Side grading for more expansion

[Viesulis]

Im in Germany! I currently have an i3 9100 with some low end board, trouble is its only got one x16 slot and i need two as i want to run a dedicated gpu for nvr duties along with a raid card for HDD's. As you cant get H310 boards for any reasonable price anymore im looking in to new stuff. The best value option seems to be a Ryzen 5500 along with a Asrock Pro4 B450 board, this combo would cost me about 120 eur. I dont really need a cpu upgrade from the 9100 as currently it rarely goes above 50%, its just the 5500 is really cheap. My setup is a windows VM in truenas with a quadro passed trough for BlueIris, with a basic nas on truenas. If anyone has any reccomendations that would suit me better im open to suggestiens :3

[RadiatingLight]

You have a pretty good solution already for not-too-expensive.

You could try to find a z390 or b360 board with more slots, meaning you could keep your same CPU and only swap the mainboard. This depends on used prices in your area. In my area it's far cheaper to find a used Z390 board than to buy a whole new platform.

[Tetras]

1 hour ago, Viesulis said:

The best value option seems to be a Ryzen 5500 along with a Asrock Pro4 B450 board, this combo would cost me about 120 eur.

Keep in mind that despite most ATX boards having 2, 3 or even more full length slots, they rarely have many lanes (aside from 16 on the primary slot) and the best you're ever likely to get is 8 for the primary and 8 for a secondary. The most common arrangement is a primary 16 and a secondary 4, or several full length slots which are all just 1 lane electrically.

 

Another issue you can find with AM4/AM5 is that CPUs with Radeon graphics (-G CPUs), have more restricted PCI-E gen/lanes than regular CPUs. The 5500 is not a G CPU, but I believe it is based on a G CPU and has more limited features as a result. I don't know if this would have an impact on any of the slots available.

 

[RadiatingLight]

14 minutes ago, Tetras said:

Keep in mind that despite most ATX boards having 2, 3 or even more full length slots, they rarely have many lanes (aside from 16 on the primary slot) and the best you're ever likely to get is 8 for the primary and 8 for a secondary. The most common arrangement is a primary 16 and a secondary 4, or several full length slots which are all just 1 lane electrically.

 

Another issue you can find with AM4/AM5 is that CPUs with Radeon graphics (-G CPUs), have more restricted PCI-E gen/lanes than regular CPUs. The 5500 is not a G CPU, but I believe it is based on a G CPU and has more limited features as a result. I don't know if this would have an impact on any of the slots available.

 

Hopefully a RAID card doesn't need more than an x4 connection.
Alternatively, AMD CPUs support PCIe bifurcation depending on the motherboard, so if more than x4 is needed then OP can find a board to give him two x8 slots.

[LIGISTX]

2 hours ago, Tetras said:

Keep in mind that despite most ATX boards having 2, 3 or even more full length slots, they rarely have many lanes (aside from 16 on the primary slot) and the best you're ever likely to get is 8 for the primary and 8 for a secondary. The most common arrangement is a primary 16 and a secondary 4, or several full length slots which are all just 1 lane electrically.

For homelab duty, this is rarely an issue. My 10gb NIC is only running at PCIe 3.0 4x. That still 4GB per second…. My HBA is technically 3.0 x8, but I promise my harddrives couldn’t even dream of doing 8GB/s of data transfer. You’d need about 50 harddrives in RAID 0 to even have a shot at that. 

[Viesulis]

14 hours ago, RadiatingLight said:

You have a pretty good solution already for not-too-expensive.

You could try to find a z390 or b360 board with more slots, meaning you could keep your same CPU and only swap the mainboard. This depends on used prices in your area. In my area it's far cheaper to find a used Z390 board than to buy a whole new platform.

I did look at getting something used, but the second hand board market over here kind of sucks, cheapest board i found that would work is 120 eur for a z390 taichi, with b360 being seemingly extinct. On AMD's website it says total usable lanes is 20, which means i wont have any left over for the raid card? If 4 are taken up by my OS ssd, 16 are taken up by the gpu. Could i divide it up so its 8 lanes for the gpu and 8 for the raid card? Its a quadro m4000 so not exactly super powerful.

[RadiatingLight]

3 hours ago, Viesulis said:

I did look at getting something used, but the second hand board market over here kind of sucks, cheapest board i found that would work is 120 eur for a z390 taichi, with b360 being seemingly extinct. On AMD's website it says total usable lanes is 20, which means i wont have any left over for the raid card? If 4 are taken up by my OS ssd, 16 are taken up by the gpu. Could i divide it up so its 8 lanes for the gpu and 8 for the raid card? Its a quadro m4000 so not exactly super powerful.

Dividing the lanes from 1x16 to 2x8 is called bifurcation and you need a motherboard that supports it.

However it's usually 20 direct lanes, and 4 more lanes from the chipset. (these 4 extra lanes usually power either more M.2 slots, or the bottom PCIe x4)

if you don't need crazy bandwidth, you can use the bottom x4 slot for your RAID card. (depending on which exact motherboard you get the connectivity will differ so look it up first)

[Viesulis]

4 hours ago, RadiatingLight said:

Dividing the lanes from 1x16 to 2x8 is called bifurcation and you need a motherboard that supports it.

However it's usually 20 direct lanes, and 4 more lanes from the chipset. (these 4 extra lanes usually power either more M.2 slots, or the bottom PCIe x4)

if you don't need crazy bandwidth, you can use the bottom x4 slot for your RAID card. (depending on which exact motherboard you get the connectivity will differ so look it up first)

Oh, i had assumed the chipset alone needs 4 and then another 4 for the SSD, i did some maths and 4x gen 3 should be more than enough for my usecase. Would there be any issues passing trough the gpu to the VM considering this isnt prosumer hardware?

[RadiatingLight]

10 hours ago, Viesulis said:

Oh, i had assumed the chipset alone needs 4 and then another 4 for the SSD, i did some maths and 4x gen 3 should be more than enough for my usecase. Would there be any issues passing trough the gpu to the VM considering this isnt prosumer hardware?

Never done GPU VM passthrough myself but I haven't heard of any compatibility issues.