Hi All,

 

Been a while since I've built a proper NAS. I already bought some parts and am unsure if I made a mistake with purchasing the Gigabyte Z790 AC UD.

 

Facts:

• New unRAID NAS is for storage as well as running my plex server
• I plan to use my intel i7-14700k integrated quicksync GPU for the next few years, but want the ability to upgrade to a better GPU down the road

 

I was curious if anyone could look at my motherboard PCI-E specs and determine if my HBA, NIC, NVMe, and a future GPU could work in this motherboard without limiting the speed on any of them, and if so, which ports should I use for which device?  I have concerns about the PCI-E capability to ensure all of those components will run at full speed. I'm still in the return period and want to future-proof this a bit.

 

• Motherboard (Gigabyte z790 AC UD)
• CPU (Intel i7-14700k) -- purchased for quicksync capability
• HBA (LSI 9305-16i) -- all spinning 24TB ironwolf pros attachd (15 disks)
• 10Gbe NIC (Intel x550-T2) -- want to ensure I can maintain 10Gbps speeds

 

Also running dual NVMe drives (one in CPU m2 slot, one in a chipset m2 slot as they have heatsinks and wouldn't both sit next to eachother in the chipset slots).

 

Motherboard Expansion Slots:

Edited March 31, 20251 yr by drewster

Assuming you want to leave the CPU slot for the GPU, the HBA would be limited to x4, but that's still good for HDDs, the NIC would be worse at x1 only, so that would be a little limited.