Motherboard Any favorite SOC ITX "server" boards?

zovc

King of Cable Management
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Jan 5, 2017
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I'm trying to hold off on building new systems until I see how R5 and ITX AM4 boards come out, but I really need to get a second system up and running. I've been moving my computer from my office to my living room and back every day and it's workable but it's just tediom I'd like to get rid of.

It occurred to me that the ideal stepping stone between my current one system and my ideal setup of personal gaming rig, living room light gaming rig, and NAS is to get an ITX server board and get it up and running with my LP GTX 1050. I get to kit out my S4 Mini with the video card, riser cable, power supplies and whatnot, and when I decide on my living room PC build, I can sawp out the server board and start building my NAS with it.

So for the lognest time people were recommending ASRock Rack's C2550D4I or C2750D4I for their arguably good value (not also needing to buy a CPU or a CPU cooler means their feature set has a lot to offer at the price point), but recently folks are saying they have started failing like it's Y2K.

Does anyone have any advice for a similar board with an ITX form factor? Preferably at a similar (or lower) price point. I forget which Supermicro board someone recommended to me on another board, but it used small RAM sticks and those looked pretty pricey. The 12 SATA ports on the ASRock Rack boards are attractive, but as long as the board itself can support ~6 drives, I can upgrade with a card to add more than enough storage for just me.
 

confusis

John Morrison. Founder and Team Leader of SFF.N
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Jun 19, 2015
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All i can say is steer away from the embedded AMD boards. AMD never really released a high perf SOC chip for the platforms, and the performance is severely lacking in what is available.
 

Phuncz

Lord of the Boards
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May 9, 2015
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The failure rate of the Atom C2x50 series seem to be exagerated, it's not like they all suddenly died. The issue is only found years after they were released and these were being deployed for 24/7 usage in data centers and offices alike. The issue is real but still distant. If you'd want to run something 24/7 for 5 years or longer, I'd look at the unaffected chips or maybe a nice Xeon D board.
 
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zovc

King of Cable Management
Original poster
Jan 5, 2017
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603
The failure rate of the Atom C2x50 series seem to be exagerated, it's not like they all suddenly died. The issue is only found years after they were released and these were being deployed for 24/7 usage in data centers and offices alike. The issue is real but still distant. If you'd want to run something 24/7 for 5 years or longer, I'd look at the unaffected chips or maybe a nice Xeon D board.

I would say I technically am looking for 24/7 for 5 years or longer, but realistically I'll probably have either moved all my storage to a cloud somewhere or have a dedicated server rack by then.

You are probably right that people are exaggerating the failure rate. That's kind of the nature of server-grade stuff, I think. To take failure rates extremely seriously.
 
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