Upgrading home server: X58 or C226?

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WangChung

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 19, 2013
Messages
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Was finally able to test out my ARC-1883i on a decent board rather than the (admittedly) bargain basement AMD board I have been using for years, and works great. I used my desktop's Rampage III Gene and put the card into PCIe slot 1, which I didn't do before, and worked perfectly.
I've finally decided to just step my game up and upgrade my home server full hog. I'm looking at either a Rampage III Extreme or a ASRock C226 WS+ board. The R3E offers me the cheap Xeon 6 core and 48GB ECC RAM, but it is outdated with the mediocre Marvell SATA controller. The C226 is newer, but only 32GB RAM and 4 cores.
Additionally, the C226 route would give me onboard video which is fine, but the R3E I would have to buy another video card.
Lastly, the R3E has a bit of a following on bios-mods, so I can at least get OROM upgrades pretty easily enough. If I get the ASRock or almost any other workstation board I'd be on my own and have to rely on the vendor for BIOS updates.

I'm really thinking the extra memory, 2 cores/4 threads and ROM upgrades are worth the higher priced X58 board option. Expensive as hell on eBay and whatnot. Is there something drastic with the C226 board I'm missing that is more worth it?
Thoughts?

Pic for click
XoDA99i.jpg
 
WangChung said:
Was finally able to test out my ARC-1883i on a decent board rather than the (admittedly) bargain basement AMD board I have been using for years, and works great. I used my desktop's Rampage III Gene and put the card into PCIe slot 1, which I didn't do before, and worked perfectly.
I've finally decided to just step my game up and upgrade my home server full hog. I'm looking at either a Rampage III Extreme or a ASRock C226 WS+ board. The R3E offers me the cheap Xeon 6 core and 48GB ECC RAM, but it is outdated with the mediocre Marvell SATA controller. The C226 is newer, but only 32GB RAM and 4 cores.
Additionally, the C226 route would give me onboard video which is fine, but the R3E I would have to buy another video card.
Lastly, the R3E has a bit of a following on bios-mods, so I can at least get OROM upgrades pretty easily enough. If I get the ASRock or almost any other workstation board I'd be on my own and have to rely on the vendor for BIOS updates.

I'm really thinking the extra memory, 2 cores/4 threads and ROM upgrades are worth the higher priced X58 board option. Expensive as hell on eBay and whatnot. Is there something drastic with the C226 board I'm missing that is more worth it?
Thoughts?
Click to expand...
For the C226 route, the C226 route means lower overall power use due to inclusion of onboard video and the fact that newer Intel CPUs uses less power than their older brothers. With that said, I would not recommend that ASRock motherboard since it doesn't seem to be all that reliable. I recommend going with one of these two more reliable Supermicro mobos instead:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182820
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182821
 
We need more info. We don't know why you think you need more cores and more ram, when you might not actually need them.
 
Right now I use the server for Handbrake encodes/re-encodes, Plex media server, and a seed box. I also back up my and my GFs other computers, laptops, phones, etc. I'm also about to start using OwnCloud and some other instances in VirtualBox.

I'm sure the C226 would be "enough", but that's not exactly what I'm/we're about here right? ;)
 
Honestly I would say go with c226, you'll probably be at a wash for the encoding as the new quads are going to have faster clockspeed and better ipc than an old x58 six core so I think x58 is a bad idea. It doesn't seem like you need tons of ram either, 32gb seems fine to me.
 
Supermicro do a Xeon D 1540 ITX motherboard with integrated 8-core CPU that will take 128 GB RAM.
 
Quartz-1 said:
Supermicro do a Xeon D 1540 ITX motherboard with integrated 8-core CPU that will take 128 GB RAM.
Click to expand...

These look fantastic to me. Full Xeon cores with very low power use. and (optional) dual on board 10gig ethernet.

It's just too bad to me that they only come in ITX. I need more expansion for mt builds.

That, and being only DDR4, means that I wouldn't be able to reuse my registered DDR3 RAM, making an upgrade a lot more expensive. :(
 
Went with the C226 option, should all be delivered this Friday.

I've had good luck and good customer service with ASRock, so I stuck with them and got the C226 WS+. If it doesn't work out, I can just buy something else I suppose...
 
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