Hello everyone;

 

I'm looking to move over from Synology and need to procure myself some parts.

 

I'm highly hesitating between these two combos:

 

Intel Core Ultra 7 265 2.4 GHz 20-Core Processor

ASRock Z890 Riptide WiFi ATX LGA1851 Motherboard

 

Intel Core i5-14400 2.5 GHz 10-Core Processor

ASRock Z790 PG SONIC ATX LGA1700 Motherboard

 

Would you say the extra cores from the I7 and extra efficiency might be worth the extra 300$ the whole setup would cost?

 

I know the first motherboard is a bit light in term of SATA ports, but I thinking on getting this HBA from ebay:

Broadcom HBA 9500-8i Tri-Mode Storage Cntroller SATA 6Gb/s SAS 12Gb/s PCIe

 

I'd love to hear what you guys think. Thanks in advance!

 

Edit: I forgot to mention that I'll be running some Jellyfin, Home Assistant and other containers as well as possibly a VM if/when needed. There'll probably be a couple of users at a single time and very light and occasional transcoding.

Edited April 30, 20251 yr by Bamchar

I was debating this, and I ended up just reusing my 14700 (non-K) system as an Unraid box instead of buying a new "15th gen" Intel system.  14th gen still has hyperthreading also on the P-cores.  Plus, I got to build myself a new computer for daily use .

 

I don't see any big disadvantages of the 14th gen systems as long as you have the bios mitigations done so your CPU doesn't burn out.

I thought the BIOS update fixed the issue, but I'm seeing several reports of people who purchased 13/14th gen products in the past few months who previously did the BIOS update and are still experiencing failed processors that they've had to RMA. These anecdotal reports combined with the fact that Intel released yet another microcode update yesterday to address more instability issues is clearly telling everyone that there are still problems and they don't have this situation under control. With the 265K dropping to $299 a few days ago, I would probably go with a 15th gen system at this point.

265K and it's not even close.

On 9/13/2025 at 1:03 PM, Skandalus said:

265K and it's not even close.

Why? I'm reading a lot of negative stuff about Arrow Lake CPUs.

1 hour ago, plastic_pox179 said:

Why? I'm reading a lot of negative stuff about Arrow Lake CPUs.

Context matters, what they're usually being dunked on is "not the best price to perf ratio for gaming", which doesn't really translate to servers.

For what OP mentioned they want to do... well I wouldn't even buy new, for similar uses my 8 year old 7700K is way more than enough already, so it's very overkill. If you want to buy new then go low end 1-year old gen so you don't get the "newest" tax.

3 hours ago, Kilrah said:

Context matters, what they're usually being dunked on is "not the best price to perf ratio for gaming", which doesn't really translate to servers.

For what OP mentioned they want to do... well I wouldn't even buy new, for similar uses my 8 year old 7700K is way more than enough already, so it's very overkill. If you want to buy new then go low end 1-year old gen so you don't get the "newest" tax.

What's the best value Arrow Lake CPU to get and use with a W880 motherboard?

I would be going AMD but each to there own. Get a used 9300/9400 hundred and save a tone, unless your planing to connect U.2 NVMe drives to your HBA which is going backwards when a $5 adaptor can do the job. What is your use case is what you should have said. If your using it for file server only then your wasting money, if its a ton of vms and docker containers then more cores. Have you thought about a used workstation dell 7920 ect. One thing people forget is that your using consumer gaming orientated hardware in a server case Sanrio. I have always used server workstation rigs for Unraid. First was a ML110 then a dell 5820 tons of pcie slots and lanes and now a s2600stb a real server board. All my rigs have had ecc reg ram and all xeon based which is made for the task.

There's nothing wrong using a gaming rig for Unraid but you have to remember there not sold to run 24/7 deal with not having ecc ram, deal with not having rock solid stability, deal with not having pcie bifurcation, deal with limited pcie slots and lanes, no IPMI/BMC and have limited bios options to resolve things. I would look at Supermicro in your case and at least get a board that has some workstation/server functionality if buying new, like a X13SAE-F and getting some ecc non buffered ram to go with your lag 1700 cpu. Or go used and grab a ex server/workstation though there is one benefit of using a gaming rig is daul boot it for gaming :) My thoughts best of luck