Hey all, so I'm new to unRaid after doing a bit of research, and figure it will be perfect for me going forward. Now comes the hard part of deciding on hardware to use (more on this later). I currently have a 24 bay 4u case ordered that accepts E-ATX motherboards (its my understanding that a regular ATX should also fit), and I have the HDD's already figured out. I'm migrating from a workstation build that ran Windows 10 Pro, running on 2 Xeon x5650's with 48GB of ram. The reason I'm upgrading hardware is 2 fold, on one hand I've run out of space and cannot physically connect/add more HDD's to the case (its an HPz600), and on the other hand it's falling behind and unable to keep up performance wise. Game servers are lagging, and Plex is buffering, even in the local network.

 

Programs I currently run in Windows, and would run in the unRaid using dockers/vm, are:

-Usenet programs (Nzbget, sonarr, radarr, Ombi)

-Plex (with 3/4 streams max, some trans-coded to phones/tablets). Plex library is easily 75% of my data.

-AMP (Application management panel): hosting 4 heavily modded Minecraft servers with upto 20 people at once, an ARK server (1-2 users), and a space engineers server (also only 1-2 users).

-Windows 10 for gaming, general office work, other downloads, and running wondershare/4k video down-loader, etc.

-Will be adding some form of file backups

 

My question is whats a good CPU and Mobo combo for this? Due to the game servers I need high single core performance, leaning me towards an AMD 3900x build (2700 single thread passmark, 32800 overall), and with the plex trans-codes it also has a good overall performance (my current x5605 are only 1300 single thread, and ~10,000 overall with both processors). The thing holding me back is the utter lack of PCI lanes/slots on these (or, so I think?). I'm not finding a Mobo on the x570 platform that can easily accommodate:

 

-GPU for passthrough gaming(rtx 2080) and a second one for viewing unraid locally on a separate monitor, though I can just get a 1x gpu for this?

-HBA card to connect to the 12g expander/backplane of the case (has 3 SFF-8643 ports, my guess is only 2 will be used)

-10 or 40 gbe card

-USB 3.1 if not on the board (I back up a lot of external's, and need to do it quickly)

 

I figure Ill need at least 4 PCIe slots: 1 16x, 2 8x, and 1 1x. Most of the boards I find have 3 16x slots, but they run in 8x-4x-4x mode, is that enough to handle a 2080, 12g sas3 backplane, and 10gbe?

 

Or is there another cpu/mobo you'd suggest? I'm looking to stay around $1000 for the processor, mobo and ram, though even this setup above goes over that a bit, so I'm flexible. I cant find a dual Xeon that's affordable and comes close to the passmark scores on the ryzen 9, and if I step up to an Epyc it blows my budget out of the water. Thanks in advance.

 

Following because I have very similar needs/use case and unfortunately no advice or data on good mobo's to use. Feels like you wrote this use case specifically for me.

 

What case did you get?