What is the Best DDR3 Supported m-ATX/ITX Mother Board!

[rsallal]

Hi Folks,

I've been reading FreeNas guide since more than a month and I decided to go with FreeNas rather than Out of Box from flexibility, Budget, upgradability point of views ....

My purpose of the build:

1. Personal Backup for documents, libraries. videos, images ...
2. Plex Server (Streaming Direct Play & Transcoding FHD & 4K), and part of my personal videos are in 4K H.264/HEVC, H.265.
3. ISCSI to host the VM files, the VM will be running on other machine.
4. Host 4K files for editing through Adobe Premier.
5. A good room to do some tests, performance ...

The Maximum number of users will be 3 simultaneous users, and all my home network setup running 1gbe except my workstation 10Gbe.

Expected Setup:

1. One pool, 10 X 10TB RAID-Z2.
2. Cloud Sync for most critical documents.
3. Later L2ARC if required.
4. Jails.

Mother Board:

1. Fractal Design Node Node 804 Case.
2. Mother Board, Not decided yet but I was lean toward SUPERMICRO X11SPM-TF-O, the thing I liked is the board features especially dual 10gbe, 12 SATA ports &n NVME port, BUT DDR4 prices really insane !!, so I might go with other direction ending up with MB that support DDR3 as I can get four pieces of DDR3 16 GB = 64GB by 180$! rather than 700 - 800$

3. CPU / CPU cooler will be decide based on the MB selection.

I wish I can find MB that can support:

1. m-ATX / ITX form factor to fit Node 804.
1. 10Gbe as my main desktop can run 10Gbe.
2. At least 12 SATA ports.
3. Optional NVME support.
4. DDR3 memory modules, btw I couldn't understand the difference between LRDIMM / RDIMM / Unbuffred / Buffered and which one is better?

Last thing I want to mention, I wish my build will be almost in silent operation as the chassis will set beside me.

Thank you and appreciate your feedback,

 

[Inxsible]

1. m-ATX / ITX form factor to fit Node 804.

Lots of choices in mATX. Few in ITX. eg. X9 or X10 series X9SCM-F or X9SCL-F or X10SSM-F

1. 10Gbe as my main desktop can run 10Gbe.

Why? Couldn't you just add a 10gbe card? Say Intel X540 or Chelsio?

2. At least 12 SATA ports.

The better option here would be an HBA with SAS2. Less cabling leading to less areas where dust can accumulate

4. DDR3 memory modules, btw I couldn't understand the difference between LRDIMM / RDIMM / Unbuffred / Buffered and which one is better?

The question should not be which one is better.... the question should be which one is compatible with the motherboard you have/select. So choose your motherboard first, then the choice of "type of RAM" will pretty much be made for you.

 

[pro lamer]

X9 or X10 series X9SCM-F or X9SCL-F or X10SSM-F

They seem to be limited to 32GB Ram (the OP mentioned 64GB) and the CPUs may not be powerful enough for h.265 4K transcoding...

X79 chipset motherboard may support more Ram and faster CPUs. But don't know if they work with FreeNAS... I have rather answered question "any Xeon E5 uATX/mITX mobo" rather than "the best".

Edit: and the Xeon compatibility with X79 is moot.

And consider a separate rig for transcoding (so you won't be ECC-bound nor FreeBSD-bound nor CPU based transcoding-bound but could use GPU) or convert some videos before putting them at Nas (especially HEVC).

Edit: I'm not sure if even Xeon E5-2690v2 is powerful enough for live transcoding 4K HEVC. And see above.

Direct streaming is not that CPU hungry.

Sent from my mobile phone

 

[rvassar]

They seem to be limited to 32GB Ram (the OP mentioned 64GB) and the CPUs may not be powerful enough for h.265 4K transcoding...

I'm running an X9SCL... It is limited to 32Gb of RAM. My little i3-2120 CPU never really breaks a sweat, even with ESXi attached via 10GbE, Plex jail, and a VM running Debian for DNS & LDAP, but I'm also not doing any 4k transcoding.

 

[rsallal]

Lots of choices in mATX. Few in ITX. eg. X9 or X10 series X9SCM-F or X9SCL-F

But both of them support 32Gb MAX, my plan to start 64 and might expand to 128 later.

or X10SSM-F

Can you point me to Supermico/newegg/Amazon page as I coudn't find it.

Why? Couldn't you just add a 10gbe card? Say Intel X540 or Chelsio?

I want to take the advantage of my Desktop 10GBASE-T network port.

The better option here would be an HBA with SAS2. Less cabling leading to less areas where dust can accumulate

Sounds Convincing.

The question should not be which one is better.... the question should be which one is compatible with the motherboard you have/select. So choose your motherboard first, then the choice of "type of RAM" will pretty much be made for you.

Agree, that's why I asked looking for the best board.

 

[rsallal]

They seem to be limited to 32GB Ram (the OP mentioned 64GB) and the CPUs may not be powerful enough for h.265 4K transcoding...

X79 chipset motherboard may support more Ram and faster CPUs. But don't know if they work with FreeNAS... I have rather answered question "any Xeon E5 uATX/mITX mobo" rather than "the best".

And consider a separate rig for transcoding (so you won't be ECC-bound nor FreeBSD-bound nor CPU based transcoding-bound but could use GPU) or convert some videos before putting them at Nas (especially HEVC).

Edit: I'm not sure if even Xeon E5-2690v2 is powerful enough for live transcoding 4K HEVC.

Direct streaming is not that CPU hungry.

Sent from my mobile phone

My Desktop running I9 CPU and it's much more powerful to serve 4K but the only thing i want the plex live in Jail is that not all of the times my Desktop PC are running, as I do experiments for development, AI, Gaming ....

So, let's consider transcoding 4K is low priority as I have alternatives.

 

[rsallal]

While i'm searching Supermicro boards list https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon3000/#1151, I think there is no board will support DDR3 64Gb or higher with m-ATX/ITX form factor, so I think the options are very limited!

 

[jgreco]

While i'm searching Supermicro boards list https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon3000/#1151, I think there is no board will support DDR3 64Gb or higher with m-ATX/ITX form factor, so I think the options are very limited!

There weren't many boards that supported larger DDR3 DIMM modules. You had some unusual ones like the AsRock Avoton C2750D4I that would take 4x 16GB DIMM, but the DIMM's were basically made out of gold and silver and virtually unobtainium. There isn't much call for small form factor with massive RAM.

 

[rsallal]

There weren't many boards that supported larger DDR3 DIMM modules. You had some unusual ones like the AsRock Avoton C2750D4I that would take 4x 16GB DIMM, but the DIMM's were basically made out of gold and silver and virtually unobtainium. There isn't much call for small form factor with massive RAM.

Thank you,

It seems I will pull back and turn toward DDR4 :(, I will check the list again.

 

[Inxsible]

I want to take the advantage of my Desktop 10GBASE-T network port.

The Intel X540 that I was suggesting is 10GBaseT. Check "Cabling Type" on the Intel ark link that I provided.

Also, I am not sure why you need 64GB RAM, if this is going to be a NAS box with a CloudSync jail and some jails for "testing" as you call it. You already said 4K transcoding is low priority -- plus 4K needs more CPU than RAM. Your use case, as you have presented it, DOES NOT need more than 32GB of RAM.

I have 16GB of RAM and I am running FreeNAS with 4 jails.

Also,
You mentioned you wanted an ISCSI pool -- but then you mention having only 1 pool of 10x10TB drives in RAIDZ2. This doesn't make sense. ISCSI needs a lot of IOPS -- the higher the better. So it would be best to separate the 2 pools. Use 1 pool (say 6 disks or so) for your FreeNAS/jails/testing and another pool with as many disks as you can fit in that chassis for ISCSI. OR just create a separate ISCSI box-- say a 24 bay chassis or something with 1 or 2 TB drives packed to max.