Hi there peeps,
Currently got an old B250M Performance motherboard, although it does the job im looking to upgrade to something that is AM4 compatible, already bought a wraith stealth cpu cooler for dead cheap second hand.
I’m changing from Debian to Unraid too, mainly using the server as media server, but hosting some other apps too. Only got one ssd, the rest are hdds, so multiple ssd slots are not much of interest for now at least.
Is there anything I should be looking for in a motherboard whilst browsing? Anything that would make it more future proof etc? I don’t really know a whole lot about Motherboards.
Appreciate any tips 😇
If you want a proper server, it seems that Asrock Rack is the only manufacturer of AM4-socket-based server mainboards. Unlike desktop/gamer boards, these are designed for parallel airflow, typically from front to back in a 19" rack. These also come with IPMI remote maintenance, so can be operated headless in a remote location.
I have considered one of these for a while, such as the X570D4U, which also supports up to 128 GB of ECC RAM. Depending on what you want, this may be overkill, though.
(This was my favourite, because it has two M.2 slots, but there are others with only a single slot, since you said you only need one.)
Unlike gamer or other boards, these have no fancy black vanity covers and often won’t allow overclocking, but are typically very well designed and rock solid for unattended 24/7 operation.
The ASRock X570 Phantom motherboard is $99 on Amazon right now. If you don’t need IPMI or ECC RAM, this is the board to get. It has fantastic IOMMU groups, so it’s very easy to do PCI-e hardware passthrough to VMs. I currently use it and have a GPU passed through to a VM for transcoding and an HBA passed through to a different VM for storage. This kind of thing can be a pain or impossible on the B-series motherboards.
Thanks for the recommendation! A few words I gotta loon up here though haha, I’m still a it new 😅
This is great advice, thanks 😇 Edit, although abit pricey 😅
