Mini-ITX board with LGA1150


maetthew

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Hi guys, my first post here.

 

I've been looking looking around for about 2 weeks now for building myself a NAS/home server. At first I was planning on buying new hardware for it but rememberd I had some old stuff laying around from an old desktop build. I have is a Core i5 4670k, some DDR3 1600mhz ram and a MSI GTX 760 4GB Twin Frozr that I was hoping to be able to utilize at least the CPU and the ram to begin with. I'm not looking to do anything crazy with the server to begin with, just as a NAS, and running a couple of web applications but thought maybe the graphics card might come in handy at one point if I decide to start streaming video.

 

As a case I was kind of settled on the Fractal Design Node 304 which seems perfect for me. However, I don't seem to be able to find much of any Mini-ITX boards with LGA1150, and the ones I did manage to find that were available for purchase were a bit too expensive for me. I realize it's an old socket, and most shops don't sell them any more so I have to look at the second hand market, but I've no clue what model to look for.

 

So I come here asking, does anyone know of any Mini-ITX boards that would be suitable for an Unraid-build? I would need a minimum of 4 SATA connections at the moment, hopefully more as I will probably add more disks further along. Budget would preferably be around $100-$150, less if possible.

 

I'm from Sweden so any links to specific sellers would probably have to be Ebay or Amazon UK or DE but I would be very grateful if anyone could even suggest me some models so I can start searching for them myself.

Thank you in advance for any help, advice or input you might have.

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42 minutes ago, maetthew said:

So I come here asking, does anyone know of any Mini-ITX boards that would be suitable for an Unraid-build?

I am using the ASRock Rack E3C226D2I in my backup unRAID server in the Node 304 case.  See my signature for full system details.

 

I am not sure what availability might be in your area.  It's not easy to find any more.

 

It's  a great server board and even has IPMI. 

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8 hours ago, Hoopster said:

I am using the ASRock Rack E3C226D2I in my backup unRAID server in the Node 304 case.  See my signature for full system details.

 

I am not sure what availability might be in your area.  It's not easy to find any more.

 

It's  a great server board and even has IPMI. 

Thank you for the suggestion, but yeah, the availability is none as far as I've found. There's one on Ebay for about $535 in China which would in total cost me probably about $650 with shipping and import fees, a little steep for me :)

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4 hours ago, maetthew said:

Thank you for the suggestion, but yeah, the availability is none as far as I've found.

I'm not sure what "get quotations" means as far as price and availability but here are four listings for the board on Alibaba.  The prices are reasonable if they actually have the board at those prices:

 

image.thumb.png.073272484531d2f0dcd3e14ba8474b04.png

Edited by Hoopster
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1 hour ago, Hoopster said:

I'm not sure what "get quotations" means as far as price and availability but here are four listings for the board on Alibaba.  The prices are reasonable if they actually have the board at those prices:

 

image.thumb.png.073272484531d2f0dcd3e14ba8474b04.png

Thank you for looking, I couldn't find that through a search an Alibaba, but even if I could the swedish postal office put in some ridiculous import tariffs and taxes for anything from outside the EU. For example, an import of something valued at $200 would cost me an extra $75 in tariffs/taxes so its not really feasible. 

 

I did however manage to find a ASUS Z97i-PLUS on the "swedish ebay" that ends in 27 hours. The current bid is about $56 and I looked at some previous ended auctions of that board, and those that ended in a sale went for $100-120 basically. It seems pretty good (at least to me with my limited knowledge). 4 sata connections 6Gbps, Intel NIC (which I've read on here that people prefer, not 100% sure why that is but I think Realtek can be unstable?), up to 16GB 3200 mhz DDR3, M.2 slot. I think it will be good enough for me as a start. 

 

I think I'm gonna try to snag that unless you or anybody else has anything to object about that board. 

Edited by maetthew
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8 minutes ago, maetthew said:

I think I'm gonna try to snag that unless you or anybody else has anything to object about that board. 

No objections.  That board should work fine.  In fact, before I bought the ASRock server board, I had an ASUS Z97 board in the case with my i5 4590 CPU.

 

The only "limitation" is that board has only 4 SATA ports so if you need more drives for storage/parity/cache, you'll need to add an HBA to the x16 slot.  That should be fine since your i5 4670K has an iGPU and the slot would not be needed for a graphics card.

 

Your iGPU will handle any unRAID video needs and even Plex (or other media platform) streaming and basic transcoding needs.  I know since my i5 4590 is capable of this.

 

If you want the flexibility of adding a GPU to the expansion slot for use in a VM (although your processor really does not have much overhead for VM use), you might want to look for a socket 1150 Mini-ITX board with 6 SATA ports.

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34 minutes ago, Hoopster said:

No objections.  That board should work fine.  In fact, before I bought the ASRock server board, I had an ASUS Z97 board in the case with my i5 4590 CPU.

Great thank you! 

34 minutes ago, Hoopster said:

The only "limitation" is that board has only 4 SATA ports so if you need more drives for storage/parity/cache, you'll need to add an HBA to the x16 slot.  That should be fine since your i5 4670K has an iGPU and the slot would not be needed for a graphics card.

I only have 4 drives at the moment and shouldn't need more for quite a while. I was initially planning to use an old 120GB SSD I had lying around as a cache. But with this board I can get a M.2 250GB to use as cache and have the other four drives in the SATA connections. 

37 minutes ago, Hoopster said:

Your iGPU will handle any unRAID video needs and even Plex (or other media platform) streaming and basic transcoding needs.  I know since my i5 4590 is capable of this.

Very valuable, thanks! 

38 minutes ago, Hoopster said:

If you want the flexibility of adding a GPU to the expansion slot for use in a VM (although your processor really does not have much overhead for VM use), you might want to look for a socket 1150 Mini-ITX board with 6 SATA ports.

I doubt I'll ever need GPU passthrough. I will be using this as a NAS with a couple of docker containers running some web apps with me as the single user. I probably wont be running any VMs at all, and if I were it would probably just be to spin up an Ubuntu server to try something out temporarily. Even if I wont be able to do that on this machine, my desktop is powerful enough to run a couple of VMs for that purpose so that's no biggie. I don't foresee a use case where I need a permanent VM, especially not one with a OS GUI. 

 

Thank you very much, very valuable input, I am immensely grateful! 

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