$3k upgrade. Looking for advice on these parts.


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Hi!

 

The time for an upgrade has finally come and the joy of picking out new parts has me excited beyond measure. This build will serve to combine my old unRAID NAS and my HTPC to a single box, so I will be doing virtualization for the latter.

 

Now, I am by no means an expert on server grade hardware.. so here I am, looking to you for guidance.

 

On the server side of things I will be running a few dockers, most notably Plex. At this moment in time I want to be able to do about 4 or 5 concurrent transcodes. For the virtualization I want to run a Windows 10 VM that will handle some gaming and run Plex Media Player.

 

My understanding is that I will need a CPU with an integrated GPU and then a dedicated video card for the VM passthrough, so I chose a Xeon E3-1275 v6 and a GTX 1050 Ti that will be outputting 4K/60 resolution.

I will have 2 SSD's, one for cache and dockers, the other one for VM's. Is that the recommended setup, or should I run dockers and VM's off the same SSD, leaving the other SSD for cache only?

 

Here is the parts list. Any advice is greatly appreciated.

 

Intel® Xeon® Processor E3-1275 v6

Supermicro X11SSL-CF-O

2x Crucial 16GB Single 2133MT/s DDR4 PC4-17000 Dual Ranked x8 ECC DIMM

4x Seagate 10TB IronWolf

Samsung 850 EVO 500GB (for cache)

Samsung 850 EVO 250GB (for dockers and VM's)

Gigabyte GTX 1050 Ti Windforce OC 4GB

2x CableCreation Internal HD Mini SAS (SFF-8643 Host) - 4x SATA (Target)

Fractal Design Node 804

Corsair SF600

APC Back-UPS Pro BR900GI UPS

Total: $3,104.6

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So I see a couple of issues with the parts you have selected. The particular motherboard runs its only PCIe 16 slot at 8x so you are going to lose half your performance for gaming, might want to find a board that runs the slot at full 16x. Also your CPU is only a quad core and if you want to run four concurrent trans codes I might suggest you consider a CPU with more cores, perhaps six or eight. You will want at least two cores for unRAID, then say two or more for your Windows 10 VM, then more for your Plex trans codes, so at the very least a six core or eight core would be better. Using an SSD for your VM is recommended and having one for cache is also reccomended.

 

I recently did an unRAID NAS build using this board SUPERMICRO MBD-X10SLL-F-O with a lower end pentium CPU in the same Fractal Design 804 case you have picked.

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@hallifallen -

@gridrunner just completed a three part series on server tuning. You should watch them all, but the third part, in particular, addresses sharing cores. Although I'd agree more cores might be nice, I do believe it is satisfactory for these requirements given reasonable offset (i.e., not doing everything at the same time). But see my recommendation at the bottom of this post.

 

 

Regarding the case, see my post here ...

 

 

My recommendation, however, you might not like ...

 

The Ryzen platform is coming, and it is pushing Intel to increase its core counts. All of this is good for us, the consumers. Ryzen may very well stabilize in Linux over the next couple months, and be a very attractive platform, both $$$s and performance. And Intel is going to respond - I think they're flailing a bit now. I would make do with what you have a while longer, and watch and wait. I think buying a 4-core Xeon now is going to make you regretful in 3-6 months.

 

Just my opinion. I have a 4 core Xeon (Haswell) with 32G ram and love it. But I wouldn't buy one right now.

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22 hours ago, ijuarez said:

not 100% sure but I don't think you can use two different size SSD in cache, you cannot use a SSD in the Array (i tried) unless that changed recently.

 

you could use it as an unassigned disk for your vm and dockers

 

I was thinking that I'd use the bigger one for cache and dockers and the other one as an unassigned disk for the VM's.

 

22 hours ago, ashman70 said:

So I see a couple of issues with the parts you have selected. The particular motherboard runs its only PCIe 16 slot at 8x so you are going to lose half your performance for gaming, might want to find a board that runs the slot at full 16x. Also your CPU is only a quad core and if you want to run four concurrent trans codes I might suggest you consider a CPU with more cores, perhaps six or eight. You will want at least two cores for unRAID, then say two or more for your Windows 10 VM, then more for your Plex trans codes, so at the very least a six core or eight core would be better. Using an SSD for your VM is recommended and having one for cache is also reccomended.

 

The performance hit from using only 8x is negligible. The tests I looked at showed 1% difference when using the same card in 8x vs 16x.

It wouldn't be a problem either way since this is in no way intended to be a gaming rig, I've already got a desktop for that. :) I was mainly thinking about being able to do in-game tournament spectating on the tv this system will be hooked up to.

 

I looked at the videos linked by @bjp999 and I think a hyperthreaded quad core cpu will suffice. There will be reasonable offset.

 

21 hours ago, bjp999 said:

My recommendation, however, you might not like ...

 

The Ryzen platform is coming, and it is pushing Intel to increase its core counts. All of this is good for us, the consumers. Ryzen may very well stabilize in Linux over the next couple months, and be a very attractive platform, both $$$s and performance. And Intel is going to respond - I think they're flailing a bit now. I would make do with what you have a while longer, and watch and wait. I think buying a 4-core Xeon now is going to make you regretful in 3-6 months.

 

Just my opinion. I have a 4 core Xeon (Haswell) with 32G ram and love it. But I wouldn't buy one right now.

 

You're right, I don't like it one bit. :D

I've waited quite a bit to upgrade my current setup, and there are always some newer and better parts in the pipelines. I also don't want to sit and wait for everything Ryzen related to become stable..

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  • 4 weeks later...

Alright, I went ahead and ordered the stuff and it's already in transit. However, a lightbulb went on in my head when I was thinking about configuring the system and I think I might have a problem..

 

The GPU has no physical power connector, the card draws its power from the PCIe slot. Now, the PCIe x16 slot on the motherboard is only configured for x8 and so I wonder if it will be able to supply enough power to the card.. Wikipedia says:

 

Quote

×4 and wider cards are limited to 2.1 A at +12V (25 W) and 25 W combined.


A full-sized ×16 graphics card may draw up to 5.5 A at +12V (66 W) and 75 W combined after initialization and software configuration as a "high power device".

 

Anyone got some information on this?

Edited by hallifallen
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Alright, everything is installed and all 4 drives are now preclearing at ~250MB/s. I switched out the Gigabyte 1050 Ti for a MSI 1050 Ti that has a power connector and it works just fine.

 

One issue is with the hdd's and the hdd bracket in the Node 804. Seagate doesn't have the middle screw position on the IronWolf drives. I can only attach the drives using the top screw hole and so the drives are kinda dangling in there. I'll need to figure out how to secure them properly, even though the case isn't gonna get removed from the tv cabinet. Hopefully we won't have any earthquakes in the meantime :D

 

By the way, the IPMI feature on the motherboard is awesome!

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On 19/08/2017 at 9:04 AM, hallifallen said:

One issue is with the hdd's and the hdd bracket in the Node 804. Seagate doesn't have the middle screw position on the IronWolf drives. I can only attach the drives using the top screw hole and so the drives are kinda dangling in there. I'll need to figure out how to secure them properly, even though the case isn't gonna get removed from the tv cabinet. Hopefully we won't have any earthquakes in the meantime :D

That sucks about the Node 804 HDD screw positions. I was hoping that would be something they have resolved by now, it's one of the things holding me back from doing a new unraid build with 8TB HDDs

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