A Perfect Homelab Motherboard That You Can't Buy (ASRock IMB-X1231)

[@WolfgangsChannel]

To try everything Brilliant has to offer-free-for a full 30 days, visit brilliant.org/Wolfgang/ . The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant’s annual premium subscription. UPDATE: IMB-X1231 is now available from MITXPC for $449.95: mitxpc.com/products/imb-x1231 Links: ASRock Hidden ASPM Setting Guide forums.unraid.net/topic/98070-reduce-power-consumption-with-powertop/page/25/#comment-1355095 Asrock IMB-X1231 (B2B only) www.asrockind.com/product-inquiry RAM geni.us/oZc4 (Amazon) CPU geni.us/e8PC7H (Amazon)

[@IOTWVUVWTOI]

Asus H170I-PRO Mini ITX runs 6th gen intel, has x2 ethernet etc. Would love your opinions on this board and how you would utilise this board

[@infotruther]

Does it come with abc.....?

[@Redknight535]

Hi Wolfgang, are you willing to share the Asrock bios updates privately?

[@Cybercowboy419]

Hello Wolfgang, do you happen to know if they rolled/meeged the 1.60E into their currently released Bios? I believe they are on 1.90 currently, if not would you be able to share 😊.

[@marsovac]

I asked AsRock to provide me a BIOS twice, and both times they delivered. Once to get ReBar Support for a Z170 board where I had a 7700K and an intel Arc gpu, and another time for an Agesa update i needed for a B450 with a 5800X3D regarding USB disconnections. Both of these bioses were marked as beta but they eventually shipped them as stock bioses. Kudos for their BIOS team response.

[@P4GrAnGeR]

This also happened to me with ASUS for the Z97-AR, although the newer firmware just appeared on the site a while after an extensive call with one of their engineers with no evident link to my complaints. Just some mysterious fixes to a board "years out of support" 2 weeks after the call :^)

[@baoquoc3710]

And now AsRock also did the same, but it's in the form of performance boost for the 14th gen cpus, by launching new BIOS for Z690 and Z790 mobos

[@witalit]

Yep I am running a Beta BIOS for my BMC on my E3C222D4U board to fix issues connecting to IPMI. Still to this day that BIOS didn't go to public release as far as I can see, not sure why but its been solid for me. AsRock support were awesome for me.

[@everythingpony]

How are you guys? Getting so lucky when I ask for any of this stuff they tell me they can't because it's confidential and they don't support it anymore

[@everythingpony]

​@@witalitarchive it plz

[@Vatharian]

From my personal experience with ASRock and ASRock Rack - these are engineers - and not many of them, like 70? - that are truly passionate about their job. They are absolutely unafraid of crazy ideas (LGA3647 on ITX, P4 Combo boards, AGP SLI, SLI on VIA chipsets, Kx Upgrade series, Phenom II on nForce3, sticking Lynnfield CPU in SandyBridge board and many, many other "hold my beer and watch this" stunts and products), they sit firmly between purely industrial manufacturers like Kontron, and enjoy the partnerships with Pegatron, which means they are backed by huge money and they actually know what they are doing. And they support it! Good portion of my builds have ASRock inside and I have utmost respect to their dedication and enthusiasm.

[@petros1815]

Mid to late 2000 they used to make all kinds of weird stuff as you said, I loved ASRock back then!

[@hugevibez]

I've also had terrific support from them, when the retailer would not help me. On one of my builds I accidentally bend some pins when installing the CPU but the system ran fine for many months, one day however it completely shit the bed and the board died. They repaired my socket for just 20 bucks + shipping.

[@siruba468]

and they are super responsive and knowledgeable about their stuff as well. i had X570D4I-2T and had a few issues with the firmware (namely for SR-IOV), the engineers responded directly to my emails and provide me direct FTP links to beta BIOS incorporating fixes. All my self-built servers are AsRocks since then. Absolutely love them.

[@xXxJakobxXx3]

Unfortunately, ASRock never merges these fixes which they provide through custom BIOS updates back into the main BIOS. I had two boards from them, both required custom updates for different reasons. Whenever they released a new BIOS update I had to reach out to them and ask if they could provide me with an updated version for my custom BIOS. Once the warranty was over, they wouldn't provide me with any more updates and I didn't want to run my home server on an outdated management engine version.

[@Splarkszter]

​@@xXxJakobxXx3 Quite stramge that they have people working on custom bioses for random customers

[@jonathanmarshall3974]

I continue to support Asrock because they actually respond to BIOS questions and requests. If you're listening, Asrock - please keep doing this.

[@vladimirljubopytnov5193]

I have opposite experience, they threw all the baby issues with am5 at me (purchased 4months after debut), kept repeating non helpful replies (flash to version 1.xx when the flashing itself did not work etc.). Had to return that piece of crap :/.

[@tz496]

I used to have an old AsRock Athom board with an integrated 520m, at some point i ended up flashing that BIOS an the process had failed. I had close to zero hope when i e-mailed them about the back then 5yr old board. After about a week i got a response where they let me know the board's support has already ended, but they still had some spare BIOS chips which could be socketed, three days from that e-mail that arrived at my doorstep and it'll be an interaction i'll fondly remember for many years. This was just a regular consumer ITX board.

[@nathanscarlett4772]

Thats awesome

[@kittikajorns1811]

That is the real customer service.

[@Chris.Wiley.]

Wow, that board would be ideal for a NAS / Proxmox build with all those SATA ports and ECC support. Maybe if enough people express interest, ASRock will make it available to us.

[@flammablewater1755]

We just need one "business" to buy a lot of them for resale. Don't tell ASRock.

[@playlist5455]

Groupbuy? An order of several hundred would intrigue them. Only issue is that board will be expensive

[@legendaryz_ch]

But only 2.5G yikes

[@coinholio470]

@@legendaryz_ch You've got quicksync on the CPU, what else you need the PCIe slot for? Just throw a beefy NIC in there.

[@psiah9889]

​@@legendaryz_chif you're using spinning rust hard drives it's not like they're gonna get much faster than that, even if thrown into a big RAID array. And if you're looking for a big SSD array there's probably better options... I've seen plenty of relatively cheap boards built around having a lot of m.2 slots.

[@spaghettibolognese7719]

Thanks for shouting out to this ECC problem that has been existed for years. I went for Ryzen because of a much more friendly implementation of ECC. Although it's not as power efficient in some scenarios, I am very happy about it

[@JetBlackRage]

Mind telling us a bit about your build? How much of a gap do you feel there is in power efficiency? I'd heard you're looking at a 10w difference, which is double but still not crazy levels of power draw by any means.

[@seifenspender]

@@JetBlackRage Don't want to talk for spaghettibolognese here, but I'm also running a Ryzen system: Ryzen 4650G Pro 4x16GB ECC 4x4TB NVMe SSD 1x SATA SSD 2.5G networking card PicoPSU Currently 16W idle from the wall. I enabled the 35W target in the UEFI and have a max total consumption of ~50W at full load. 22W avg. in the last few months. Got really lucky with my components regarding power consumption tho. Heard stories of ~10W more at idle, so I was pleasantly surprised.

[@DeusMalleus]

​@@seifenspender what board tho?

[@WolfgangsChannel]

Throwing in my home server set up: Ryzen 4650G Pro ASUS Prime B550M-K 2x 16GB ECC RAM 3x 18TB HDD 4x 4TB SATA SSD 1x 256GB SATA SSD Intel X710-DA2 (10 GbE SFP+) BliKVM PCIe 23W from the wall

[@ekvinox]

So there is a perrfect mini itx motherbard, they just don't want me to have it...

[@dismiggo]

In that email they wrote that if anyone was interested, they should contact them, without specifying that they only meant business clients. So that meas that there's still hope, right... right?

[@jurajjanosik7451]

For what I can say, the Asrock ind. support is exceptional. I had bought an asrock ind motherboard from ebay and when I contacted their support about some problem with iGPU, within a week they send me updated bios that solved my problem. Oh, and that motherboard used a lga 1151 socket so it was pretty old.

[@PauloH]

I found it on aliexpress but OH GOD the price

[@jesperkuipers9432]

damn with shipping about 1k euros here in europe

[@PauloH]

@@jesperkuipers9432 laughs in Brazilian's taxes

[@mgarcianaval]

Cade o link? 😅

[@NomDayPloom]

How much?!?

[@Loik948]

well, it's labeled as "industrial". People think "gaming" products are overpriced. Everything thats sold to big companies costs three times as much of what its actually worth.

[@hunterchasens835]

At 11:40 you mentioned that AMD's transcoding is worse than Intel's, but you also chose a Rzyen 4000, up against an 13th gen Intel. The Ryzen 7000 and 8000 have pretty good transcoding with the Ryzen 7900 being on par with an i5-14600K in HEVC, and only around 2-4% behind in AV1. I also believe that ECC is enabled on much of the Ryzen 7000 lineup. I know Ryzen 7900X has ECC (with mobo support).

[@niter43]

He's comparing hardware accelerated transcode here (Intel QSV vs AMD VCN), CPU cores aren't being actively hammered / play little role here -- as you can see from even slow 4C/4T 10W TDP Pentium being ahead on that chart 11:00 (although desktop 7000 series iGPU has updated VCN engine and probably performs better)

[@acuteaura]

encoding quality on RDNA3 AV1 is horrible though

[@1xXNimrodXx1]

Yeah add an Arc380 for transcoding.

[@Ironclad17]

Buying a cpu for the hw video encoding is nonsensical.

[@dmckrk]

Maybe it's hard to get such board for desktop, but as You mentioned there were some laptops with ECC, that is probably the way to go, because they are super energy efficient and quite easy to get from second hand market. I just checked my older laptop (p52, 8gen) at it's quite easy to get such board with xeon and up to 128G of ECC RAM. There are many other models and brands to choose from. My newer one supports ECC (no xeon needed) so may be good idea to repurpose it when I'll upgrade that one. Using laptops for such case is funny idea, You have UPS, active cooling and quite small size. My first server was big HP proliant which was as loud as my vacum cleaner, then I got laptop with broken screen for great price, what a relief - no noise, compact size. It served me for about 5y :) Probably You hear such comments often :) it's not easy way and require some bargain to get something to repurpopose because nobody will buy expensive laptop for such use case :)

[@LucasAlves-bs7pf]

I love industrial motherboards cause it brings a lot of creative solutions for home users too. I have a IMB310TN and its my little love. Here in Brazil it's even more dificulty to find these type of hardware. Great job!

[@mrsna]

Maybe if Asrock sees this they make a consumer variant for this one. Would be pretty nice.

[@juanignacioaschura9437]

The problem is not whether ASRock can do it or not, but rather if Intel will allow them to do it or not.

[@abb0tt]

@@juanignacioaschura9437…bingo.

[@hawk_7000]

I think it would make more sense for everyone if they could just ship what they already have rather than first having to spend developing something new that will not have huge sales volume. I mean, the Asrock Rack boards are somewhat available, not as broadly as their consumer boards but they are not unobtainium. I feel like these could also go in essentially that same channel.

[@Kane-5263]

So far Asrock is the best manufacturer I know, they are easily reachable, always anwser, and each time can help, the do! Their Deskmini 330 have a non standard connector for it's sata drives, one I had was faulty after years of use and the warranty was long gone. They still sent me two new fresh one for free without any questions (and I asked only for where to buy them initially)

[@mortengreenhermansen4489]

THANK YOU for talking about ECC! Extremely important by ignored by most!

[@LRK-GT]

"Cosmic Ray Events" sound like a far-out and rare occurrence; the studies I've skimmed, say otherwise. Any PC 'always on' would benefit from ECC. Any PC/Appliance for any level of 'critical use' (even, entertainment) *REALLY* needs ECC. When I was a young PC enthusiast-gamer, I thought ECC was 'stupid-lame server stuff'. Since then, I've learned of mitigations done @ the 'software level' to keep non-ECC machines running somewhat reliably. IMHO, ECC should be standard, and non-ECC RAM sold only as OCing 'enthusiast' RAM.

[@aliancemd]

7:17 I have a feeling I know what the Alder Lake(-N) system is. I've built already 3 servers with Intel N100(1 TrueNAS-only + 1 Proxmox for myself + 1 Proxmox for my father) - I like that it supports virtualization which allowed me to install EVE-NG in Proxmox(using KVM) and host inside it the the Mikrotik x86 image, using nested virtualization, which would not be simple to do on an ARM device.

[@CarbonPanther]

Oh i would love for you to find a similar new motherboard on the AMD side, even if it is an embedded platform or has similar availability problems, just to see what the current gen possibilities are. Like for example how extremely power efficient Zen3+ and Zen4 have been on mobile platforms, as well as their updated RDNA2 onboard graphics, i mean they support full AV1 encoding so it might be worth a shot to compare right? Maybe i'll look for some candidates and post them in the replies, cause i would love to see what is possible! If all else just to have some more new options.

[@directhex]

I'm using one as my home server, an Asrock Rack X570D4I-2T. It's expensive at ~$450 but not unobtanium. Also, you won't want to run Windows Server on it (there are no Windows Server drivers for X570 chipset or the embedded GPU in the Ryzen Pro 5650GE I'm using). I grey-imported the Ryzen Pro because you can't use ECC with embedded graphics on a consumer Ryzen G-series.

[@BadMax02_VR]

there are currently used Gigabyte MJ11-EC0 boards which are for sale at only 60€, they have a amd embedded EPYC CPU, therefore have actual real ECC support, ive wrote another comment asking wolfgang if he could try them out and make a video about them, ram-könig apperently has alot of them and keeps restocking them on their website.

[@Steven-hq3go]

5000 AMD series APUs can transcode HEVC. The 8000 series APUs are based on RDNA3 so can also transcode AV1 too

[@10_bn]

What about the CWWK AMD-7840HSHS 8-Bay/9-Bay NAS ITX motherboard? It supports ECC, features an AMD 7840HS with a 780M iGPU, includes 9 SATA ports, and has 2 NVMe slots.

[@o.l.k.s.n]

A common problem of motherboards from small Chinese manufacturers is overall "meh" quality in the end. Such manufacturers usually create devices with dozens of "wow" features, like a bunch of I/Os, while strangely none of the big brands have something similar closely. When you scratch a surface, you quickly get that this "wow" is achieved with questionable tradeoffs because of hardware limitations and that's why big brands don't have similar products. Later on you'll learn that such mobos have no BIOS updates in a year after they got released, no technical documentation (schematics, block diagrams, manuals, conformance, compatibility lists, etc.), they use cheap power-inefficient components like SATA chips for a bunch of I/Os, etc. Hardware compatibility and stability is another big topic. Also, good luck with getting custom BIOSes on request. Just sharing my personal experience with overhyped Minisforum MS-01 and their support, and some research on user's experiences from forums about similar devices. If you take your personal time and data seriously, you won't go with such devices.

[@darkienescariot9361]

The spec sheet is a wet dream. Those VRMs though...

[@mrspartan58]

I believe similar results can be achieved with the newer more available IMB-X1238. ECC ddr5 sodimms will cost a bit more but may net better power efficiency. This setup paired with an aspm L1 capable sfp+ card like the TEG-10GECSFP and the unicorn setup might actually be achievable.

[@HupfderFloh]

ASRock is missing out on a whole consumer base here. There are dozens of us!

[@kujamasarulp7871]

there are 2 boards similiar to the imb-x1231 asrock rack w680D differences: only deep mini itx and uatx instead of mini itx no onboard audio 10g ethernet instead of 2.5g ddr5 dimm instead of ddr4 sodimm and the both w680d ones have 8 sata onboard - 1 with 8 sata over oculink and the other with 4 sata onboard and 4 via oculink

[@esko1one]

That board hovers around €800… That's not an option for many people lurking here, I think.

[@thespencerowen]

Its close, but only 1G and 32G ram max, and 4 sata.

[@rossmky]

I’m running a W680D4ID-2T/G5/X550 with an i7-13700k. Had a minor bios issue and AsRock sent me a fix within 2 weeks. Great board, amazing support. Runs ECC RAM no problem. AsRock has a RAM compatibility matrix for their boards that is updated regularly. 32gb supported per slot x 4 = 128 max.

[@RoccoWocco]

I have had great support experiences with Asrock Rack too. I only run a X570D4I-2T. Tbh I prefer the X570D4I-2T over this board it has dual 10gbit. And you can actually buy the board.

[@JetBlackRage]

But I guess you sacrifice the Intel power efficiency and quick sync. How do you find transcoding? I should add, I've got a 5900x in my desktop that I could shuffle down into a similar board, but the quick sync and power efficiency are big hurdles to talk myself over.

[@RoccoWocco]

@@JetBlackRage mine pulls around 50 watts with esxi + truenas scale and 2 docker vms in esxi. It could be better but I'm fine with it. It's a 5600x with 64gb of ram and 3x4tb sata ssd. If I run a Minecraft server (currently with atm9 mod pack and 4 friends playing) it's averages 85 watts which is deffo up there

[@lanwin]

Wow 600€ is a lot for a board. Why did you considered buying such an expensive board?

[@RoccoWocco]

I paid a little less, about 500. I really wanted the dual 10gbit and nicely integrated features of this board. I also wanted it to be this small. My full build was a similar price to a pre made NAS with 10gbit. Except those cannot come close in CPU perf. @@lanwin

[@heclanet]

I can confirm that Asrock's support is Bad if you are not a KZbinr, I had problems with the RGB software that literally cleaned all the partitions of the HDDs, I contacted support asking about the problem and they never responded. The worst of all is that after this bad experience I was able to replicate the problem 2 more times (already experimentally) it is a bug when detecting the RGB controls of the computer, which literally deletes the partition tables

[@RichardCoptere]

i'm using an asrock imb-191 found in the trash at my work. it seems like imb-1231 is the big brother. It works wonderfully beside not having a lot of port.

[@xfragboix]

Can you look up a GPU for me in the trash pile? I'm not picky, any kind will do 😂

[@subrezon]

Hit the nail on the head with the "you can choose 3 out of 4" statement. When you enter the homelab community, the sorting hat assigns you one of 4 types of hardware: affordable old enterprise gear with all the features that idles at 150W and sound like jet planes; affordable desktops or mini-PCs without ECC; affordable Ryzen-based systems with ECC without QuickSync; or extremely expensive and/or unobtanium business gear that does everything for like 5x the price. But on a serious note, there is a way to kind of sort of get all 4 - use a Ryzen server and a dedicated Intel mini-PC that exclusively does transcoding. Or, you know, relax a little bit about the missing ECC and do your best following best practices to avoid data corruption.

[@brianhansen9578]

My Intel Arc 380 idles at 1w in proxmox in my ryzen box when not transcoding, much cheaper than minipc just for transcode and with AV1 HW encoder

[@dave7244]

The need for ECC support is not something you are typically going to have to deal with.

[@subrezon]

@@brianhansen9578 that sound crazy, is this reported power consumption or did you measure it at the wall plug?

[@coopercummings8370]

That assumes you have a free pcie slot, which you often don't. on ITX you only get one slot, and it has to compete with an HBA to allow you to connect enough storage devices and a 10Gbps NIC. On mATX things are a lot less tight, but it is still fairly common for boards to only have 2 pcie slots@@brianhansen9578

[@WolfgangsChannel]

@brianhansen9578 how did you check the power consumption of the Arc card? I've tested the power consumption of the Arc card, and even though Intel's drivers report the power consumption at 1W, the entire card adds around 7-10w to the total system power draw, when measured at the wall. Even at idle.

[@cameramaker]

On Intel, the ECC support was also a question of a matching chipset - for those older generations, one would need a C/W server/workstation chipset for ECC, while none of the B,H,Q,Z series in consumer boards supported it. I am not sure how this changed with the newer series, but sure its a good thing (my dell with W chipset and 10900K unfortunately does not do ECC.. because of the cpu). I think they just got tired of releasing the same CPU's under Xeon E branding, so they merged those lines together.

[@mrspartan58]

Assuming one could purchase this board through a third party, how would you obtain the M2X4-SATA-4P adapter? Is AsRock Ind the only source of these adapters? Is the special bios needed supplied with adapter?

[@AlbertoDelacruz92]

I need this answered!!

[@19c]

Just curious, have you ever tried using M.2 to 6 SATA adapter with ASM1166 controller on this board? ASM1166 supports ASPM, but me and another person under a blog post were having trouble with ASRock motherboard M.2 slots connected to the chipset not recognizing the adapter, even after flashing new firmware. On the same boards, the CPU connected PCIe slots could recognize the adapter just fine. Very strange.

[@mikekane9734]

Hey Wolfgang! Thank you for your videos. I am currently in need of replacing my Xeon E5-2667 V2 Supermicro 1U server (as it takes 80W at idle), with something powereffitient, supoport for HW transcoding, ECC, and plenty of Sata 3 ports. Watching your videos with a hope to find a good motherboard. But in every video you seem to be chasing a unicorn. Is there a board that doesnt cost an arm and leg, currently on the market and actually good for all that good tasks? I would really appreciate a vido like this. Or links?

[@ShaferHart]

unfortunately when you make ECC a requirement you move into "enterprise" territory and have to accept a price or power consumption tax. You also need to start reading the fine line to make sure the hw supports hw transcoding as some cheap "enterprise" ones don't like some hp microservers.

[@chublez]

Shame we can't buy it. I'm not overly concerned with ECC myself. Having a real cpu socket to make an upgrade easy if your home NAS starts taking on more loads than anticipated and 8 onboard SATA ports is pretty nice however.

[@robot_0121]

The DFI SD106 Q170 also claimed this capability in 2017. I bought 5 of these boards for $15 each. They sold off the remains after Gazprom. They found a vulnerability in the BIOS. That's why the price was low. In general, the board is excellent. There is support for ECC, and it also supported coffe mod through bios modification, which is cool. great board)

[@user-kg6uj6ji5p]

I have contact to asrock retail in here, they can help me to buy imb-x1231 however the price will be around 500 usd. Honestly that quite expensive

[@LRK-GT]

Yes but, for the features and the 'industrial' design; that seems reasonable. I own a DFI and a Jetway (DFI ODM-suspect) industrial motherboard; they are built to much better standards with better (and more durable) component choices. You would be getting something for what you're paying, at least.

[@user-kg6uj6ji5p]

@@LRK-GT cool mate, i already contact asrock but they told me that motherboard are made in different teams and told me to be patience because there no stock, only made by order, i seen someone claims in here they made from dedicated engineer in their job. i guess it was right

[@vencibushy]

Asock's IMB motherboards are actually quite expensive. We've got at work some small industrial PC's equipped with such motherboards. They cost about $15k per unit which is actually cheap for industrial applications. What drives the cost up is the fact that all the equipment comes with 15 years of part availability coverage.

[@acuteaura]

I get a lot of these features on modern AMD mini PC. DDR5 is basically a given and good enough for NAS error correction, and I got enough experience with trash external enclosures now to pick good ones. And they come with USB4 ports these days, so you could even add 10 GbE or something like the Startech 4 slot NVMe enclosure. Big downside is that thunderbolt controllers make the minimum price of things sit at around ~200 EUR...

[@V3DT]

ECC was actually one of the main reasons I was excited for Ryzen, finally was something competitive with intel & supports ECC. I have 3 Ryzen based system running currently with 128GB of ECC memory each, all 3 run 24/7 & have been rock solid.

[@theftking]

All the best homelab stuff is impossible to find.

[@PsychotherapistSam]

The ASRock support is, in my limited experience, really nice. They supplied me with an updated bios for a weird x470 board, which had different versions than the normally obtainable ones. I currently have an X570D4U-2L2T (which I got extremely cheap on Kleinanzeigen of all places; otherwise that's also pretty unobtainable, like most "enterprise" hardware in Germany) paired with a Ryzen 7 PRO 5750G and 128GB ECC Memory. Everything just works so well, it's probably the nicest Motherboard I'll ever own. You mentioned the Ryzen PRO APUs with ECC Support are only being sold B2B, so I guess I was just really lucky getting my hands on a 5750G? Great video as always :)

[@Lardzor]

I'm curious if the Intel Rapid Storage Technology supports all 8 SATA ports. According to Intel, the max supported drives is 6, which is also the max number of SATA ports on older intel chipsets. I'm wondering if it is possible to create a Raid Array with 8 drives on this motherboard, and more generally on newer Intel Chipsets that support 8 SATA drives.

[@Lordniksidor]

Got myself a hp prodesk g4 sff for 100AUD with Intel i3 8100 as a result of your channel to replace my 12yo dlink 4bay nas, laptop running HA and htpc running Plex, spent a few weeks procrastinating, figuring out what to buy and trying to learn and eventually got proxmox up and running this weekend, samba shares up, jellyfin lxc & ha vm up and running, mostly at c9 in powerTop, 3sata onboard, x16 & x4 pcie & 1 nvme slot. Cracked out the power meter but it's dead... Dodgy nimh battery on the t board leaked everywhere and corroded the traces, i tried some jumper wire repairs but no luck so $20 later and wait for Australia Post to find out the power consumption.

[@wolfpoker]

Great features in that board! We should ask asrock how many they consider a minimum order to accommodate our homelab needs and let's do a mass purchase. I know 2-3 other communities that would most likely chip in :>

[@geraldh.8047]

9:02 I can recommend the Asus W680 Board. It’s not cheap but at least it’s available and actually well supported and works fine. Have never checked the C-States though.

[@TheDakes]

Could you look at the "Gigabyte MJ11-EC1 AMD EPYC Embedded 3151" Board? Currently you can find them in Germany for 90€. What a bargain!

[@topkek5378]

Where :o

[@TheDakes]

@@topkek5378 The shop is called ram-koenig or something. I originally found it through eBay. But as eBay sellers often do, they also had their own online shop with a little lower prices. Actually the board used to be even cheaper, but the price apparently went up.

[@fokkedeboer2342]

AM5 actually has integrated grpahics AND ECC support. I am currently running an 7600 with an AsRock B650M riptide. I confirmed it has ECC supoort as i use it for Truenas

[@phredka12]

after many problems with asus and msi now i have asrock motgerboard and iam f... happy with suport, quality and dokumentation. 5 star for asrock

[@CharlesGauthier]

Wolfgang, with your contacts at ASRock, I was expecting you to spin up a small business "wolf industrial" that busy industrial boards from ASRock and resells near bones NAS / servers to home lab enthusiasts!

[@HabenSieFeuer]

some of the asrock server boards look perfect for what i want for my new home server, yet actually getting one is seemingly impossible, at least without ordering from another continent and getting hammered on import taxes too

[@chrisn5315]

This is an important quest you are on.

[@abb0tt]

I too support this quest.

[@OTechnology]

I settled for a Supermicro X11SCA and a Xeon E-2174G for my ECC enabled and Intel Quicksync Home NAS.

[@lanwin]

Do you every tried to measure the power consumption? And did you found some quriks with this configuration?

[@nulldev42]

I see it on sale at MITXPC (no idea who this is) for $300. EDIT - It appears that they sell the IMB-1231 (note the missing "X") which has the Q670 chipset and doesn't support ECC)

[@8xwlG3ZH9fo1mBVI]

How much are they charging to enterprises?

[@ClaySano]

As of now there are listing for this in the US for ~$300.

[@praetorxyn]

I've got my eye on the ASRock IMB-X1314 mATX version. I'd love to see / hear your thoughts on that one! I ended up backing the 8 bay UGreen has for $899.99, as that seemed like excellent hardware for the price (plus, every 8-bay NAS chassis I know of has at least one thing that pisses me off, and I like the UGreen one). But I'm planning to do Proxmox with PCIe passthrough to a TrueNAS VM (or bare metal TrueNAS with a separate Proxmox box, I haven't decided yet) and 8 drives in ZFS, so I figured ECC would be better than not, and the above board comes with IPMI which would be nice to have. I have until the UGreen campaign ends to decide what I'm going to do, as I can cancel my pledge until the campaign ends. Since most of the cost will be storage anyway as I'm buying large capacity Iron Wolf Pro drives, I'm asking myself if saving $500 or even $1000 is really worth missing out on ECC and IPMI.

[@Metalhead_Geek]

I actually have 4 of these motherboards. And no people don't ask if I'm going to sell them because I'm not. But I'm using one as a Nas in a custom made case that has a touchscreen.

[@Kraaketaer]

You're wrong on the AMD APU ECC support thing - it's the exact same case as with the desktop CPUs, that it's "not disabled" but not supported or undergone any type of verification on consumer chips - but they do that for the (identical silicon, near-identical configuration) PRO SKUs. I've got a DIY NAS that started out with a hand-me-down 1600X from my old desktop, then moved to a 2400GE (non-pro), and now runs a 5600G (non-pro). All of these have supported the 32GB of ECC RAM I've got in the system with no issues - even on my old, crappy Biostar X370GTN motherboard (the first AM4 ITX board to hit the market!).

[@WolfgangsChannel]

Supported as in "system booted with the memory module", or as in "ECC functionatly is enabled and working"?

[@Kraaketaer]

​@@WolfgangsChannelFunctionally enabled and working as far as I know. ECC options show up in BIOS, and while there's no way of testing for it in TrueNAS that I know of, I did confirm it was working while I was initially setting up the system.

[@WolfgangsChannel]

Unfortunately, this might just mean that your system supports booting with unregistered ECC RAM, but not that it actually utilizes the ECC features. On Linux, you can check that with lshw (`sudo lshw -class memory | grep ecc`), on Windows, you can use `wmic memphysical get memoryerrorcorrection`. Outputs "5" and "6" indicate single and two-bit ECC respectively. On FreeBSD and TrueNAS Core, you can use `dmidecode -t 17` to check ECC support. If your "Total Width" is 72 bits, this would indicate that ECC memory support is enabled. However, this method is hit or miss, and sometimes produces false positives.

[@Kraaketaer]

​@@WolfgangsChannelIt does report 72 bits of total width using dmidecode -t 17. Not much else I can do to test this without messing with the system I guess? I do have a vague plan to move from a bare metal TrueNAS core setup to some form of virtualized setup (want to do more with the system now that it's reasonably powerful, and plugins and VMs under TrueNAS aren't really doing it for me), which would probably give more options for figuring this out properly, but that's months down the line at a minimum (need to figure out what I want to do, and likely get some more storage to back up my data before migration).

[@BaldyMacbeard]

These small media server sorts of home servers are nice at all, but they're not terribly difficult to put together. But here's a nice challenge - try to put a 2x3090 ML home server that doesn't idle at ridiculous power consumption. Choices of boards with 2x Pcie 4.0x1 6 at 4U spacing are kinda narrow. None of them seem to have reasonable idle power consumption cause they're all the typical high end gaming boards. And I've got no clue how to get a 10 gig nic in there. Oh... and of course you'll have to figure out what PSU's (I'm kinda inclined to go 2x500W) to use since the system will hopefully idle around at about 50W, but peak out at 800-900...

[@TaylanEkinci]

In my opinion, one of the most necessary parts for a home server is a remote access application such as ilo or idrac.

[@reptilia7170]

Just upgraded my homelab from various j4xxx and j5xxx intel boards to 2 cheap asrock am4 board, ecc and 5650g. I did notice some power usage increase but performance wise really happy! Intel build would have been better but c chipset boards simply to expensive!

[@FuchsHorst]

AsRock, please release this product! and keep providing BIOS fixes!

[@stefanbogdanski2249]

I got an ASUS Q370i-IM-A on ebay with core i5-9500, low profile cooler, 8 GB RAM (SO DIMM), 240 GB NVME. Package was 200€, I think the board and cpu is a solid base to start a build from. What do you think?

[@_miranHorvat]

Power consumptoon improvement needs the context of investment cost. My server "idles" at 88W from the UPS. From the top of my head: 1x evga supernova 1300 g2 1x x10dri 2x E5-2667 v4 8x 16GB 2133 ecc 2x PM983 960GB nvme 2x 6410A 960GB nvme 2x PM991 128GB nvme 1x NQ100 960GB ssd 1x old s.evo 256GB ssd 1x old kings. 240GB ssd 1x 500GB 2.5" hdd 5x 1.5TB 7200 3.5" hdd 1x gtx750 3x Fractal 120mm 3x NF A12x25 1x Pure wings 2 120mm

[@declanmcardle]

@3:30 I wonder does Wendell know about this 'M.2 cheat code'?

[@JohnSmith-yz7uh]

i just got a Gigabyte MJ11-EC1 ITX motherboard, which was pulled out of a GPU server. It does require some adapter cables to fully utilise it (no PCIe slot but a slimsas i4 + i8) but if you're fine with 1GbE or a m.2 2.5GbE adapter you can get 4 SATA + 3 NVMe, or 4 SATA + 4SATA+ 2 NVMe. And all that for 90€

[@HaimPeretz]

I also saw this board . How do you get 4+4 SATA + 2.5gbe+2 nvme configuration?

[@JohnSmith-yz7uh]

@@HaimPeretz you can get a SlimSAS 4i SFF-8654 to 4x Sata cable and have a total of 8 sata drives (set to sata in the BIOS). Alternatively you can use the slimsas port as a x4 PCIe port given the correct cable/adapter. It also has a slimsas i8 port,that has 8 PCIe lanes, that you can bifurcate if I remember correctly.

[@HaimPeretz]

@@JohnSmith-yz7uhthanks , the board is almost perfect for me But, if I planned to convert the slimsas 4i to 4 SATA drive, slimsas 8i to GPU and m.2 to 10gbe network card (this board has only 2 port, 1gbe each) I will not be able to get another port for os SSD.

[@SkynetCyb]

Would you ever make a guide about making a homelab/NAS with AMD? Since for example ECC is enabled? It could be interesting to see what options you have, especially since AMD's transcoding got a lot better since the early days of Ryzen, I think reevaluating could be good

[@user-kg6uj6ji5p]

CWWK just release motherboard has lga 1700 support 12gen - 14gen cpu, sata slot, 1 pcie 5.0*4, 2 pcie gen4.0*4 slot and full x16 slot. The only downside of their motherboard are lack of ecc but use ddr5, but for the price their selling around 120usd to 170usd it actually no brainer option for newer gen CPU And directly compete with Asrock IMB-X1231

[@kevinhu196]

I'm looking forward to your Alder Lake guide video, your guide videos are relevant, practical and provide the best information, for me ECC support is not a big deal for a media server.

[@LRK-GT]

The *exact* same thing has happened with all of AM4 Embedded and more-featureful X570 Server-Industrial boards. ASR isn't the only company making awesome boards w/ 0 consumer-facings.

[@Airbag888]

You should buy it for us and resell Wolfgang

[@danknemez]

A few of my friends and industry colleagues, alongside myself, have had pretty much the same support experience when it comes to AsrockRack or AsrockIndustrial - helpful, quick and custom BIOSes are common. But Asrock the DIY board one is much more... "typical" from a consumer standpoint. As for AMD ECC, AM5 certainly showed that "we don't officially support it, but we don't disable it" means a BIOS update can just throw it away, sadly. And the un-validated aspect also shows up from time to time as some Ryzen platforms don't properly report the error events to the OS, even though ECC is working.

[@nyanmisaka]

These industrial motherboards are produced on demand and are often out of stock. So they are quite pricey.

[@xXRenaxChanXx]

Isn't ECC also slower than normal ram? I remember seeing benchmarks somewhere that showed ECC DDR4 2666 performed more like DDR4 2133 and so on.

[@MrRobot-lm2lo]

90 000 optional buyers

[@carlpeters8690]

Nice board. A quick search lead to one for CA$429.99 - but even if I was willing to pay that, it was out of stock.

[@sourcilavise3788]

I'm still a little concerned about the VRM on those boards, did you try pushing it somehow and check the temps ?

[@WolfgangsChannel]

The VRMs should be fine up to 65w, as mentioned in the datasheet

[@sourcilavise3788]

@@WolfgangsChannel The 13500 pulls over 150W according to intel specs when all cores runs :/ The VRM will not hold it.

[@WolfgangsChannel]

That’s with Intel‘s auto-overlocking technology enabled (forgot the name). At stock, it’ll run at 65W

[@sourcilavise3788]

@@WolfgangsChannel Well I've checked some bench and the 13500 seem to limit itself at 132W (compared to 181 for a 13600K) while rendering. I don't understand this auto overclock thing as I only know the XMP profiles for RAM. But at 65W limit, you will not be able to push all cores to the maximum frequencies.

[@SvensenDe]

@WolfgangsChannel Thanks for the cool video. what kind of m.2 4x port Sata adapter is this? Do you perhaps have a link to it? And I took a look at asrock's website about bios updates that you may have received or can you also share them with us?

[@Kabodanki]

Props to ASRock, they have my respect

[@justwantedtoreply]

Been using ASRock industrial boards for a long time. Imb190d I use as a Nas.

[@bigjaws2645]

Have a look at the ASRock Rack E3C256D2I. Just finished a Homelab Server built with it. with a Xeon E-2356G including QuickSync ECC Ram Dual NIC IPMI 8 x SATA mini--ITX Working nicely....

[@WolfgangsChannel]

How's the power consumption?

[@bigjaws2645]

With two HDDs, two SATA SSDs and 2x32GB RAM. All 3 NICs connected, Proxmox running in idle: 33W for everything.

[@penguinsam]

@@bigjaws2645 33W for a Xeon E build is pretty ideal

[@ggorg0]

Hey, are you planning to make a Discord server for the power efficient homelabbing community? I'd like some help with schoosing stuff for my homelab, but I'd rather chat with someone who actually knows the subject on a chat platform rather than a forum-like one (YT comments)

[@Demios101]

For some reason I always assumed Wolfgang's vids came in on weekends.

[@ryansteiger6960]

Thanks for the video Wolfgang 👍

[@chrism6880]

They offer a micro-ATX imb-1314 that seems to be very similar. Found it on ebay for $325

[@lucasew]

imagine how crazy would be if someone did a prebuilt pc using this mobo they order from asrock directly then ship in a off the shelf product

[@vomKuckucksfelsen]

tbh - your best video so far! thank you!

[@ghostofdre]

AsRock, there's a market for these boards outside of industrial applications. Maybe they could market them as "industrial" for those home industrial applications.

[@declanmcardle]

You could build a weissbier brewery in your basement and say you need it for measuring pressure and other things...

[@oddbjrnkvalsund9136]

Rosch Computer GmbH in Wiesbaden, Germany will sell you one of these cards, no problems. I am not affiliated btw. I got a quote on the Asrock MB-1233-WV back in 2022: 428 euros incl. VAT.

[@skoog7091]

Nice video as always! Have you checked out IKuaiOS Intel N100 ? Im thinking about buying it. But I cant find any tests of it.

[@EmperorTerran]

Any plans to review ASUS Pro WS W680-Ace IPMI It actually is available.. and while expensive should offer a lot. Would love to see how its ipmi looks and general insightful opinion...

[@mateuszw.812]

Well, I don't knoow what are you talking about. On Aliexpress I just found two offers for this motherboard. the price is very high for my liking, but its there

[@WolfgangsChannel]

Those are resellers/scalpers. The price is almost double of what it should be, and I doubt that many people will want to invest $800+ into it, seeing as both offers have no reviews.

[@matthewharrison3813]

I'm looking to replace my server and would like to add an NPU for local voice recognition in home assistant and perhaps eventually other AI tasks such as an LLM or home security image recognition. Is this something you might cover in future videos? Your focus on low power would be appreciated and there's such a range of options from on processor NPUs, dedicated small NPU accelerators and GPUs that it's hard to know where to start.

[@hummmingbear]

A humble homelab build video would be awesome

[@dpspokojdpspokoj2320]

How about Kontron's (ex Fujitsu) motherboards? It might be a great idea to test their MBs and ask whether they plan selling them to retail customers.

[@Battlewear]

As a new home lab builder, if this board isn’t available what do you suggest??

[@human-V-oid]

AsRock make really good motherboards for the price even in the consumer ranges

[@kiro8134]

I would‘ve loved to now how much that board would cost. Maybe you could contact a company to buy it for you?

[@nadtz]

about $600

[@kiro8134]

@@nadtz okay and where did you get that from?

[@nadtz]

@@kiro8134 A vendor website, they don't have it in stock but they can get it upon request

[@anonapache]

If they only would provide a bmc firmware for their x470 boards with ast2500 chips, that support fully compliant redfish api access.