Suggestion for mobo/CPU upgrade from Atlas build?


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Been rocking pretty much an identical build to John's Atlas build from 4-5 years ago.  It's still working well, but I'd imagine I can get more energy efficient while not losing (or even gaining?) some performance.  I could also then use my old 16GB of ECC RAM and build an unRAID backup/test box, since I have an extra unused unRAID key anyway.

 

I used to run ESXi on my server, but now I'm running baremetal.  Please look at my build in my sig.

 

Ideally, I'd like to keep using my current ECC RAM, so really if possible, I'd like an unRAID-confirmed recommendation for an IPMI server mobo with DDR3 support, similar SATA setup, and an Intel CPU with solid ability (running Plex on my unRAID box).

 

Any input would be greatly appreciated!  Thanks!

 

Edit: I should mention, DDR3 support is not a must-have, but more of a preference to save myself some $... If there's a much better mobo that requires DDR4, I'd still appreciate the suggestion!

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It looks like the Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O supports both the original Sandy Bridge E3-1230 and the Ivy Bridge E3-1230v2.  Which do you have?  They're both pretty good chips.  What else are you looking to achieve other than power efficiency?

 

If you want to stay with DDR3 then your upgrade path would only be to the Haswell Xeon v3 chips.  And honestly, while they're a little more power efficient, I don't think it would be worth the effort to upgrade for that reason alone for a desktop/server setup (mobile would be a different story).

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It looks like the Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O supports both the original Sandy Bridge E3-1230 and the Ivy Bridge E3-1230v2.  Which do you have?  They're both pretty good chips.  What else are you looking to achieve other than power efficiency?

 

If you want to stay with DDR3 then your upgrade path would only be to the Haswell Xeon v3 chips.  And honestly, while they're a little more power efficient, I don't think it would be worth the effort to upgrade for that reason alone for a desktop/server setup (mobile would be a different story).

Thanks for your reply.  I have the Sandy Bridge.  I don't really have a specific need, per se.  I guess I was thinking if I could upgrade the mobo and cpu relatively cheaply, I could buy myself a few more years of having a capable server while decreasing my power consumption.  But perhaps you're right and it's not really worth it at this point.  I probably need to get better about the "if it ain't broke" mentality.

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Yeah, it's not broke and it's not old enough.  The last few generations of chips have only seen 5 or 10% performance gains over prior and while power efficiency has been getting better you'll notice it more on a laptop.  Your current chip is a 7928 Passmark chip, while the Haswell version is 9301.  They're both 80w chips but I'd expect the Haswell to give you a small improvement in power consumption.  Skylake would give you a little more power and better memory performance.  But we're just not seeing the traditional Moore's law increases in performance anymore. 

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  • 1 year later...

Bumping this topic, since I'm getting the itch to upgrade yet again.

 

My Atlas clone hasn't seen any upgrades at all (aside from HDDs and SDDs) since I built it in 2014. Truth be told, while it has been running great, I think the processor is starting to show its age with all the Dockers and VM I run. 

 

The case, PSU, SAS card and expander should be good to go, but I know I'll need to get a new mobo, CPU, and DDR4 RAM... I have enjoyed the stability and quality of the Xeon and Supermicro mobo (including IPMI since I run headless), but I wonder if I won't get more utility switching to consumer-grade hardware with a modern Core processor (for Intel QSV support, for example, for Plex hardware transcoding).

 

Does anyone have a suggestion on a good upgrade path for me? I haven't researched hardware in years, and could really use some advice. I've been reading through the build and mobo subforums, but not feeling like I'm making much progress. I have fairly heavy Plex use (Docker), about 7 running Docker containers total, 1 Windows 10 Pro VM... Low-ish power would also be a plus!

 

Thanks in advance!

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  • 3 weeks later...

Any decent quality board and an i5/i7 will do fine.  I've been impressed with my reasonably priced Asus board and cheap i5.

 

I run an Asus TUF Z370-Pro Gaming and an i5-8400 and had zero issues, it's fast and stable.  Even has two M.2 slots for NVMe SSDs (one can also do SATA M.2).

Edited by HellDiverUK
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