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This is really annoying when building a NAS too. Great value CPUs with ECC support make the configurations great and then you need to spend 50-100€ to just get
by pedrocr 6y ago
This is really annoying when building a NAS too. Great value CPUs with ECC support make the configurations great and then you need to spend 50-100€ to just get boot graphics even though the machine will be headless 99% of the time. Buying something second hand or from aliexpress defeats the purpose of trying to build something reliable. The market for low-end discrete GPUs has all but vanished thanks to Intel integrated GPUs. AMD should add a very basic GPU to every CPU part just good enough for boot graphics and consoles. All the motherboards already include the outputs themselves so only a little bit of silicon in the CPU is missing.
- derefr 6y ago> and then you need to spend 50-100€ to just get boot graphics even though the machine will be headless 99% of the time. Buy a serial-over-USB patch cable; connect it from the NAS to your laptop; open an STTY emulator on the laptop. No boot graphics needed.
- toast0 6y agoStill need something for boot graphics for the BIOS, unless non-server motherboards are coming with serial redirection default enabled and nobody mentioned it.
- kllrnohj 6y agoSet it up with a temporary card and then yank it out after it's setup. You don't tend to access the BIOS that much.
- ciupicri 6y agoI wonder if it's possible to set up the UEFI firmware by setting some EFI variables from the operating system for example by running efivar [1]. [1]: https://github.com/rhboot/efivar https://github.com/rhboot/efivar
- derefr 6y agoI mean, why not use a server motherboard (i.e. one supporting AMT; not necessarily one that requires RDIMMs) if you're building a NAS? NASes are servers in terms of their workload. Take advantages of the features designed for server customers.
- pedrocr 6y agoAvailability and cost naturally. A big part of the appeal here is the low price point for a great spec bare-bones home server using these consumer parts.
- toast0 6y agoMostly cost. The board itself, but also server boards are often hard to find for desktop sockets, so that drives cost for the CPU as well. But, if I get a server board, maybe I'm going to get one with IPMI, and those usually have serial consoles and some limited VGA for KVM over IP too. I could afford a $800 server project, but I'd rather spend $300.
- pedrocr 6y agoHad no idea that would even boot. I prefer being able to just plug in a monitor but that's an interesting option.
- arvinsim 6y agoA comment above refers to the GT 710 as a cheap option new.
- pedrocr 6y agoThat's the 50 in 50-100€. At this level that's around one step up in CPU within the AMD range that you're wasting on an old GPU just to get the thing to boot.
- jeffbee 6y agoWhat about the core i3-8100 with ECC and IGP? The real problem with building a NAS out of these low-end parts is finding the motherboard where ECC actually works. For Ryzen it's roulette, you just have to order one and see if ECC works at all; for Intel you can count on a few vendors but the motherboards cost twice as much as the CPUs and/or have inconvenient shapes.
- pedrocr 6y agoThe point was to use one of these great AMD parts... Motherboard support doesn't seem to be a problem, Asrock lists all their range as supported and has everything you might need. The actual annoying part about motherboards is that some older stuff is technically compatible but you need an old CPU to upgrade the BIOS before you can install one of the newer ones.