I need to get some new hardware for a small homelab. Most of the machines don't need to do anything too fancy. So something like 4-8 cores would be enough. I mostly need something with good remote management/general support and multiple PCIe slots.
I'm stuck deciding between systems with Zen 3 or the new Xeon E-2300 processors.
Zen 3 EPYC is probably overkill and costs way more than some Ryzen (Pro) so I'd probably not choose some EPYC processor for now.
With Ryzen you are stuck to only two mainboards from Asrock (as far as I know) and from what I read support for the X470 was crappy, X570 seems to be better though. Also the focus of Asrock is more on gaming and less on servers and the the combination of non server processor and server mainboard is rare. For the Xeon about a dozen motherboards were announced already though only a few are available at the moment. There are some other vendors like Gigabyte, Asus and Tyan but servers are not their main focus either.
Since the Xeon is a server processors I'd expect some more support for it. Regarding connectivity there does not seem to be much of a difference for my use case between AMD vs Intel combos.
I'm currently leaning more towards some Xeon + Supermicro combo, but maybe someone has the ultimate argument against those? Waiting for the next CPU + mobo generation would probably take too long. Alder Lake is around the corner but who knows when you can really get your hands on it. Also it is a desktop processor and I don't doubt there will be a server mainboard for those.
I'm stuck deciding between systems with Zen 3 or the new Xeon E-2300 processors.
Zen 3 EPYC is probably overkill and costs way more than some Ryzen (Pro) so I'd probably not choose some EPYC processor for now.
With Ryzen you are stuck to only two mainboards from Asrock (as far as I know) and from what I read support for the X470 was crappy, X570 seems to be better though. Also the focus of Asrock is more on gaming and less on servers and the the combination of non server processor and server mainboard is rare. For the Xeon about a dozen motherboards were announced already though only a few are available at the moment. There are some other vendors like Gigabyte, Asus and Tyan but servers are not their main focus either.
Since the Xeon is a server processors I'd expect some more support for it. Regarding connectivity there does not seem to be much of a difference for my use case between AMD vs Intel combos.
I'm currently leaning more towards some Xeon + Supermicro combo, but maybe someone has the ultimate argument against those? Waiting for the next CPU + mobo generation would probably take too long. Alder Lake is around the corner but who knows when you can really get your hands on it. Also it is a desktop processor and I don't doubt there will be a server mainboard for those.