Looking at options now. I was planning on putting in an AM4/AM5 consumer board with a Ryzen processor but I am quickly finding out all modern boards have no x8 slots anymore.
I need an x8 slot for my HBA, an x16 for GPU and x4 for NIC. PCIe 3.0 or higher. Does this exist or am I doomed to get a Threadripper or Epyc? Meaning I need a second GPU for Plex since there’s no iGPU.
Also means much higher idle power draw I think?
My X670e Aorus Master has 3 x16 slots and im pretty sure the middle one is wired for x8 5.0…
EDIT: I was wrong, its 1 x16 5.0 off the cpu, 1 x4 4.0 off the chipset and 1 x2 3.0 off the chipset
EDIT EDIT: You can get AMD CPUs with built in graphics, any am4 cpu with a G in it has graphics, and every am5 cpu should have graphics
I think I will go for the Asus ProArt B650-CREATOR. It seems to have 2 x16 slots which will then run at x8 (enough for Plex) and another x16 slot than runs at x4.
I wish there was an easier way to see PCIe lane allotment and what will and won’t work on a board by board basis… its really hard to find those specifics for each board.
This information is readily available in the manual for the motherboard. Though from my experience, consumer boards have less detailed documentation compared to server boards.
From the manual for the X670e Aorus Master:
Unfortunately Plex doesn’t support hardware transcoding on AMD iGPUs, only Intel’s QuickSync
EDIT: nvm! Plex recently added hardware transcoding support for AMD!
I will be also looking for my own Motherboard and Processor but I have been keeping and eye out to see if there are any cool motherboard more in the workstation class of hardware that has some sort of IPMI. ASUS used to make a few different ones.
ASRock Rack has a number of options, I am going with the B650D4U-2L2T/BCM for my build. Have another box running the X570D4U-2L2T/BCM which is working well.
This board is pretty sick! It just seems like it’s a little limited in the PCI department. That built in 10GbE Lan is awesome! I just with it had a second 16x PCI slot!
mother board companies now mostly hide them on consumer stuff, because intel stuff is so limited for pci-e lanes and thus slots, so they keep them hidden on AMD consumer stuff not to raise questions from intel users, that say why do they get pci-e lanes documented in big print, and we usually have to go to the manuals to get full details.
Asus makes two workstation socket 1700 motherboards with IPMI options. The Micro-ATX version has IPMI built in, the ATX version uses an adapter card.
ATX Option: https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-W680-ACE-IPMI-workstation-THUNDERBOLT4/dp/B0BZGKKCWC
or
Micro-ATX Option: Amazon.com
That is really good to know. I thought they were still making them but I could not remember what they were. The ATX motherboard provides so much more when it comes to PCI options.
Welcome to the community by the way!
