Greetings,

Seeking guidance on the upgrade path. My current setup:

• CPU: Intel i5-9600K

• Motherboard: ROG STRIX Z390-I GAMING

• GPU: Arc A380 (used for video transcoding)

• RAM: 32GB DDR4

• Storage: 2x M.2 NVME 512GB Samsung Drives

• Storage: 4x HDD 4TB from Seagate (Ironwolf)

I use my UNRAID for variety of tasks, streaming videos, nextcloud, macOS backup. My plan is to expand this further by hosting my own Gitlab instance with runners to build my applications all on my machine.

Presently I ran out of storage (all drives at max capacity) and in need of expansion. Trouble is that I already used all 4 of my SATA ports, mobo only has 1 PCI-E slot which is occupied by the GPU, and I am in need of more cores for Gitlab runners and a few VMs I want to run. So I started doing research and wanted to build something to last me next 10 years or so since I got serious about self hosting.

• CPU: AMD Epyc 4545p (efficient 65W TDP compared to 95W TDP of my current CPU and comes with 16 cores)

• Motherboard: Supermicro H13SAE-MF

• GPU: Stays the same

• RAM: 32GB DDR5 ECC UDIMM (may go higher but perfect time to upgrade with RAM prices going STONKS)

This is roughly what I am aiming for, but I do have questions I am hoping to get answers and also what are your overall thoughts on the setup?

• I've seen conflicting information that there is no reason to limit myself to 65W TDP processor as many higher tier variants may be more efficient at low load like 4585px, is that right or I am misunderstanding smth here?

• I primarily looked for motherboard with multiple PCI-E slots so I can have GPU and HBA card for more HDD expansion, however all seem to be Micro-ITX instead of full size, why is that? Perhaps there are better options than the one above?

• Speaking of HBA this is an unknown area for me. I know that HBA card allows me to split SAS ports into 4 SATA ports, but any general recommendations on the setup/hardware, as well as general knowledge about HBA/SATA expansion, is greatly appreciated it as I never had to expand beyond built in SATA ports.

• I noticed that Supermicro H13SAE-MF has "-O" and "-B" suffix by some retailers. What's that about?

P.S. parts were also picked based on general availability in Europe so please keep that in mind when suggesting alternatives :)

Edited November 16, 2025Nov 16 by Icekronik

It's been a month since you posted this. Did you reach any conclusion?

My current HW, an HP ProLiant 110g4 (I don't recall the specs - it's been years since I had to maintain it, but I think that I added memory at some point) won't boot after a power outage. I'm hoping to reset the NVRAM, which I hope will help but haven't had time to deal with it. In any case, I may need new hardware, so I'm looking for suggestions. I don't use it for anything more than NAS and FTP, so my needs are simple.

@StevenHB not really. I've been pondering to upgrade for a while, but since then we got RAM shortage and prices are out of whack. Even if I were to discard RAM issues, I couldn't really settle for a small board as I am really looking for a full ATX board and can't find any?

I am still aiming for 4545p processor from AMD (due to 65W TDP), but can't find a suitable mobo with multiple PCI-E slots that isn't mITX.