Why are there no PCIe Lane focused AM4 Mobos?

[plumptree]

I'm in the process of trying to build a budget Ryzen UnRaid NAS (have been for quite a while now) and am stumped at my choices for motherboards.

 

It seems like im having the issue of New Whonnock where they have all the slots, but when you fill them the speeds of the lanes gets way reduced, or ports just get turned off)

 

Here's what I'm looking for:

 

AM4

3x PCIe 3.0 16x slots

 - 1 at 8x (HBA card)

 - 1 at 4x (10g NIC)

 - 1 at whatever (1060 for Plex Transcoding, apparently even 1x is fine)

2x M.2 NVMe slots (Raid 1 for redundant cache drives)

 

As described earlier, i have been unable to find any good mobos that fit this criteria as the lanes have been allocated to things I don't need (yea Gigabyte, I need both a 2.5Gbe ethernet port AND Wi-Fi, cause I'm both an enthusiast with high end networking, but don't own a single ethernet cable).

 

Or if you actually have all the SATA ports filled on a Mobo, usually one or two of the slots will be turned off as they share bandwidth, and same with the M.2 slots.

 

Any help or recommendations would be great and much appreciated.

[Electronics Wizardy]

How about that asrock rack board? 

 

Built in impi/gpu, dual m.2 support. built in 10gbe, and 8 sata ports. Should do most things without adding any cards.

 

For why, you can only split pcie so many ways, like 4x4,  and if you want to do more, you need pcie switches and those would cost more than a cheap xeon scaleable or epyc

[Levent]

Like this one? You really have to read the fine print when it comes to using that many PCIE devices, I am not sure if this one can use all those at the same time.

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/X570-AORUS-MASTER-rev-10#kf

[plumptree]

9 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

How about that asrock rack board? 

While it is a really nice board, I got a really good deal on 2 Asus XG-C100Cs and can't return them anymore unfortunately (already installed one in my main rig), and I can't quite justify spending nearly 1.5x on the motherboard than I originally spent on my 3700x back in 2019

 

12 minutes ago, Levent said:

Like this one? You really have to read the fine print when it comes to using that many PCIE devices, I am not sure if this one can use all those at the same time.

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/X570-AORUS-MASTER-rev-10#kf

That is a really nice board, but it seems like it has been discontinued and replaced by the X570S version, which has the same issues I was describing earlier. Also doesn't help it's not available anywhere in Canada, for any reasonable price. Thank you though

[Electronics Wizardy]

There is a good amount of boards with 3 x8 physical card slots, but there all pretty pricy. Here is a cheaper one https://www.amazon.com/Asus-Prime-X570-Pro-Ryzen-Motherboard/dp/B07SW925DQ/ref=sr_1_16?crid=331OBA65ARVC5&keywords=x570&qid=1656386934&sprefix=x570%2Caps%2C131&sr=8-16

 

Check for x470 boards on sale or used too

 

also some may disable a pcie slot if m.2s are used, check for that

 

3 minutes ago, plumptree said:

While it is a really nice board, I got a really good deal on 2 Asus XG-C100Cs and can't return them anymore unfortunately (already installed one in my main rig), and I can't quite justify spending nearly 1.5x on the motherboard than I originally spent on my 3700x back in 2019

Whats the rest of the build? How many drives? You can probably skip the hba if you have less than about 

[Blue4130]

30 minutes ago, plumptree said:

I'm in the process of trying to build a budget Ryzen UnRaid NAS (have been for quite a while now) and am stumped at my choices for motherboards.

 

It seems like im having the issue of New Whonnock where they have all the slots, but when you fill them the speeds of the lanes gets way reduced, or ports just get turned off)

 

Here's what I'm looking for:

 

AM4

3x PCIe 3.0 16x slots

 - 1 at 8x (HBA card)

 - 1 at 4x (10g NIC)

 - 1 at whatever (1060 for Plex Transcoding, apparently even 1x is fine)

2x M.2 NVMe slots (Raid 1 for redundant cache drives)

 

As described earlier, i have been unable to find any good mobos that fit this criteria as the lanes have been allocated to things I don't need (yea Gigabyte, I need both a 2.5Gbe ethernet port AND Wi-Fi, cause I'm both an enthusiast with high end networking, but don't own a single ethernet cable).

 

Or if you actually have all the SATA ports filled on a Mobo, usually one or two of the slots will be turned off as they share bandwidth, and same with the M.2 slots.

 

Any help or recommendations would be great and much appreciated.

It's their way of gatekeeping. If you want server level amounts of PCIE you need to step up to threadripper at minimum. Intel is no better. Segregate the market to push enthusiasts up the product ladder.

 

I am with you though. I really wish I could use all of my m.2 slots without shutting down pcie slots. And I wish my second 16 physical was actually x16 electrically, not x4.

 

I don't need the full on threadripper or epyc amount, but an extra ten or 15 lanes would be nice.

[plumptree]

42 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

There is a good amount of boards with 3 x8 physical card slots, but there all pretty pricy. Here is a cheaper one https://www.amazon.com/Asus-Prime-X570-Pro-Ryzen-Motherboard/dp/B07SW925DQ/ref=sr_1_16?crid=331OBA65ARVC5&keywords=x570&qid=1656386934&sprefix=x570%2Caps%2C131&sr=8-16

 

Check for x470 boards on sale or used too

 

also some may disable a pcie slot if m.2s are used, check for that

 

Whats the rest of the build? How many drives? You can probably skip the hba if you have less than about 

The CPU is going to be a Ryzen 7 3700x that I upgraded from, GPU for Plex transcoding is a GTX 1060 6GB, 10G NIC is the Asus XG-C100C, and I'm planning to roll out 6 Drives to max out the SATA ports, and then later expand that with an HBA card to 11 drives as thats as much as my case can handle, the Fractal Define R6 (i got it second hand for $50 so not too expensive)

[plumptree]

38 minutes ago, Blue4130 said:

It's their way of gatekeeping. If you want server level amounts of PCIE you need to step up to threadripper at minimum. Intel is no better. Segregate the market to push enthusiasts up the product ladder.

 

I am with you though. I really wish I could use all of my m.2 slots without shutting down pcie slots. And I wish my second 16 physical was actually x16 electrically, not x4.

 

I don't need the full on threadripper or epyc amount, but an extra ten or 15 lanes would be nice.

I found what is nearly my perfect mobo, the Gigabyte X570 UD. The only thing that it doesn't have is a second M.2 slot for redundancy. If i didn't care about that (which I am on the fence about but know I should have it) then it's perfect. Cheap, ample lanes, good enough VRMs as im not going to be OCing

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, plumptree said:

The CPU is going to be a Ryzen 7 3700x that I upgraded from, GPU for Plex transcoding is a GTX 1060 6GB, 10G NIC is the Asus XG-C100C, and I'm planning to roll out 6 Drives to max out the SATA ports, and then later expand that with an HBA card to 11 drives as thats as much as my case can handle, the Fractal Define R6 (i got it second hand for $50 so not too expensive)

Then those boards with 3 x8 physical cards will work. Your gonna need x470 or x570 here

 

1 minute ago, plumptree said:

I found what is nearly my perfect mobo, the Gigabyte X570 UD. The only thing that it doesn't have is a second M.2 slot for redundancy. If i didn't care about that (which I am on the fence about but know I should have it) then it's perfect. Cheap, ample lanes, good enough VRMs as im not going to be OCing

You can also get a pcie 1x to m.2 here. It will be slower, but won't really matter for a boot drive.

[plumptree]

4 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Then those boards with 3 x8 physical cards will work. Your gonna need x470 or x570 here

 

You can also get a pcie 1x to m.2 here. It will be slower, but won't really matter for a boot drive.

I'm not going to be using the M.2 as a boot drive it will be my cache drive for UnRaid, also hold my docker containers for game servers and plex and such so performance would be kind important

[Blue4130]

14 minutes ago, plumptree said:

I found what is nearly my perfect mobo, the Gigabyte X570 UD. The only thing that it doesn't have is a second M.2 slot for redundancy. If i didn't care about that (which I am on the fence about but know I should have it) then it's perfect. Cheap, ample lanes, good enough VRMs as im not going to be OCing

I still don't like that two of the 3 x16 slots are really only x4.

[plumptree]

6 minutes ago, Blue4130 said:

I still don't like that two of the 3 x16 slots are really only x4.

It would work for my needs, the HBA can go into the 8x slot and the GPU and NIC and go in the 4x slots as thats all they need.

Also the reason the HBA needs 8x and not 4x is that the LSI ones that I'm looking at (used) are PCIe 2.0

 

edit: spelling (that to at)

[Needfuldoer]

6 hours ago, Blue4130 said:

It's their way of gatekeeping. If you want server level amounts of PCIE you need to step up to threadripper at minimum. Intel is no better. Segregate the market to push enthusiasts up the product ladder.

Yup. When I was building my home server, I knew I wanted it to have 10 gig Ethernet, a dedicated graphics card (for video transcoding), 40 gig Infiniband (homelab), a couple PCIe SSDs (Jellyfin metadata and maybe ZFS dedupe), and room for 12 drives. That left x99, Threadripper/Epyc, and used 2U servers as options. I ended up with a Dell R720xd with all that and 256 gigs of RAM for a palatable price.

 

5 hours ago, plumptree said:

It would work for my needs, the HBA can go into the 8x slot and the GPU and NIC and go in the 4x slots as thats all they need.

Also the reason the HBA needs 8x and not 4x is that the LSI ones that I'm looking at (used) are PCIe 2.0

PCIe 2.0x4 is still 16gb/sec, at least.

[plumptree]

12 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

PCIe 2.0x4 is still 16gb/sec, at least.

The LSI is 8x, but still works, at least its not 2x lmao.

 

It may be a bottleneck if all 8 would be spinning up and accessing data all at once, but that most likely wouldn't happen as its just for my household for file access, and only for friends and family for the Plex