Upgrade time

[blackb0x13]

Greetings, long time stalker, first time poster.

 

Trying to keep this as short as possible;

Currently I have a 14 drive array set up. I want to upgrade my hardware to allow the use of an Nvidia GPU for video transcoding on the fly. I want to use two (which I own but currently only using one) supermicro AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 SAS HBA. I would need 3 pci-e slots with the ones for the sas cards at 8x. Can't seem to find the right combination or verification that using all 3 pci-e slots (1@16x and 2@8x) would work. Looking to go Intel this time around.

 

Any suggestions will be welcomed.

 

Thanks!

[ChatNoir]

5 hours ago, blackb0x13 said:

Can't seem to find the right combination or verification that using all 3 pci-e slots (1@16x and 2@8x) would work.

For that much PCIe lanes, you would have to go to Workstation or Server HW. Consumer grade CPUs offer 20 to 24 lanes in general.

[blackb0x13]

1 hour ago, ChatNoir said:

For that much PCIe lanes, you would have to go to Workstation or Server HW. Consumer grade CPUs offer 20 to 24 lanes in general.

Any suggestions?

[Smith]

Looking for something very similar to this as well. What did you end up finding?

[blackb0x13]

I have to do more research but seems that an x299 board may work with the right cpu.

 

Looked at some server boards but it's way overpriced for my case use

[Vr2Io]

On 11/8/2022 at 9:28 AM, blackb0x13 said:

(1@16x and 2@8x) would work. Looking to go Intel this time around.

Actually you don't need two 8x, 4x also fine. Suggest ASUS Prime Z790-P WiFi D4  ( I haven't that ) , it have four 16x slot in 16x 4x 4x 4x, so two GPU and two HBA fine.

 

PS, My current main build was Asus Prime X299- A II, also price reasonable.

Edited November 18, 2022 by Vr2Io

[Smith]

22 hours ago, Vr2Io said:

Actually you don't need two 8x, 4x also fine. Suggest ASUS Prime Z790-P WiFi D4  ( I haven't that ) , it have four 16x slot in 16x 4x 4x 4x, so two GPU and two HBA fine.

 

PS, My current main build was Asus Prime X299- A II, also price reasonable.

Thanks for this suggestion. It might be a tight fit with a GPU and two HBAs. I  would be curious if there would be significant bottlenecks with TDARR, and two HBAs running mover/parity check at 4x. I believe the HBA I use is 8x and I can easily hit 2GB/s during parity checks with 14 disks.

 

Are you happy with the Asus x299 platform?

Edited November 19, 2022 by Smith

[blackb0x13]

2 minutes ago, Smith said:

I  would be curious if there would be significant bottlenecks with TDARR, and two HBAs running mover/parity check at 4x. I believe the HBA I use is 8x and I can easily hit 2GB/s during parity checks with 14 disks.

This is my concern actually.

[Vr2Io]

Due to each HBA only connect maximum 8 disk, even for 4x PCIe 2.0 bandwidth still have ~2GB, so there are no bottleneck, and you can upgrade to PCIe3 HBA, the slot support up to PCIe4.

 

For PCH to CPU, with DMI4 x8, there also huge bandwidth and no need concerns in bottleneck.

 

5 hours ago, Smith said:

Are you happy with the Asus x299 platform?

Happy with that, but CPU will be less performance and huge power usage if compare to new main stream CPU. The reason for me use it was 8 ram slot, so basically not recommend for new build.

Edited November 19, 2022 by Vr2Io