Choosing a motherboard help


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Hello Everyone,

 

                              I have been lurking some time as my friend pointed me here to give me a project as I have been injured and have been forced to stay at home. Collecting  a large library of movies and playing a ton of games which has been my social interaction between family and friends.

 

Due to the injury, I have received a settlement and though I am frugal, I still want to buy the best that will last as my last pc is 5 years old and needs a makeover. The old pc is an Asus Z87 pro with an I-7 4770k with 32 GB of memory. GTX 770 ftw and I was thinking of making this into the plex server, but wanted more. 

 

I want to make an all-in-one build that I can leave on, so low power consumption when not playing games is high on my list(know cpu I choose will factor into this). This will be supporting 2x 1080TI, at least 32GB of memory. 

 

I have been looking at the ASrock taichi and then came across Asus x99-e-ws. I am learning every day, but lack the knowledge if this is worth the cost of going from 250.00 to 500.00 USD. There are more SATA ports, but an expansion card would do the same thing. 

 

Would appreciate the community's response in this area as it is the only thing holding me back from starting. 

 

Thanks for any help!

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Hello and welcome. 

 

Unfortunately the 4770K doesn't support VT-d, so it will never be the all-in-one solution you are interested in.  I agree it would make a fine unRAID/Plex server, though.

 

So is it worth going to X99/Socket 2011v3 to build an all-in-one gaming/NAS machine?  It's certainly possible and a good number of people are doing it though I definitely consider them "enthusiast" level techies.  Make sure you are looking at the CPUs for that board, it's not just the board that will cost more.  The Skylake-X chips cost a lot more than Socket 1151 chips. 

 

Why the two 1080i's by the way?  Are you trying to support one gaming VM or two?  Also how much Plex streaming and transcoding do you do, and is it at the same time as gaming?

Edited by tdallen
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Thank you for the response.  I will be transcoding 4 at the most and could be gaming at the same time. I will be using both 1080ti's for one vm. (this is possible to use both?) This may change to split to 2 vm's which would give me another workstation. Though for now it is for gaming. I am planning this rig to last at least 5 years and so paying more for the right components now for me is worth it. 

 

Appreciate the questions as it helps me solidify my choices I have made so far. 

 

One other question that has been bothering me about cases is that they seem to not have a spot for optical drive. For instance, the fractal define r6 gunmetal has everything I want except a location to put an optical drive as I need to rip dvd's for plex. I will be getting an Asus optical drive to rip blu-ray and 4 k media. The other options is the corsair obsidian 750d airflow edition.  

 

 

Edited by blewstar
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Was hoping someone would of replied with the last few questions I have, but adding a few more as ready to hit the BUY button. Shameless bumping

 

1. The motherboard ASRock z370 taichi does have onboard video IGA. That will be used for unraid. Just double checking this now will allow for dual 1080ti's passthrough for one vm? I read somewhere just need to click the add button.

 

2. Would I be safe using a 256GB  NVMe cache? Could you recommend one?  I am still learning about drives here as there was something mentioned about a samsung evo that had a bug. Does this bug persist using a 1TB SSD for VM?

 

3. After these 2 questions i am ready to order components and buy a license. Can't wait!

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I wanted to update this to perhaps help others on what I have found. 

 

1. I will be using one 1080ti for a single vm.... I believe I can use 2, but not that important at this time.

 

2. I found some information on the NVMe M2 drive that will allow for mirroring. I have 3 M2 slots on this motherboard and by using 2 will block 4/8 sata ports. I have decided to go with 2x  MyDigitalSSD 1TB SBX Single Sided 80mm and when I need more SATA ports will get an expansion card.

 

My parts list is extreme as I will be using this to experiment on at times from the different vm's created. Disregard the memory as it will not be rgb. Too many problems and software needed which leads to another question I have and a new thread. Thanks everybody for the help. 

 

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/z8PMbX

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