Good alternative to ASUS H87I-PLUS?


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Hey all,

I'm doing my first build in a LianLi Q25b case, was looking at the H87I-Plus for the motherboard (i3 processor) but am finding it hard to source in the UK. Can anyone recommend me a good sub £100 board that supports 6 drives, or a decent board and SATA extension?

 

I was thinking of adding a tv tuner, but I'm unsure at the minute and can always get an external one, so could use the PCI slot for the SATA extension .

Currently I stream directly to openelec boxes from a DroboFS, but am thinking of replacing everything with the Nexus Player when it comes to the UK and running plex + possibly live tv to get everything integrated through the one system instead of jumping around inputs...

 

Any advice would be very much appreciated

Thanks

C

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This doesn't meet your < £100 requirement, but it's an excellent board with a server class chipset and 6 SATA ports ... a very good choice for a Q25B:

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/ASRock-E3C226D2I-Server-Workstation-Socket/dp/B00G9TZHSQ

 

The ECC memory support and IPMI are very nice features that are well worth a few extra £

 

If you buy it, be sure you use an i3 that has ECC support  :)

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Thanks for the reply.

I'm a bit unsure of spending the extra cash as I don't really know what benefits I'll get.

Ecc I know will correct errors, but my drobo doesn't have that and I've never had any problems.

Ipmi seems to be a way of uncoupling the hardware status from the os, which I can see the benefits of, but don't know if it'll be overkill for a home media server. I also plan on using it extensively for photography, but will be doing manual backups to an external hd every few weeks for off site storage.

 

I have two choices, go expensive and do ipmi and ecc, which will take a bit longer to finish (given myself £100/month to spend so as not to freak the wife out), or go cheap 4xport SATA board and extra controller, probably update in a year or two to a rack mount 16 drive server once I have my node zero cupboard sorted...

 

What do you think. Is it worth the extra for what I need.

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I came across a deal for the Asus h81-I plus and ended up going with that for my Lian li q25b build.  I got it kind of by accident actually, because I was shopping for the h87-I.  But it's worked out great.

 

It's not quite as robust as the h87 but it comes with a cheaper price tag and I was planning to buy an ibm 1015 regardless so its less ports didn't matter much to me.

 

Anyways, it's worked out great for me in unraid 6.  I don't have any performance complaints to speak of so far.

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Desktop class boards are fine for most uses -- memory is pretty reliable these days, so the added benefits of ECC modules are something many are willing to forego.    My view is that if you're building a fault-tolerant server for your data, it's a good idea for the memory subsystem to also be fault-tolerant as an additional layer of protection.

 

But the Asus H87I-Plus is indeed an excellent board ... I've used it in several builds.  If I was building another system today, I'd go with the AsRock, primarily for the server-grade chipset and ECC memory.    IPMI is also a VERY nice feature -- this lets you use the system completely head-free (no keyboard or monitor) ... you can completely control it from any other PC on your network, even when it's off.    BIOS changes, even BIOS upgrades, can be done remotely.

 

But if cost is a major factor, then the Asus board will indeed let you do the build a month earlier given your current budgetary constraints.

 

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Thanks for the info, you really did have me sold on the asrock for a while, mainly for IPMI than ECC, but when I priced everything up it ended up double the cost for mb, ram & cpu, only because I can get 40% off the motherboard currently, otherwise the price difference wouldn't be that great and I'd go for the asrock.

 

The thing is I know I'll end up upgrading my server to a rack system in 2 years and will be buying a whole new set of components, so I'm happy to not totally max out this build.

 

So these are the components I'm currently thinking.

LianLi q25b - Already own

Asus H81I-PLUS Motherboard - £56.77

Syba SATA controller - £27.78

Intel Pentium CPU - £49.24

Silverstone SFX PSU 300W - £52.13 (originally the 450W is 300W enough?)

 

Storage is 3x3TB WD Green drives I already have.

Parity will be another 3TB disk, should I go red or are greens ok for parity?

Plan a SSD Cache disk, don't know how big yet, probably quite small, 80GB or something.

2x4GB RAM from crucial.

 

What does this look like to you?

I currently do no transcoding and would prefer to keep it that way for the home, but you never know... Probably only ever one stream though. But currently just nfs to xbmc boxes...

 

If this looks like a system that'll work I might just buy it outright now, if you think I need i3, 450w PSU, more RAM or a different board etc then I'll have to revisit the list.

 

Thanks for your help, I haven't built a PC in 15+ years and am a bit cautious of jumping in feet first without asking if I've made some huge mistake first.

C

 

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If it helps you I have a very similar system built already.  Mainly for use of Plex and streaming to my popcornhour.

 

I have the

 

lian li q25b

Asus H81i-plus

Intel g3220 cpu

2x 4gb ram chips

ibm 1015 controller

4x 2tb hdd's

1x 120gb SSD

FSP Group 300w PSU

 

Couple of comments:

1.  No problems so far running on 300w

2.  I haven't noticed any issues stream via plex (haven't tried a ton of transcoding yet, but like you I try to avoid doing any)

3.  I would recommend at least 120gb SSD for the flash drive if you plan to do any large transfers.  Mostly because with unRAID 6, it's recommended you keep apps and dockers on the ssd for speed.  So that will chew up maybe 10-20gb.... and if you're like me and transfer BDMV folders over, then that really only leaves you room to transfer at most 2 before it's filled.  Obviously it'll free back up over night when MOVER runs, but I'm just saying....you may want to think about how much you plan to transfer to the server.  Because the cache only really helps you if it has the free space to hold the data (at least from how i understand it).

 

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There's no advantage to using a RAID controller for your extra SATA ports.  The SYBA controller you listed is fine.

 

... and the 300w Silverstone is plenty of power for all the drives you can put in a Q25B.  Your system will also run a bit more efficiently with that unit, since it'll come closer to drawing power that's within the 80+ certification range.

 

 

 

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I have mine flashed to it mode which really just makes it an expander and not doing any RAID functions.  To be honest I think the only difference between the m1015 and the card you linked is speed capabilities.  But I'm not enough of an expert to say how much if any truthfully.  And in your use age I would assume the one you linked is probably fine, especially if you plan to upgrade somewhere down the line anyway.

 

I went with the m1015 because truthfully I had a completely different setup in mind when I ordered it.  but since it has a pretty solid reputation in the community I decided to use it anyway.  I figured its a good price to have if I ever decide to do a bigger upgrade.  There appears to be some pretty solid options for expanding beyond 8 drives with the m1015 based on this thread

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=21769.0

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There's actually no speed advantage with an M1015 vs. the SYBA card when used as intended here.

 

The PCIe x1 interface on the SYBA card is a v2 interface, so it supports 500MB/s of bandwidth.  This is easily enough for full speed transfers on 2 drives, and in most cases 3 drives.    There would be a bit of throttling if you connected 4 drives, but even that wouldn't have any notable impact except on parity check and rebuild speeds.

 

The PC-Q25B supports a max of 7 drives ... so with the 4 motherboard ports, there won't be more than 3 of the ports on the add-in card used (and likely only 2).

 

The M1015 is an x8 card, so it has much higher bandwidth available -- but unless you're connecting SSDs to the add-in card that extra bandwidth is irrelevant.   

 

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Thanks for all the help.

I got the ASUS H81I-Plus motherboard, the Syba SATA controller And then a Intel Pentium G3420 3.2GHZ CPU which should be newer than the one I posted before. £130 all in but got it for £85 because of some vouchers I had for Amazon.

 

PSU, RAM, parity disk and cables left to get... Ohh and unraid license :)

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  • 3 years later...

To revive an old thread...

ive been running this setup for a few years now. I have offloaded a lot of home automation services to a different device, but still use this for Plex, which I think could do with a bit of help with transcoding.

 

CURRENT BUILD

intel pentium G3420 3.2ghz

ASUS H81I-Plus

1x8Gb RAM

Sata card

4x3Tb WD Greens

120GB Kingston SSD

300w ST30SF Bronze PSU

 

RAM never really goes above 30%

CPU is both cores 100% when transcoding.

 

Can I get away with an i5 or even i7 (socket 1150) with this build/psu?

 

My alternative would probably be to leave this alone and upgrade my docker server to an i5 NUC.

 

thanks for any new advice.

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Bumping the processor up to an i5 or i7 would indeed give you significantly more "horsepower".

 

Your G3420 scores 3405 on PassMark.     A Core i5-4670 scores 7436 -- more then double your current value.    An i7-4770 scores 9786 -- almost triple the Pentium's score (2.87 x to be precise).

 

Your motherboard supports all of those processors, and the power supply is plenty powerful.   Your Pentium has a TDP of 53W.     The i5-4670 and i7-4770 both have a TDP of 84W.  This is a nominal difference … and in fact neither will draw nearly that much power during the vast majority of the time.

 

Checking recent sales of these CPUs on e-bay, the i5 has been selling in the $75 - $100 range;  the i7 is both rarer and notably more expensive (around $135 and up), but it does have about 1/3rd more "horsepower" than the i5.      Either should be a very nice upgrade.

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