I’m just finishing up my NK6 build, will be posting some pictures soon, but had 1 question for now.
X11SCA-F with an Intel 8500T. iGPU not showing up in unraid. I have a monitor plugged into the VGA port, should I plug an HDMI in for boot? Or is there a setting in the bios?
Do you have a GPU plugged in? How do you know it’s “not showing” in Unraid?
I have no gpu’s plugged in.
I installed Intel GPU top and GPU statistics. I can’t choose a GPU at all from the settings.
I also went into terminal and ran intel_gpu_top and it returns an error “No device filter specified and no discrete/integrated i915 devices found”
The GPU may be disabled or not enabled in a couple of ways. Typically we’ve heard people need to enable the onboard iGPU/display outputs through the bios first using the vga port to get access to the settings. However, apparently there’s a physical jumper on board to disable VGA and that forces the digital outputs. But, we also know that a lot of the time the iGPU may disable itself if no display is recognized on a digital port, so you may need a dummy plug instead of or in addition to these other configurations.
Alright thank you I’ll try a few things when I get home.
The X11SCA-F defaults to the VGA out attached to the BMP. You may need to switch it to the iGPU by changing some BIOS settings.
Give this a try and see if it helps:
Boot into your BIOS setup.
Under the “Advanced” menu → “Chipset Configuration” → “System Agent (SA) Configuration” → “Graphics Configuration”
Change “Primary Display” from “Auto” to “IGFX” and change “Internal Graphics” from “Auto” to “Enabled”.
Restart the system and you should now get video out via HDMI and your CPUs iGPU.
Awesome, thanks. I’m stuck at work late but will try when I get home.
Worked perfectly, thanks again.
Any ideas how to get my memory 64gb of ddr4 3200 to run at 2666?? It’s currently running at 2133.
Hardware Haven did a review of this Classico case with mixed results.
The reviews on Amazon are also quite mixed. Many people report that the back of the hard drive cages is almost touching the side panel and doesn’t allow clearance for SAS or straight SATA cables. Even with 90 degree cables it sounds like it is a really tight fit and they have difficulty getting the side panel on. Also a lot of complaints that it is fairly flimsy.
Too bad, I was expecting a little more from Dark Rock, they make quite high quality CPU coolers. Placing the back of the hard drive cages so close to the side panel that you can’t get power and data connectors on seems like quite the oversight on a harddrive-centric case like this.
Kind of funny to see that Video title on Serverbuilds; A site all about building custom NAS builds in mostly desktop cases.
Hi folks,
Thanks for all the great information on this thread, I’ve managed to snag a Supermicro X11SCA-F from eBay. It’s coming with a Xeon E-2124G, is this worth keeping and using or worth upgrading? Main uses will be Plex/arrs and HA…
That’s an excellent processor that I would start to use, and you can always upgrade it later if necessary.
Hello guys,
First of all, thanks for this very useful and interesting thread.
Question for the Europeans, the Supermicro X11SCA-F being very hard to find, especially at a fair price, what MB did you finally choose ? I am looking for an alternative with 8 SATA ports.
Thanks !
I’m trying to put together a rack-mounted NK6. Here are the parts I’m looking at. Basically just looking for a QA that this makes sense and these parts will all work together:
I realize this is almost all the recommended parts from the example build. My main question is if the mobo, PSU, CPU cooler, and fans will be compatible with the Rosewill case? I’m guessing they would because it’s larger, but want to be sure, esp for the mobo since I don’t really know how that mating works.
Also, does RTG still exist? All of the storage links either lead to “out of stock” pages on ebay or, in the case of the Seagate 12TB drives, to what seems to be a different vendor.
Lastly, that Rosewill is pricey. If anyone has another rec for a rack-mounted case that would work, I’m all ears. 8 bays is fine, I just went with the RSV-L4500U because it was recommended to me in another thread and because it’s not a huge premium over the 8-bay L4000U.
Looking to build an NK6… looking to upgrade my current setup based on two Xeon E5-2697. Not them most power efficient setup. I have 11 HDDs and 2 SSDs. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti being used for Plex transcoding. Tdarr uses CPU power to transcode existing shows… pinned 16 cores for Tdarr jobs. Drawing 11 kWh or so, a day.
Considering the Supermicro X11SCA-F board… but what is the best bang for buck CPU to consider? I’m running Plex, Tdarr, Radarr, Sonarr, and a few other containers.
Hi, I’m checking out this guide mainly to upgrade cpu/ram/mobo from an old sandy lake build I have running xpenology. I have an LSI SAS card to use for drive expansion, so I think sata ports are lower priority than onboard nvme for me. I’d be fine with a few of the boards listed but I’m finding prices 3x what is listed in the OP. I realize this guide is over a year old, is this just pricing upswing I need to wait out, or am I missing something? Are there other boards I could look at, or should I wait for NAS killer v7 to come out?
Just to update, I did end up going ahead and getting the Supermicro X11SCA-F for about $150. Glad to lock in that decision, now I can narrow my focus on what fits that board. Obviously looking at the recommended CPUs but also looking at low tdp 9th gen options as well. Probably go with the memory recs, may choose to pop in another set of sticks in future, unless there’s a decent 2x32GB option instead. Already have an 8 bay box and PSU to use.
Thinking I might run this as a proxmox box with virtual NAS, passing through LSI controller for disks.
Prefacing this post to note that My first build from a JDM_WAAAT post was the NAS Killer v2.0 in July/Aug 2018 and it’s still chugging along as my main Proxmox server.
I had my NAS as a VM running Open Media Vault and finally decided I really needed to get a proper NAS built. I had my eye on NAS Killer 6.0 from when it came out but only recently had the resources to jump on it. As many are aware I’m sure, most of the listed motherboards are in short supply and expensive now so based on the basic criteria along with some of my own requirements, I built the following:
Mobo:
ASROCK Z390M Pro4 - $96.00
Missed one for $20 cheaper but ended up with a new in box mobo 
CPU:
Intel i7-8700 3.2GHz 6 core - $80.00
RAM:
Silicon Power Value Gaming DDR4 RAM 32GB (2x16GB) 3200MHz - $52.00
PSU:
EVGA 600W 80 Plus - $49.00
Cooler:
Thermalright Assassin X120 Refined SE - $20.00
HBA:
Adaptec - ASR-7805 - $25.00
Boot Drive:
WD Blue 1TB SN580 NVMe Internal SSD - $62.00
Cables:
2 x SFF-8643 → SATA/SAS breakout - $36.00
2 x SATA power splitter - $13.00
Misc:
fan for HBA - Noctua NF-A4x10 FLX, Premium Quiet Fan - $14.00
Case:
Fractal Design Node 804 Micro-ATX Computer Case (Windowed, Black) - $125
HDD:
Already had 8 7 HDD of varying sizes already used with my OMV VM. (one died somewhere along the way)
TOTAL:
$572.00
*I wanted to note about the case choice. First, I obviously needed a case that could hold my drives without having to mod it. The Node 804 will hold 10 x 3.5" HDD + 2 x 2.5" HDD/SSD.
Second. Having built my last two desktop PCs using good quality cases instead of cheaping out to save some $$, I found that in most cases the extra money is very well worth it for the build quality of the case. They are a real pleasure to build in and they will last much longer.
Future plans:
For all of you that I’m sure will say, "You should switch to UnRaid/TrueNAS/etc.
I considered switching to UnRaid but converting my mergerfs/snapraid array to UnRaids file system is too much of a pain right now and I’m already comfortable with OMV. I also don’t use the docker feature since I have a server for that.
TrueNAS, etc, I already have a bunch of different size drives and don’t want to spend the money in a bunch of new, 10+TB drives. Besides, with my current config, my whole NAS could fail and as long as the HDD are still good I can access each individually to access the files.
Nice build! I don’t suppose you have a link to either your source for the mobo, or the Z390M that was $20 cheaper that you might be willing to share? (If still available)
I used this guide to build a NK6 installing the Adaptec 7805 SAS card.
I am going to recommend against using this card due to a bug which can cause the controller to hang when under high i/o loads.
While I am able to consistently reproduce it on my machine, the exact circumstances may vary from user to user. There appears to be community created kernel driver patches for proxmox and unraid, but not ubuntu although I see people asking about this going back to 2009 with no relief. I’m running the latest bios and drivers
Controller #1
==============
Firmware : 7.5-0 (32118)
Staged Firmware : 7.5-0 (32118)
BIOS : 7.5-0 (32118)
Driver : 1.2-1 (50983)
Boot Flash : 7.5-0 (32118)
There is also a possible solution involving changing the timeout of the SCSI subsystem. You can read about that here
I’ll be relacing the card with an LSI.