nerbonne Posted September 25, 2021 Share Posted September 25, 2021 I'm going to upgrade my motherboard, CPU, RAM. The intent is to add M.2 support to the motherboard since I feel my Sata SSD drives are too slow for VMs (both SSD's speed test just lower than 300 MB/s using DiskSpeed app). I was hoping some of you familiar with SuperMicro chassis could look this over and make sure I'm not missing anything. Concerns I have: - Will the fans be ok. Current setup has five case fans plugged into the motherboard and no CPU fans. New setup will have same fans plus CPU fan. New motherboard has 6 fan headers, although one is labeled "CPU_OPT" which is supposedly for a water cooler. Seems like putting a fan on it will work. Seems like I may need some fan wire extenders? - Will the power supply connection be ok. The current motherboard has a 20 pin and 2x 8 pin connections. The new motherboard seems to need the 20 pin, a 8 pin and a 4 pin. There is an unused 4 pin power connection from the power supply so I think this will be fine? Why this motherboard? - Has an internal USB port (for the boot drive) - Supports M.2 NVME (one at 4x, one at 2x) - Supports 1 16x PCIe or 2 8x PCIe cards - Supports 128 GB memory (for VMs) - Supports ECC memory (but doesn't seem to be any available...) Why this CPU? - Could go with a 9900K but it uses more power. Storage speed has been the bottlenecks so far in my opinion, I don't think a 10th/11th gen CPU is needed? Old Motherboard: SuperMicro X9DR3-F New Motherboard: Gigabyte C246-WU4 Old RAM: SK Hynix HMT151R7BFR4C DDR3 4GB modules (15 chips for 60 GB/was 16, 1 went bad) New RAM: G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-2666 32GB Modules (4 chips for 128 GB) Old CPU: Intel E5-2620 v2 (2 CPUs) 6 Cores 12 Threads New CPU: Intel i9-9900 8 Core 16 Threads New Drives: Samsung 980 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME (2 ea.) Existing Case: SuperMicro SC846BE16-R920B Existing PSU: SuperMicro PWS-920P-1R (2 ea.) Existing Backplane: SuperMicro BPN-SAS2-846EL1 Existing HBA: LSI 9211-4i (probably upgrading to LSI 9211-8i for more PCIe lanes/bandwidth) Existing HBA cable: SuperMicro CBL-0108L-02 (SFF-8087 on both ends) Existing Case Fans: SuperMicro 80mm with 4 pin connector (5 ea) Existing Drives: 24x HDD in hot swap bays (connected via Raid card); 2x SATA SSD in internal brackets (connected via SATA cables) Thanks for reading. Quote Link to comment
Ford Prefect Posted September 25, 2021 Share Posted September 25, 2021 The C246M-WU4 would be a betteroption, I think but slap not availableatm.Since the i9 CPU does not Support ECC RAM, you could go with another MB.A nice one is the Asrock B350 Pro 4, with 2xM2 PCie-x4...maybe limited to 64MB RAM and the two larger PCIe Slots will Support a slower combination than the Gigabyte. Gesendet von meinem SM-G780G mit Tapatalk Quote Link to comment
nerbonne Posted September 25, 2021 Author Share Posted September 25, 2021 Hi, thanks for the reply. I looked at the B350 Pro 4 and I kinda liked it, especially the different video ports makes it more compatible with my server KVMs. But, it only supports 64MB RAM max, I'd really like to have 128MB so I'm going to stick with the C246M-WU4 for now. Quote Link to comment
Ford Prefect Posted September 25, 2021 Share Posted September 25, 2021 ...but you were not referring to the c246M, which is the mATX version. Here the 2 M.2 are both PCIe-x4 capable. ... different from the ATX version, that you were referring to.Gesendet von meinem SM-G780G mit Tapatalk Quote Link to comment
nerbonne Posted September 27, 2021 Author Share Posted September 27, 2021 Ah yes, I see that now. Thank you. I wish the ATX board had two x4 M.2 slots. I like the internal USB port but I can just get a header for that and I like the 6x fan connectors, the mATX only has three but I can just use splitters right? Quote Link to comment
Ford Prefect Posted September 27, 2021 Share Posted September 27, 2021 splitters for FANs should only impose a problem, if they are controlled by PWM and not voltage alone. So use 3 Pin fans or a dedicated fan controller, if need be. In my 24bay Rack-Case, all case Fans are not controlled at all...they are just attached to a row of Molex connectors at 12V ....going "full speed" all the time. Quote Link to comment
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