Server died - Looking to rebuild

[eroz]

A little backstory.....since who doesn't enjoy a story.

 

My server turned off suddenly one day as I was sitting nearby.  It wasn't a gradual shutdown, it just stopped.  I tried turning it back on but it wouldn't power on.  I checked the usb drive in case that was corrupted and was not allowing it to start, but it was fine.  I then thought it might have overheated so I waited a few hours and tried powering it up and it did not start.  I swapped the PSU thinking it was dead but again it will not start.

 

So I've decided to buy a new motherboard, CPU and RAM.  This is what I currently had MB - AsRock z87 Extreme6; CPU - Intel i5-4570; 16GB of RAM.  Not sure what to get this time around that will place nicely.  I use the usual dockers; Kodi, Apache, Nzbget, Sonarr, Couchpotato, Mylarr and Plex.  I don't have any VM's anymore but might think about doing another in the future.  For Plex I might have 3/4 transcodes/streams at the same time.

 

Any ideas?  I have no budget but don't want to spend much either.  My case is an Antec 1200 so no worries on the motherboard needing to be micro/mini-ATX.  I normally run it headless and only occasionally connect a monitor if needed so motherboard should have onboard graphics or a cpu that supports video.

 

Thanks!

[HellDiverUK]

Just get whatever B150 board you like, and a Skylake i3 or i5.  B150 allows you to recycle your RAM.  I'm a big fan of Asus boards, they never let me down.  AsRock has been very hit-and-miss for me, even their server boards are not terribly reliable.

[tdallen]

My guess would be the motherboard.  While there's a chance it's untimely death took out the CPU and RAM, it's also entirely possible they're fine.  Do you have any way to test?  Maybe take a shot at just a new motherboard?  Or, any possibility of a warranty return on the ASRock?  A 7,000 Passmark CPU and 16GB RAM is a pretty decent setup...  If you want to take a step up in processing power then a Core i7 or Xeon is the next step.

 

I've also had good luck with Asus boards but VT-d support is sketchy across their lines so be careful if that is a requirement.  ASRock, Intel, and SuperMicro are more known for the VT-d support.

[00b5]

I just upgraded (lol) to a z87 extreme4 & G3258, love it so far

 

Anyway, if you are set on upgrading, here are my ideas:

 

Skylake:

 

Get a skylake mb (there is a Z170extreme6 which has 8 onboard sata, and tons of slots for your your addin cards), then any skylake cpu you want. Bonus, almost all skylake cpus support vt-d, if that was important to you. Add in some DDR4, and off you go.

 

Server grade:

 

Get server hardware this time, like a supermicro server MB and a xeon. You can do 1150 now (mb/xeon cpu) and recycle your ram, then later buy some ECC and use it instead. Or just get it all now. You can probably even find some server MB's with enough sata for all your drives, and retire/resell the aoc/ibm cards (or save them for later for even more hdds!!) The ASRock C226 WS ATX Server Motherboard can recycle all your current stuff (CPU/RAM) and then you can replace upgrade with xeon/ECC/etc as you feel like it, and has 10 sata ports. There is also a nice supermicro that has even more sata, don't remember which one right now.

 

I'm not sure what the latest skylake server stuff is, but its out there, and if you want ECC & skylake, you'll need a server MB (whereas with haswell, you could find consumer mb's that supported ECC if you looked).

 

Any more specifics?