Hi. I’d like to hear your experience or opinion on three motherboards I’m considering. I’m set on AMD and AM5.
My use case is a future proof NAS, PLEX and playground box in a Fractal Node 804.
l’ve heard a lot of bad things about Asus, MSI and Gigabyte AM5 motherboards and people seem to look down on ASRock. So what’s the best option?
One generic caution is to look at the PCIe lanes available in your PCIE slots.
Maybe not as much an issue with micro ATX
But I have a b650 board and it has two extra PCIA slots and while they are mechanically x16 they are only electrically X1. And I have a 10 gig network adapter plugged into one of them that only gets 6 gig in a single direction because of the limitation
AM5 is not really a recommended platform for NAS - it’s too expensive. ‘Future proofing’ is kind of not a thing either. AMD doesn’t make much sense for Plex.
Can you perhaps specify just what it is you want to do that you think requires a brand new beefy system?
Good point. I do understand the difference…tricky if you don’t know the difference.
I appreciate your feedback. I don’t really have a good use case for needing a beefy system. I’m gonna store business files on the system and have some automatic redundancy with, for example, unraid. I’ll move my automation from my RASPI to this as well as add security cameras and other future automation. I’ll start building my media library.
I kinda what AMD and why should I buy AM4 chips when is has been superseded by AM5?
Why do you want AMD
I have the full ATX version of the Gigabyte Aorus B650m board. It’s in my desktop. It’s fine. I haven’t liked old gigabyte boards from years ago but this one seems fine. Works well with a Ryzen 7600x.
I have no beef against asrock but no personal experience. Asrock RACK makes some really interesting small server boards, btw.
But if you’re setting up a possible plex server, get an intel board and a cpu with an igpu. It’s gets you hardware transcoding for no extra slots and little extra power. AMD’s transcode basically just doesn’t work, or is pointless.
For my home server I am using a i5-10500 that I got a good deal on. It’s fine. Before that I was using a i7-7700 (which was itself totally fine, I didn’t need more speed to be frank). Before THAT I had a dual xeon v4 system. That last one was fun, but it actually had trouble if I had to transcode a 4k movie because it didn’t have any hardware transcode ability.
No good reason to go AMD or AM5, honestly. I originally looked at AMD due to ECC support but AM5 is not there yet. I’d like to have ECC support, but it’s obviously not too important for my needs. Am I looking into Intel now.
I went against future proof advice and built an AM5 system for my NAS/Homelab server. But went a little further and got a x670e board, specifically the Asus ProArt X670E-CREATOR.
It has 4x m.2 slots, onboard 10gbe, but comes at quite the price premium. It’s running proxmox with unraid virtualized within, and while it works well I still wouldn’t really recommend it. It is quite the price hike, and one of the reasons I went with AM5 is the 7900(non X) CPU which runs at 65w TDP even with its 24 threads. But this isn’t as big a deal for a server that is usually mostly idle, as Ryzen AM4/AM5 both don’t idle down as well as intel systems.
It seems that Intel is very much the better way to go, so I’m listening to the advice given.
I also like AMD especially for future proofing. I have an unRaid server using a B450 board and originally a Ryzen 7 1700 processor. I upgraded the processor to a Ryzen 7 5700G last spring and after selling my old processor the upgrade was less than a $100! Did the same on my workstation Ryzen 5. With Intel I would have been looking at a new MB and RAM and a lot more time and money than I would have wanted.
Glad I’m not the only one that thought AMD we a good option. Alas, I’ve gone Intel. Thanks.