Intel Socket 1151 Motherboards with IPMI AND Support for iGPU


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1 hour ago, Burizado said:

I noticed that the E3C246D4U does not have audio out jacks on the Rear I/O, and I don't see a mention of an audio chip on board in the specs.

Yes, that is the case with many ASRock Rack server boards.  It depends on the CPU socket and chipset but many of them have no onboard audio.  I don't think I have seen onboard audio on any socket 1150 or 1151 server motherboards.  Xeon W and Threadripper server motherboards do have onboard audio.

 

Some Supermicro server boards have onboard audio, including socket 1151 for the Xeon 2100/2200.

 

The ASRock Rack "workstation" boards have onboard audio, but none of them have IPMI. 

 

Any audio device (onboard or otherwise) would show up in the IOMMU groups for the board.

IOMMU group 0:	[8086:3e31] 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Device 3e31 (rev 0d)
IOMMU group 1:	[8086:1901] 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/E3-1500 v5/6th Gen Core Processor PCIe Controller (x16) (rev 0d)
	[8086:1905] 00:01.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/E3-1500 v5/6th Gen Core Processor PCIe Controller (x8) (rev 0d)
	[1000:0072] 02:00.0 Serial Attached SCSI controller: Broadcom / LSI SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Falcon] (rev 03)
IOMMU group 2:	[8086:3e9a] 00:02.0 Display controller: Intel Corporation Device 3e9a (rev 02)
IOMMU group 3:	[8086:1911] 00:08.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/v6 / E3-1500 v5 / 6th/7th/8th Gen Core Processor Gaussian Mixture Model
IOMMU group 4:	[8086:a379] 00:12.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Thermal Controller (rev 10)
IOMMU group 5:	[8086:a36d] 00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH USB 3.1 xHCI Host Controller (rev 10)
	[8086:a36f] 00:14.2 RAM memory: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Shared SRAM (rev 10)
IOMMU group 6:	[8086:a368] 00:15.0 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Serial IO I2C Controller #0 (rev 10)
	[8086:a369] 00:15.1 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Serial IO I2C Controller #1 (rev 10)
IOMMU group 7:	[8086:a360] 00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH HECI Controller (rev 10)
	[8086:a361] 00:16.1 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Device a361 (rev 10)
	[8086:a364] 00:16.4 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH HECI Controller #2 (rev 10)
IOMMU group 8:	[8086:a352] 00:17.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SATA AHCI Controller (rev 10)
IOMMU group 9:	[8086:a340] 00:1b.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH PCI Express Root Port #17 (rev f0)
IOMMU group 10:	[8086:a338] 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH PCI Express Root Port #1 (rev f0)
IOMMU group 11:	[8086:a330] 00:1d.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH PCI Express Root Port #9 (rev f0)
IOMMU group 12:	[8086:a331] 00:1d.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH PCI Express Root Port #10 (rev f0)
IOMMU group 13:	[8086:a332] 00:1d.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH PCI Express Root Port #11 (rev f0)
IOMMU group 14:	[8086:a328] 00:1e.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Serial IO UART Host Controller (rev 10)
IOMMU group 15:	[8086:a309] 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP LPC Controller (rev 10)
	[8086:a323] 00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SMBus Controller (rev 10)
	[8086:a324] 00:1f.5 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SPI Controller (rev 10)
IOMMU group 16:	[144d:a808] 04:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd NVMe SSD Controller SM981/PM981/PM983
IOMMU group 17:	[8086:1533] 05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation I210 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 03)
IOMMU group 18:	[1a03:1150] 06:00.0 PCI bridge: ASPEED Technology, Inc. AST1150 PCI-to-PCI Bridge (rev 04)
	[1a03:2000] 07:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ASPEED Technology, Inc. ASPEED Graphics Family (rev 41)
IOMMU group 19:	[8086:1533] 08:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation I210 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 03)

You may have to add a PCIe audio card for audio to a VM.

 

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I too am part of the ebay ASRockRack E3C246D4U club, thanks to Hoopster! I remember someone posting that they had to reflash the motherboard BMC because when they installed it the BMC button on the back got stuck behind the backplate and that cleared the BMC flash. Well, the same thing happened to me, and now my BIOS BMC flash is failing self-test and I can't control fan speeds.

 

I can't find the original post about this, but does anyone have the E3C246D4U BMC flash files/utility? I submitted a support request on the ASRockRack web site, but no response yet....

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38 minutes ago, Dase said:

does anyone have the E3C246D4U BMC flash files/utility?

Yeah, that was me who wiped out the BMC.  😁

 

PMme  an email address and I will forward what ASRock sent me to recover the BMC.  I am headed out for a few hours, but, I'll send it later today when I get a chance.

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This has been an excellent read.  I am going to start my build shortly and get off my WD PR2100.  How does the video transcodeing do on the chip.  Wouldn't that transcoding benefit from an actual GPU installed ?  Just thinking out loud.  I am tired of my plex grinding to a halt on 4k videos.   I like this motherboard combo listed here.  I was thinking an I7-7700k would be better with graphics and video ?  Seeking thoughts.. 

 

Thanks. 

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On 3/27/2020 at 10:36 AM, 5STAR said:

How does the video transcodeing do on the chip.  Wouldn't that transcoding benefit from an actual GPU installed ?

I have found that at any resolution 720p 4 Mbit and above, the iGPU transcoding is quite good.  It very efficiently reduces the load on the CPU.

 

Of course, if you need several concurrent streams of 4K/HEVC transcoding, a dedicated GPU such as the Quadro P2000 would be a better choice.  For that, you would need the UnRaid Nvidia plugin and corresponding special unRAID build.

 

On 3/27/2020 at 10:36 AM, 5STAR said:

I was thinking an I7-7700k would be better with graphics and video ?

Better than what?  By the way, the ASRock E3C246D4U board that most of in this thread are using supports 8th and 9th generation CPUs only, if that matters.  It does not support the i7-7700K

Edited by Hoopster
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Great.  Sorry I am very new to this forum and looking at the Unraid software too.  I think the E2288 is a great processor as well.  Additionally I think I can add the Quadro P2000 or bigger to this motherboard too.   I primarily want flexibility with this build.  I want to run VM's and a upgraded Plex Server.  The WD PR2100 fails at 4k transcoding.  It buffers from the start for like a minute then shows 12 seconds of the program and stops to buffer again and so on.  IPMI I love and have it on my Dell servers as Idrac very useful.    Is the E3C246 board the biggest? I have been looking for the most optimal.  

 

Thanks you for the response Hoopster.  I spend 4 days looking around and you zeroed in on the same things I did as far as parts.  I appreciate your input very much.  

 

Mike

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24 minutes ago, 5STAR said:

Is the E3C246 board the biggest? I have been looking for the most optimal.  

The E3C246D4U is a mATX board.  If you want a full ATX board, the E3C246D4M-4L is the closest fit.  It has 4 LAN ports and a different PCIe slot configuration.  It has five PCIe slots but three of them are only x1.  Of course, there may be others from other manufacturers.  The biggest limitation is the PCIe lanes supported by the processor and C246 chipset.  You'd have to go higher in the Xeon model line or with an AMD Threadripper to get more PCIe lanes.

 

One of the reasons many of us choose the Xeon over the desktop equivalent (i7-8700K or i9-9900K) is that you need a Xeon (or i3) for ECC RAM support.  ECC RAM support is not required for unRAID, but, for a 24x7 server with a board that supports it, it's a nice option.

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Thank you very much..  I was looking to stay at Micro ATX sizes because this one will be at my home instead of at my colo.    Trying to keep this small (Physical Dimensions) but everything keeps growing haha :).  They only reason I was thinking desktop cpu was the higher single thread mhz but ECC is a good trade off in the form of value in processing.  Ok so you think I can add the quadro J2000 graphics card to this build and it will be utilized correctly and support all transcoding properly? 

 

Again I very much appreciate you taking the time to get this UnRaid newb up to speed so I can get this going.  I am liking the Unraid software for its graphical nature and the community seems to be magnificent so you will be adding me as a paid member shortly.  I am just finalizing my hardware now.  

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27 minutes ago, 5STAR said:

Ok so you think I can add the quadro J2000 graphics card to this build and it will be utilized correctly and support all transcoding properly? 

I assume you mean the Quadro P2000.  Yes.  If you install the UnRaid Nvidia plugin and download the special UnRaid build with Nvidia drivers from within that plugin, the P2000 is a supported GPU and is capable of "unlimited" simultaneous transcodes whereas the GTX GPUs can only do 2 simultaneously.

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Great.  I appreciate all this experience your are sharing. I build PC's all the time but usually buy from Dell on servers.  I notice you have the perc H310 equivalent in your profile. Are you not using onboard RAID?

 

Thank you very much again.  Looks like the ebay config you guys are using will be my choice.  I was interested in your raid strategy with the H310. 

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3 minutes ago, 5STAR said:

Are you not using onboard RAID?

unRAID, as its name suggests, is not RAID.  RAID configurations are unsupported.  Each disk in an unRAID system has its own independent filesystem and can be read outside of unRAID by most Linux distributions.  There is no striping of data across multiple disks as there is in RAID configurations.  A file will exist, in its entirety, on a single drive.

 

Of course, this makes reading and writing files slower than with RAID systems but it comes with the benefit of easily being able to expand storage with different size disks as well as not losing ALL data on the array if more drives fail than are protected by parity.  With RAID you could lose all the data with multiple simultaneous disk failures.

 

My Dell H310 is running IT mode firmware which treats each disk as an independent disk and not as part of a RAID.  Basically, this firmware turns it into an LSI 9211-8i HBA clone.

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hmm learning all the time :) some reason I was under the impression firmware raid was a given setup and can be used.  Need to learn more about this OS :)  and raid strategies used here.   Digging into this now. 

Edited by 5STAR
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Thanks again for all of the great help in insight.  I spent the last 11 hours getting to know Unraid.  I really like it.  I get how the redundancy is handled now and it seems straight forward.  I definitely need cache drives it looks like and would love to stay M.2 or SSD for sure.   Now that I am confident about the OS and all of the plugin support etc..   I need to run VM's and of course my plex stuff.  

 

Are there any hardware limitations?  I can build something using scaleable Xeon processors and 128gig ram etc without any issues.   There are no platforms unraid will not work on ? 

 

Mike. 

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6 hours ago, 5STAR said:

Are there any hardware limitations?  I can build something using scaleable Xeon processors and 128gig ram etc without any issues.   There are no platforms unraid will not work on ? 

unRAID is very hardware agnostic.  It runs on pretty much any hardware; from low-end dual-core with 4-8GB RAM as a NAS only to multiple-processor systems with 128GB+ RAM and lots of VMs. 

 

The OS lives on a flash drive and loads and runs in RAM so the configuration and license is portable from system to system.  You can upgrade hardware all you want (I have done it four times with MB/CPU/RAM upgrades with the same flash drive) and plug in the flash drive and up comes unRAID just as before.  The only caveat is that if you change hardware involved in VM pass through, you will need to do a bit of VM reconfiguration.

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Thanks a ton Hoopster.  this process is as fun as usual when I take on a new project.   I will give the ebay thing one last look and pick a direction.  If it's ok I will keep the forums updated in case some more great ideas come.. 

 

Thank you again. 

Edited by 5STAR
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So today I received an IPMI notification that my MB temp reading is 92C.  I checked the Dashboard and the MB reading is only 27.8C, which is about where it normally hovers.  Has anyone else experienced a difference between the MB temp IPMI states and the Dashboard?

 

I typically go by the temps on the dashboard.  Wondering if I have a bad sensor.  It has been running fine all day like this, but I haven't seen the IPMI MB temp fluctuate at all.

2020-03-29 18_48_42-Settings.png

2020-03-29 18_50_43-Atlas_Dashboard.png

Edited by Burizado
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If you read back into this topic, both Hoopster and I have experienced IPMI reporting ridiculously high mobo temps. The one time it happened to me I rebooted and it returned to normal, and I haven't encountered it since. My guess was it was a stuck sensor, but not sure. Looks like this is not uncommon with this mobo...

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I got the same warning once from IPMI (about a month ago) that said MB temp was 83C.  My reported MB temp in unRAID was around 32C at the time. I rebooted and have never seen that warning since.

 

When I checked, that was the temp in IPMI of the PCH (the C246 Chipset) which has a heatsink on it on the motherboard just above the top PCIe slot.  I have never seen the PCH higher than 72C since and I now have a small 40mm fan on it which keeps it between 59-62C.

 

image.png.c1a6334a061fab03bf219dab526dbf78.png

 

The motherboard sensors (coretemp and nct6791) don't show anything for the PCH so I am not sure where that reading is coming from as I can find nothing that corresponds to the reported PCH temp.  The AUXTIN temps are always quite high and never seem to change.  I have no idea what those are either and Google is not much help other than some thinking they are PSU temps.  My PSU does not support SMBus so I am not dgetting IPMI reading on the PSU.

 

image.png.1ab5c2b4eae8906ec5f691975c65e05e.png

Edited by Hoopster
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Got another motherboard temperature warning tonight... my second. Server wasn't doing anything. I'm debating disabling the MB temp sensor in IPMI because I can't imagine that's an accurate reading. But I'm going to email ASRock tomorrow and ask about this being a known issue before I do that.

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Yeah, I did a reboot of the server and the temp was still high.  I took off the side of the case (Fractal Design Define XL R2) and the inside was not warm at all.  I know that is no indication of the chip temps.  I may add a fan to the side panel.  It would blow a bit on the PCH and NVMe I think, and at least help circulate the air a bit more.

 

I may contact ASRock as well if my 'adding a fan' method does not help.  Right now I am not too worried about it, but it definitely bugs my OCD seeing the red temp warning. 😄

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On 3/30/2020 at 12:26 AM, Hoopster said:

When I checked, that was the temp in IPMI of the PCH (the C246 Chipset) which has a heatsink on it on the motherboard just above the top PCIe slot.  I have never seen the PCH higher than 72C since and I now have a small 40mm fan on it which keeps it between 59-62C.

Hoopster - so something like this? https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0083A0BY4/ref=psdc_430499031_t4_B00BF3S83C I've only ever put a fan on a cpu before so I'm just wondering how this would screw in?

 

Edited by parisv
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2 hours ago, parisv said:

Hoopster - so something like this?

Actually, I used a Noctua NF-A4x10 and just jammed the skinny end of the little rubber fasteners into the fins at the corner of the heatsink.  It seems to hold it in place fairly well.

 

Another option is to cut a couple of pieces of thin copper wire long enough to go diagonally through the heatsink and then up through the holes in two of the corners with enough left on each end to fold over and cinch down the fan.  Use two wires in an X pattern and "weave" them in an out of a couple of heatsink fins to hold them in place before going up through the fan holes and cinching down the fan.

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