workstation" cpus like certain intel xeon skus or amd threadripper

I mean CPU/mobos yeah. Number of lanes don't really say much to me, but my current motherboard have plenty expansion slots. I know they probably aren't as fast, but that's not what I need(?). I just need to run my kinda slow GPU, HBA and preferably one more card, for instance a 10GbE in the future maybe.

 

[zer0sum]

Not sure how hard they might be to find for you, but my go to choice these days for lots of PCIe expansion is an AMD Epyc 7302 paired with a Supermicro H11SSL or H12SSL

 

[Tech Junky]

@Nimrad

I use AMD at this point and went with a ASRock PG Lightning https://pg.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X670E PG Lightning/index.asp#Specification

I went with this because current boards tend to skimp on slots / lanes due to packing in 4+ M2 drives and monster GPUs that take up 3+ slots of space. Also, most board do a crappy job at lane division between slots where if you put 2 cards in they auto split the bandwidth down to x8/x8 or worse. This board doesn't do that.

For 10GE you can get a card that's X1 for $100 - https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1709735-REG/owc_owcpcie10gb_10g_ethernet_pcie_network.html

The thought here though is if you want something that can grow with you or be relevant for more than a year like Intel these days it's the only option before venturing into SMB/Enterprise type stuff mentioned above.

If you're serious about data though you could use the top X16 for a bifurcation card since it's AMD and you can split it into x4/x4/x4/x4 for 4 different devices where Intel would need a PLX switch and bottleneck bandwidth. My initial intent might have been to use one and make a massive flash based storage but, AMD throws a wrench into processing media conversions not as efficiently as Intel QSV which lead to putting in a cheap A380 GPU to handle the task.

If you want to up your storage options there's U.2/U.3 drives which are basically M2 but in a 2.5" format and break beyond the 8TB limit the M2 format has. There are U options that go as high as 30-60TB and higher capacities coming soon. They can be a bit pricey if you want the fastest options but there are legacy options of 8TB going for $400 as well.

The problem being a year out though in planning is going to be even more changes as this fall is when you'll see both Intel / AMD releasing their new gear. AMD won't be a huge shift though other than changing the chipset to X880 but, the CPU side might be a big change on the iGPU side. Intel is kind of a joke at this point releasing the same CPU basically for several years with their refreshes instead of making something new.

Anyway.... ballpark on this sort of setup from the ground up would be ~$900 + your existing stuff being ported over to the new MOBO/CPU/DDR5/NIC.... could be a bit less if you hunt down deals or the new releases bump down the prices even further.

 

[zachj]

Don’t listen to the above nonsense…

you’re coming from 4 cores and 16 pcie lanes and you explicitly said you don’t need better; you just need newer.

get a ryzen 5xxx or a 12th gen intel system. They aren’t bleeding edge but that just means they’re cheaper.

I built a whole i3 12100 server for less than $300 a year ago—only got cheaper since then.

 

[Joel]

Agree with @zachj... PC building has always been a game of "how far up the ladder of bleeding edge tech" do you want to go (and how deep are your pockets)? Your current rig is positively ancient, so if you're trying to cost-optimize, than perusing the used gear forums here and on reddit, eBay, FB marketplace, etc. is probably your best bet. Of course you're then trading your TIME trying to save a few bucks.

I know many folks talk about motherboard refresh cycles when they think about "future proofing", but in reality, a tiny minority of people ACTUALLY upgrade a CPU in place. What I think about with "future proofing" a SERVER, is PCIE lane count, bifurcation support, and 10GbE. Whether or not I use these features now, they would enable large amounts of speedy flash storage. The Xeon E5v4 platform is the best bang for buck these days IMO. Swinging for the next level, EPYC Milan gear is also getting attractive on eBay.

The main thing to remember with tech though, is if you DON'T need something now, DON'T buy it! It will generally be cheaper tomorrow when even newer stuff is out and it's lost its shininess.

 

[i386]

The main thing to remember with tech though, is if you DON'T need something now, DON'T buy it! It will generally be cheaper tomorrow when even newer stuff is out and it's lost its shininess.

That's what I thought about Arista 100gbe switches Back in 2019 when they were about 1k €/$

 

[Tech Junky]

generally be cheaper tomorrow

Depreciation is a rule of economics. Everything fades as time passes until there's a lack of inventory then it spikes. If it's reasonably priced then it's worthwhile.

I picked up that board for $160 when the others I was looking at were closer to $500. CPU was ~$400 but then a month later it dropped by $100.

The basic principal though is to start with a decent foundation and go from there. This allows you not to repeatedly go through the process. Not everyone plans for potential ideas and then ends up swapping major components shortly after building a system.

if you DON'T need something now, DON'T buy it!

I agree. You never know what you need though until you do. I didn't think I would NEED a GPU but ended up being something that allows me to save time and money. I didn't think I NEED to build my own WWAN solution but, it does save me $35/mo and gets me more consistent speeds.

It's funny how NEEDs come from WANTs and sometimes the two form a synergy in the end.

Now, categorizing and prioritizing WANTs is where the issue lies. If you don't have some self control tech becomes a costly endeavor. Resisting the urge to buy new stuff when you have an idea w/o waiting a bit to think things through can be an issue for some.

Sometimes there are more sensible ideas or solutions. For instance I pondered the whole 10GE option between a couple of devices but, that would have cost me ~$250. I thought about it and Thunder Bolt came to mind again as an option. Well, grabbed a cable and configured an IP on each side and voila 20GE between hosts for ~$20 cable. I don't need that speed 24/7 though so, no need for the Ethernet solution. Though I do have the option with 5GE between the hosts using Ethernet if I want some distance between them that the TB cable wouldn't afford.

 

[JeepGuy]

I don't know nearly as much as many people on this forum but I just updated/replaced my dependable I7-4790T, 32gb ram, Windows and Emby based 60TB JBOD media server. I selected I5-13600T, 64gb DDR5 ram using an AsRock Z790 Pro RS WiFi motherboard. I've upgraded to a Fractal Meshify XL case to eventually hold more drives as I upgrade my storage.

Currently the onboard 2.5gbE is working well along with the upgrade to 1gb fiber internet and a new N100 soft router with 2.5gbE. None of my streaming devices can handle 2.5gbE and since I'm not running raid yet my max transfer between servers reading from my hard drives is about 225mb-250mb going from new server to old server writing to a Sata SSD . Most of the time my old server still only sends files at 110mb even though I did upgrade to 2.56gbE. I want to future proof more but 95% of the time I am only streaming to 1 device; and it would not exceed 3 devices with the need to transcode to 1080P on the other 2 devices.

Current system is up and running on Windows 11 Pro with DrivePool but I'm still looking at other OS options (Testing Unraid at the moment) that will work with my new 2x16tb and 2x18tb drives while allowing for a gradual increase of storage. I can't commit to a large purchase of drives at this time and I will keep my older server pool of drives for backup. So far I'm happy with the better transcoding and performance along with less noise from fewer drives and quieter 140mm fans.

 

[wildpig1234]

I'm running an unRAID server for various stuff, but mainly for Plex. I have an ASUS Z97-AR mobo, i7-4790k CPU & 32GB RAM in a Fractal Define 7 XL with 12 HDDs that are going to be 18-20 HDDs in the future. It is plenty fast enough for my use, but as its age is nearing double digits running 24/7 I am starting to plan where to look for upgrades. I am not in a rush, but I plan to upgrade in the coming year or so.

Performance wise I currently don't need anything significantly more powerful than what I have but I would like it to be future proof. Power use is not that important as I heat up the house anyway like 8 months of the year, but for thermal management I would like to keep it reasonable.

My specific needs is where I don't know where to start looking:

1. I need/want at least 2 m.2 slots for cache drives.
2. I need 2.5 GbE.
3. I want a bit of PCIe expansion, and this is where I'm quite confused. Seems like many mobo's these days only come with 1 or 2 slots, and one of them might be disabled(?) if I use all the m.2 slots? Also back in the day when I was into PC hardware they were all the same size, but now some of them are super short? Currently I have an HBA(LSI 9212-4i4e 6Gbps SAS HBA) and a Quadro P400 GPU for Plex transcoding, but I'd like another one available for future upgrades.

I don't have a set budget, but I would like to go for consumer cards unless you have a very good argument to get something else. I live in Norway and local availability is not very good for finding reasonable pricing on Supermicro etc.

You means consumer cpus? If yes then you are out of luck as most consumer cpus have max 24 (amd ryzen) or 16/20 (intel i7/i9) pcie lanes.
The good stuff starts with 40+ pcie lanes with "workstation" cpus like certain intel xeon skus or amd threadripper

If you want two M2 slots with several Pcie slots that are not disabled when you use the m2 slots, try this X99 MB for around $110:

HUANANZHI X99-F8 Motherboard-HUANANZHI

You can pair up with e5-2680 v4 14core cpu for around $15 for the cpu (which is 2.5x faster than your old cpu at multicore benchmark). DDR4 ecc price has gone down significantly so should be able to get 16GBx4 for fairly cheap at $20 or less for each stick.

Total price $110+ $15 + $80 = around $200 for a set up that is at least twice as powerful as your old setup with still room to grow in term of cpu, ram, and pcie slots.