March 19, 201412 yr Hi folks. I'm about to build an unRAID box, and I have two choices of boards sitting on my shelf: Choice 1: AMD Asus E2KM1I-DELUXE (E2-2000 APU) with 2x1GB ECC DDR3 Choice 2: Intel Asus H87I-Plus and Pentium G3220 with 2x2GB DDR3 I'll be using my old favourite Lian-Li PCQ-25B, so both boards can fully populate the 5 bays in that case. I'll be running 3x3TB WD Red, and most likely using the onboard LAN (Realtek on the AMD, i217 on the Intel). I do have an Intel 1000PT adapter I can use if either's LAN is not recommended or won't work. Use scenario will be general downloading (Sickbeard, Torrents, etc), and MySQL for XBMC sync. Which do you guys recommend? I'm swinging towards the AMD due to the ECC support, and the power use might be a little lower (possibly).
March 19, 201412 yr There's no question, the Intel system is the one to use. That AMD CPU is effectively an Atom equivalent. At idle that Haswell based Pentium will be very power efficient and will leave you headroom in case you ever want to use something like Plex.
March 19, 201412 yr Author I sort of thought that, the E2 is even slow doing Memtest. I've yet to find a use for that AMD board, it's been slow as s**t since day one. I've also discovered the G3220 is actually a G3430, so it's a bit faster than I thought. I assume the i217 NIC works OK on the H87I-Plus?
March 19, 201412 yr I can't seem to find any threads where anyone has tested either the i210 or i217. I would throw the free version of unraid on a thumb drive and boot it up and try. Don't know what you could use that AMD board for. Might be decent as a router running pfSense.
March 20, 201412 yr Author Well, I got the Haswell machine up and running, and the Intel NIC works perfectly. Currently just running with a single drive while I set up some plugins etc, then I'll fire in the other two Reds and the cache drive (a Samsung SSD). The H87I-Plus has 6 SATA ports, so I can fill the 5 3.5" bays and have the 6th SATA for the SSD cache.
March 21, 201412 yr Author I'm having issues with a lot of Machine Check Exceptions on the H87I-Plus/G3430 combo. :'( I'm going to move everything over to an older microATX machine (Asus B75M-A/Celeron G1620) later and see if that makes any difference.
March 21, 201412 yr Don't! I had lots of those too (i have the h87i plus too) and now they have mysteriously disappeared. Even when I had those "errors", I didn't have a SINGLE issue with my system, nothing at all, completely stable and I've been running my system for 6 months now. Just go on with it, and maybe if you're really worried, you might try updating the mobo bios to see if that helps..you are on 5.0.5 right? Sent from my SM-N9005 using Tapatalk
March 21, 201412 yr Author Yep, on 5.0.5, and on the latest BIOS (just flashed it last weekend). The H87-I doesn't like my 8GB DIMMs either, which is a pain, and another black mark against the H87-I.
March 22, 201412 yr That sucks. The h87i plus is really great, 6 data port, Intel gigabit NIC which never fails to give me 100mbps read/write speed. Currently on bios 0507 and a 8gb stick of g skill ram, in case you ever decide to reuse it again. But then again since you're not gonna be using Plex, the celeron should be just fine for your use case. Sent from my SM-N9005 using Tapatalk
March 22, 201412 yr v507 is a pretty outdated BIOS (current is v1005 - v507 is 6 versions before that. However, HellDiver indicated he's on the latest BIOS (assume v1005), and is also having these issues, so apparently it's not a BIOS issue. Are you running everything at stock settings? (i.e. no overclocking)
March 23, 201412 yr Author v507 is a pretty outdated BIOS (current is v1005 - v507 is 6 versions before that. However, HellDiver indicated he's on the latest BIOS (assume v1005), and is also having these issues, so apparently it's not a BIOS issue. Are you running everything at stock settings? (i.e. no overclocking) Yes, it's 1005. No overclocking at all (I used Optimised Defaults, then turned the SATA to AHCI, turned off the Sound chip, and that's all). The B75M-A/Celeron G1620 rig runs fine with no MCEs, with the same unRAID install on the same drives and same RAM, so there's something odd with the Haswell setup.
March 28, 201412 yr v507 is a pretty outdated BIOS (current is v1005 - v507 is 6 versions before that. However, HellDiver indicated he's on the latest BIOS (assume v1005), and is also having these issues, so apparently it's not a BIOS issue. Are you running everything at stock settings? (i.e. no overclocking) What i meant was that im on v507, so maybe the newer bios version is causing the issue. But again, during the first couple of month of running unraid, i would have that error coming up ALOT, but don't see them anymore.... There are a lot of other ppl using haswell with unraid, so i guess we could say this is a mobo thing, trurl also has this mobo iinm, and i think he mentioned about this mce issue too.
March 28, 201412 yr Author I tried the H87-I again for a giggle, this time with 4GB RAM (2x 2GB Samsung DDR3L-12800 sticks) and no MCEs. Perhaps it was a memory issue before? The 2x4GB sticks I was using memtested fine, so I wonder was the 8GB on a 32-bit install causing issues?
March 28, 201412 yr I doubt it was due to the 32-bit install => I suspect it was simply timing on the memory modules. I've seen many cases where memory tests fine, but causes strange errors -- but if you swap the modules everything works fine ... and the troublesome modules work perfectly in another system.
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