I was researching and stumbled upon this motherboard. The ability to use a modern 12th/13th/14th gen Intel CPU with cheaper DDR4 ECC RAM is very attractive. I don’t think DDR5 is significantly faster to justify the price premium at the moment.
I could get 64GB for about $300, which isn’t too bad. Is this RAM compatible with the IMB-X1314?
I’m now considering doing two builds with this motherboard. One as a NAS and another as a workstation. Are these server-grade motherboards capable of undervolting a CPU? The ability to connect the motherboard to a TV via HDMI and using QuickSync to transcode media is very appealing.
For a workstation, assuming the RAM is compatible with the IMB-X1314, I could go up to 128GB. I want to add a GeForce 5090 and then use it for playing with AI, editing 8K videos, and Adobe Lightroom.
I do like that it has 3xi226v NICs, which is nice, but what would a third port be for?
Interesting that the Mobo has a VGA and LVDS ports. What is the use case for that?
In terms of CPU, which is the lowest power CPU I can get, and also potentially tinkering via the BIOS to lower the power, assuming that is possible.
For a workstation CPU, which one would you go with?
Anything about the motherboard that you don’t like?
Before you go down the research road too far, make sure you can purchase this board. Many of the ASRock Industrial system boards are hard to buy, as they tend to be sold for, well, industrial purposes.
For example, you question why this board as VGA and LVDS ports. That makes this board more useful for legacy or embedded purposes. Or the 3 NICs, which can be used for HA, using 1 for heart beat and the other 2 for redundant I/O, (and combined heart beat). Plus, another give away is that this board supports a PS/2 header. Not to mention the 6 serial ports.
So, while many ASRock Industrial system boards are interesting, the ability to purchase them can be the stumbling block.
I’d say the biggest stumbling block is the lack of official support from Asrock. Wolfgang on YouTube gets these boards sent to him for free along with custom BIOS Files to enable additional SATA ports (daughterboard) but regular users are told to get lost.
What if a BIOS update becomes necessary? It’s not like Asrock has a spotless record re: programming its motherboards - remember the BMC chip failures related to the watchdog constantly writing log files?
I guess monitoring through vPro as a poor man’s IPMI. Which brings me to
the lack of a BMC for full IPMI (again, this is an industrial motherboard rather than a dedicated server). Otherwise it has a nice distribution of PCIe slots.
Likely not, as the target market is absolutely NOT interested in such tinkerings.
That’s not the bug I referred to (AVR54). In an earlier edition of the BMC, Asrock programmed their BMC to spam a flash chip on the board every time the watchdog was enabled.
A workaround was disabling the watchdog, a more permanent solution was downloading and installing a later edition of the BIOS / BMC.
Ah, fair enough–I wasn’t tracking that one. But generally speaking, Eric (where’s he gotten to?) had a pretty low opinion of pretty much everyone’s BIOS code, as I recall.
HA, High Availability, clusters sometimes uses multiple server boards, connected by Ethernet ports to detect OS / board failures. Generally you have at least 2 heart beat links, and generally at least 1 is dedicated. The other(s) can be shared with the OS, though it varies with the HA software.
High end servers may use 4 Ethernet ports, 2 for heart beats and inter-cluster communication. Then the other 2 in a redundant capacity, like LACP or Solaris’ IPMP.
That’s correct, but at least BIOS code doesn’t usually lead to outright permanent hardware failure!
I understand that ixsystems has a good relationship with Asrock, and I enjoyed awesome support from ixsystems.
However, folk here that were bitten by the AVR54 or the BMC bug and had not bought their motherboard via ixsystems (in a mini, for example) reported some pretty variable responses from Asrock.
I contrast that with the support I got as a single-unit customer from super micro, which was a step below ixsystems but still great.
IPMI, or Intelligent Platform Management Interface, is a standardized set of specifications for hardware-based management of computer servers. It allows administrators to monitor and control server hardware remotely and out-of-band, even if the server’s main operating system is not running. The system relies on a dedicated chip on the server’s motherboard, the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC), to provide this functionality.
I can chime in with some basic experience. I have this exact board with an i5-12500 and 128GB of ECC RAM. As discussed above, procuring the board was the hard part. RAM is this Crucial part number.
32GB DDR4-3200 ECC UDIMM 1.2V CL22
MTA18ASF4G72AZ-3G2R
With 4 sticks it does not run at the 3200 speed, if I recall correctly it might have with 2, but I’m not positive.
IPMI is a nice to have not a must have if you’re going for a home lab, if you ever want it later on there are possible self made solutions with a raspi.
IPMI is clutch when you don’t have easy physical access to the system in question.
For your NAS build, this speed for the RAM is unnecessary. However, you did not share more details about your planned system (number of users, planned network speed, whether or not you want to run it on bare metal or in a VM, etc)
If you only want to use it for file storage, I am sure, you can get along with the standard, 2133MHz speed DDR4 RAM too.
Usually this is the case for all Motherboards.
If you want to use, high end, high speed RAM, you should pick a two RAM slot MoBo or only populate two slots of the 4.
On the other hand, using the highest possible speed RAM is usually over the point of diminishing returns.
(You get marginal benefits for a significant cost increase and higher risk of instability)
I think, if you insist on higher speeds, you should go for DDR5.
