That also means you don’t need to buy an APU that isn’t nearly as high performance as the rest of the Ryzen line up! This is absolutely wonderful because in the event of troubleshooting you no longer need to swap out PCI-E devices for a GPU. That means that you can access the bios out of the box through the VGA port AND you can display the Unraid operating system using the same graphics chip. The motherboard uses an ASpeed chip to do VGA output. On-board graphics!! That’s right this motherboard doesn’t need an APU or a dedicated GPU. I won’t be using the on-board NVMe slots primarily because I want to allow the 10Gb Ethernet to have the full performance available to it and secondly because I plan to use a PCI-E NVMe adapter (scroll down for more details). There is only one way to talk about this board and that is with a “Pros” list. It is missing a some features like U.2 support but dammit, it’s more than good enough and almost exactly what I’ve been waiting for! I love this board so much. Ryzen has a mere 24 PCI-E lanes available which is pretty abysmal.

I did know this going in and that is why finding the right motherboard was mission number 1.

I really wish they would have been able to squeeze 40 lanes into the architecture like some older Intel CPU’s. This is by far the biggest crux with Ryzen. If you at all plan on having a lot of PCI-E devices you should skip Ryzen all together. So keep scrolling for further details on why I selected certain things.ĪsRock Rack X570D4U-2L2T Motherboard - $439.99Ĭorsair LPX 32GB (2x16GB) 3200MHz C16 (CMK32GX4M2B3200C16) - $139.99Ģx NVMe Lite-ON CX2-GB1024-Q11 1TB - $50 each used.įirst off Ryzen barely offers enough PCI-E lanes. I’m just going to lay everything out then discuss each part separately. This is the general gist of what led me to buy certain things. Still reading the introduction!?! Goals and Needs

The heavy focus here will be on the motherboard because that is what is going to enable us to have loads of features that people would enjoy from a older/used Dell, SuperMicro, HP, Intel, or other brands of server manufactures. This build is primarily focused on getting the most “enterprise” server like build we can and top tier performance.

Plex server build