Help to pick MB and CPU.

  • Hello everyone,


    Any recommendations about which hardware should I choose.


    Now I have:
    Motherboard + CPU:
    ASROCK FM2A68M-DG3+ & AMD A4-7300
    ASROCK P55 Pro & Intel Xeon X3430
    ASUS H81 Plus & i3-4330
    RAM: DDR3 8G x1, 4G x3
    SSD: Crucial 256G
    HDD: Seagate 8TB, WD 8TB(this two for RAID), also I have Toshiba 6TB for backups, and small drives 500GB(SATA2), 1TB and 2TB.


    My problem is, I don't know which MB & CPU to pick.


    I worried about P55Pro because its SATA2 but 6 ports.And H81 Plus is SATA2 x2, SATA3 x2.
    FM2A68M-DG3+ is SATA3 x4.


    On NAS will be installed Steam library, Plex, DDNS, Pi-Hole, and may be VPN.


    Thank you for your help.

  • hi,


    The criteria for selecting a motherboard differ between users.


    Do you want to run a lot of services?
    Do you want to run ZFS?
    If any of the above, then you'll need more RAM and CPU power than 'average'. If not, then a small Atom board will even do the trick.
    Also, if you want ZFS, you'll want ECC RAM.
    Sorry, never ran Plex or Steam, so I don't know if you'll need a lot of power.


    If you want to run a lot of services, then you could also look at virtualisation, like via Proxmox or ESXi (both support hosting VMs and Containers). You'll get more freedom than on OMV. Steam and Plex fit nicely in OMV, but the others you mention could and security wise maybe should run elsewhere.


    Is power consumption important to you? Then look at power consumption. The lower the better of course. Measure it, especially idle consumption, because the machine will run idle most of the time in your use case. If you cannot measure it, look at the TDP of the processors, and if there are any power hogs on the MBs (big heatsinks and fans are a giveaway).


    Is transfer speed important? Then forget SATA2 (unless the disks do not support SATA3). You'll want SATA3, either on board, or via PCI adapter (they can be found cheaply on ebay or elsewhere).


    And if you have a lot of users, or have some power users, you'll want a big network uplink. For a lot of users, some extra 1G ports can do (spreading out the load over the links). For power users (where you cannot spread out over links, and no, even LAG will not help here), you could bite the bullet and go for a 10G network card in it (SFP+ uses less power than 10Gbe). 10G switches are getting affordable. PCIe3.0 is key in the last case. I haven't checked all your MBs, but FM2A68M-DG3+ & AMD A4-7300 will not accept that for example: the board could, but the processor is not of the right type (you'd need FM2+, not just FM2).

  • hb020, Thanks a lot for your advice.


    I'll buy RAID card anyway. And I was thinking that SATA2 is will be bottleneck for transfer speed. Also dual core is not enough and RAM is also max 12G. Buying DDR3 Non-ECC RAM even used doesn't worth it. So may be I'll buy x79 and e5-2650 with ecc RAM, but still don't know if better to pick x99 mobo but it x2 expensive. Also I didn't think about virtualization, like Proxmox, I'll keep it in mind. I think I'll be able to sell all my old hardware for same price of x79 set.

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