Confused about PCI lanes and storage options

[Crod541]

Hey y'all,

 

I'm starting to put together my own media server with a spare secondary computer I have but I'm worried about the limitations of my hardware.

CPU: Ryzen 3 3200G

GPU: MSI Gaming 1050 TI

Motherboard: ASRock B450M Pro4 Micro ATX or MSI B450I GAMING PLUS AC Mini ITX

 

So I'd like to eventually fill up all six drive slots in the case I already have; but since mATX & mITX boards seem to all have an upper limit of 4 SATA ports, there's extra complications.

 

Max PCIe lanes for the 3200G is 12. As I understand it, GPU would take 8 and an NVMe boot drive would take another 4. My question stems from around how chipset lanes come into play here -- do they get added on top of the 3200G's max of 12, or are they meant to be part of the 12?

Option A: Learn/Install UnRaid and boot from USB on mITX, eventually install an M.2 to PCIe3.0x4 riser cable and 9211-4i HBA for more SATA ports

Option B: Learn/Install UnRaid and boot from USB on mITX, eventually move drives/CPU/GPU to mATX where 4i or 8i HBA is installed directly into second PCIx16 slot

 

So back to the question -- could a 3200G actually support a GPU, NVMe boot/cache drive, and an HBA in the mATX motherboard? I'm pretty sure if I just did GPU + HBA I'd be in the clear, but I'm still not sure how an NVMe drive fits into this, or if it's even necessary (lots of downloading/writing to drives expected, is that meant to write directly to HDD array or are you supposed to used an SSD in between programs and array?)

 

Thanks!

[AbydosOne]

11 minutes ago, Crod541 said:

do they get added on top of the 3200G's max of 12

Yes.

 

12 minutes ago, Crod541 said:

could a 3200G actually support a GPU, NVMe boot/cache drive, and an HBA in the mATX motherboard?

Yes, generally. The motherboard manual will have the specifics about how the lanes are arranged.

[Blue4130]

19 minutes ago, Crod541 said:

Hey y'all,

 

I'm starting to put together my own media server with a spare secondary computer I have but I'm worried about the limitations of my hardware.

CPU: Ryzen 3 3200G

GPU: MSI Gaming 1050 TI

Motherboard: ASRock B450M Pro4 Micro ATX or MSI B450I GAMING PLUS AC Mini ITX

 

So I'd like to eventually fill up all six drive slots in the case I already have; but since mATX & mITX boards seem to all have an upper limit of 4 SATA ports, there's extra complications.

 

Max PCIe lanes for the 3200G is 12. As I understand it, GPU would take 8 and an NVMe boot drive would take another 4. My question stems from around how chipset lanes come into play here -- do they get added on top of the 3200G's max of 12, or are they meant to be part of the 12?

Option A: Learn/Install UnRaid and boot from USB on mITX, eventually install an M.2 to PCIe3.0x4 riser cable and 9211-4i HBA for more SATA ports

Option B: Learn/Install UnRaid and boot from USB on mITX, eventually move drives/CPU/GPU to mATX where 4i or 8i HBA is installed directly into second PCIx16 slot

 

So back to the question -- could a 3200G actually support a GPU, NVMe boot/cache drive, and an HBA in the mATX motherboard? I'm pretty sure if I just did GPU + HBA I'd be in the clear, but I'm still not sure how an NVMe drive fits into this, or if it's even necessary (lots of downloading/writing to drives expected, is that meant to write directly to HDD array or are you supposed to used an SSD in between programs and array?)

 

Thanks!

If this is a media PC, and you have a 3200g with igpu, why do you need the 1050ti? Pull it out and use the slot for an hba.

[BiotechBen]

19 minutes ago, AbydosOne said:

Yes.

 

Yes, generally. The motherboard manual will have the specifics about how the lanes are arranged.

Ran into this exact question, consulted manual, literally no help. 

[Crod541]

2 minutes ago, Blue4130 said:

If this is a media PC, and you have a 3200g with igpu, why do you need the 1050ti? Pull it out and use the slot for an hba.

I currently run a pretty small Plex server off a single 10 TB drive and even playing locally I've been seeing the CPU usage hit +97%. I think it's because my monitor can't play H.265 natively so some files would need to go through encoding, which was apparently pretty hard for the CPU. I'm not sure if I remember trying hardware accelerated encoding on just the iGPU, but I thought there were issues with which codecs are supported on various hardware, no? Plus I'd like to reliably support 2 remote 1080p streams...maybe a 4K HDR stream eventually.

Eventually my plan was to upgrade gaming rig's 3600X to a 5600X (or maybe even a 5800X3D ) then swap over my 3600X into the plex server build, so I'd certainly be keeping the 1050 TI around.

[BondiBlue]

4 minutes ago, Crod541 said:

Plus I'd like to reliably support 2 remote 1080p streams...maybe a 4K HDR stream eventually.

FWIW I've had zero issues with multiple 4K streams from Plex even when using much older hardware (Xeon X5675 (6C/12T), Quadro NVS 295). You mentioned high CPU utilization - are you referring to the hardware you're wanting to use as the Plex server? 

[leadeater]

6 minutes ago, Crod541 said:

I'm not sure if I remember trying hardware accelerated encoding on just the iGPU

Pretty sure Plex only supports Nvidia for GPU accelerated encoding, so yea leave that GPU in the system for that

[Crod541]

  

  

2 hours ago, BondiBlue said:

FWIW I've had zero issues with multiple 4K streams from Plex even when using much older hardware (Xeon X5675 (6C/12T), Quadro NVS 295).

That's pretty surprising, so I'll probably run into network upload limitations before needing to worry about hardware I suppose.

2 hours ago, BondiBlue said:

You mentioned high CPU utilization - are you referring to the hardware you're wanting to use as the Plex server? 

Yep, I'm pretty sure I've seen the 3200G struggle with a single 1080p stream when it was without the 1050 TI.

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

Pretty sure Plex only supports Nvidia for GPU accelerated encoding, so yea leave that GPU in the system for that

Okay good, I believe I also saw that plex on unraid had recently added support so that works out.

Back to the slots on the motherboard though -- Manual didn't have the answer but support came back surprisingly quick to confirm lower slot and upper picex1 slot are chipset. And seeing as they're additional it looks like I'm good to go with the 4i HBA and I get to use my current boot drive as a cache when I expand into all six slots -- the whole running on a USB part of unraid still really surprises me but I guess I'll have to make sure the systems backups are up to date.

Ty everyone, now just to make sure the BIOS I have on that board still supports the 3200G lol

[mariushm]

3200g gives you 8 pci-e lanes for first pci-e x16 slot and 4 lanes for the first m.2 connector

Chipsets create additional pci-e lanes, 6 for b450 , 8 for x570, not sure how many for b550, not in the mood to look it up.

Those lanes can be routed to pci-e slots or to m.2 connectors or onboard devices.

The maker of the board can also choose to disable a couple sata ports in order to gain extra pci-e lanes  (so you may have 6 sata ports and a 2nd m.2 but if you insert a m.2 nvme ssd into the m.2 connector then 2 sata ports may be disabled.... or  a pci-e x1 slot may be disabled, or the bottom pci-e x16 slot that's pci-e x4 electrically may become pci-e x2 maximum ... it's up to how the maker designs the board and these small annoyances will be listed in the manual.