Question What to look for in a motherboard for home server (NAS/Gaming) ?

[Timmyctc1]

Hi folks,
I'm planning on making a small homeserver to use up some spare Desktop parts I have at home and to try move away from constantly having to rent short term game servers for myself and the group every few months.

I have a spare Ryzen 3600x, 16gb DDR4 and possibly a PSU (May need replaced) laying around the house and was thinking of using them in a homeserver but I'm unsure exactly what specs I want to look out for in a mobo if I'm mainly going to be using it as a game server (I would possibly also use it as a NAS for mainly photography stuff)
I'd be fairly familiar with what I'm looking out for when choosing a desktop build but would be fairly new to server stuff. Ideally something that isnt drinking down power usage and is realtively smaller form factor would be ideal.
If anyone can point me in the right direction for information would be wholly appreciative.
Cheers

 

[kanewolf]

Hi folks,
I'm planning on making a small homeserver to use up some spare Desktop parts I have at home and to try move away from constantly having to rent short term game servers for myself and the group every few months.

I have a spare Ryzen 3600x, 16gb DDR4 and possibly a PSU (May need replaced) laying around the house and was thinking of using them in a homeserver but I'm unsure exactly what specs I want to look out for in a mobo if I'm mainly going to be using it as a game server (I would possibly also use it as a NAS for mainly photography stuff)
I'd be fairly familiar with what I'm looking out for when choosing a desktop build but would be fairly new to server stuff. Ideally something that isnt drinking down power usage and is realtively smaller form factor would be ideal.
If anyone can point me in the right direction for information would be wholly appreciative.
Cheers

I would look for a B450 of B550 board with a 2.5Gbit ethernet (or NAS) and as many SATA ports as possible. with a 3600x CPU you are going to have to have a graphics card but a full sized ATX motherboard with two x16 slots that can run as two x8 slots could be useful. You could add a SATA card or a 10GE card.

 

[Timmyctc1]

I would look for a B450 of B550 board with a 2.5Gbit ethernet (or NAS) and as many SATA ports as possible. with a 3600x CPU you are going to have to have a graphics card but a full sized ATX motherboard with two x16 slots that can run as two x8 slots could be useful. You could add a SATA card or a 10GE card.

Okay cool I'm actually running a B450 in my main build. Would I need a GPU just for initial setup of the server?

 

[kanewolf]

Okay cool I'm actually running a B450 in my main build. Would I need a GPU just for initial setup of the server?

I would want one. It is a lot easire to do BIOS and other things with a graphics card. You probably need one to configure it as headless.

 

[Misgar]

With a TDP of 95W, the 3600X is potentially overkill for a home server if you're running it 24/7. It's unlikely to dissipate more than 20 to 30W most of the time, but coupled with a separate GPU, it'll cost more to run than a commercial Qnap or Synology NAS.

Will you be storing files on a large SSD or hard disk? For bulk storage, you can get some very big hard disks over 20TB, but they're expensive.

You won't need multiple SATA ports unless you're considering a number of drives in JBOD or RAID (but there are many good reasons why you should avoid RAID if you don't know all the pitfalls).

If you do need more SATA ports than your motherboard provides, you can fit a PCIe multi-port SATA card, or consider a second-hand LSI SAS controller card, flashed to IT-mode. SAS cards also support SATA drives.

The limiting factor when transferring large files will be your (wired?) network. As mentioned above, 2.5GB/s or 10GB/s Ethernet will speed things up, but only if the rest of your system supports these speeds.

Gigabit Ethernet will limit file transfers to just over 100MB/s. Will this be fast enough for game loading?

What OS will you be installing on the server?

To setup the server, you could use virtually any GPU, e.g. a second hand GT 710. Your motherboard might not boot up the OS for "headless" operation without a GPU.

On a final note, make sure you backup everything on the server. If disaster strikes, you don't want it to be your only copy.