Motherboard Reviews
26 Apr 2021 16:46:52 UTC
Topic 225279
(moderation:
Do you have a Motherboard you love OR hate?
Write about it here. I have some "history" with "several" motherboards.
Tom M
A Proud member of the O.F.A. (Old Farts Association). Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)
"Love" my ASUS Crosshair VII
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"Love" my ASUS Crosshair VII Hero motherboards. I have four.
Really like my inexpensive Asrock Rack EPYCD8 server motherboard.
I build Ryzen machines these
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I build Ryzen machines these days. And they are dedicated to crunching, so I don't need full-length boards. And I don't overclock, so I don't need extra-heavy duty power. But I do want stable power, with well-cooled and reliable voltage regulators.
The ASRock B550M PRO4 are now my all-time favorites. I have several of them.
https://www.newegg.com/asrock-b550m-pro4/p/N82E16813157939
I don't know if the BIOS they are shipping now supports the Ryzen 5000 series or not. You might have to upgrade using a Ryzen 3000.
I have "several" ongoing
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I have "several" ongoing Motherboard experiments/tests etc. I am going to focus on the MSI X470 Gaming Plus Max to begin with.
I bought this MB for a prospective upgrade to 3 gpus on my Amd 3950x which only has 2 long slots. I have since discovered there is some kind of bug in the 370/470 chip sets that means the 3rd long slot will not work without some Linux kernel command line tinkering in Grub.
The first problem is there was not enough clearance in my largest case to utilize the 3rd slot for a gpu inside the case.
The second problem is I have an out sized air-cooler on the AMD 3950x which causes clearance headaches on the mining racks I currently own.
I addressed the problems in two ways. 1) I didn't use the AMD 3950x for testing. I used a Amd 2700x. 2) I bought an "Open Air" computer case that basically would not have a clearance issue for either the 3rd slot or a "too tall" cpu cooler.
Assembling the "Open Air" computer case turned out to be an "erector set" project. Complete with multiple partial disassembles to get everything where it was "supposed" to be.
The "goal" of the above setup was to get an XFX Rx 5700 and 2 XFX Rx 580's mounted directly on the Motherboard and processing E@H Gamma Ray tasks.
The good news is after dinking around and researching with everyone's favorite tool Google I actually got that far.
The bad news is when I have ANY Rx 580 or Rx 5700 video card in the 3rd slot the video card in the first slot slows down massively.
The XFX Rx 5700 I have will run 1 Gamma Ray task in less than 5 minutes if it is the only card installed on the motherboard (in slot 1). If I install an Rx 580 in the 3rd slot both cards slow down and the system gets a little laggy.
It is currently running with the Rx 5700 in slot 1 and an Rx 580 in slot 4 (counting from the cpu). The 3rd long slot is the 6th slot counting from the cpu. And the system is not laggy.
However both cards are still running slow. I am going to reset the bios to mostly defaults and see if that helps. And then remove the additions to the GRUB command line and see if that helps.
I will post the error messages and details of the Grub command lines that seem to get you past the errors in another message.
BRB.
Tom M
A Proud member of the O.F.A. (Old Farts Association). Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)
Notes on getting 3 gpu cards
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Notes on getting 3 gpu cards to run on an MSI X470 Gaming Plus Max Motherboard.
If you are seeing an error that looks something like this
iommu ivho: AMD - Vi: Event logged (IOTLM_INV_TIMEOUT device=25.00.0 address=0x42cd9e430
the following should help you get past it. When I get that error the system stops the booting cycle (it may take many console lines of output before it stops).
A How To for the people who don't want to "Grub" around looking for.
Open a terminal session in Linux. (Term in Ubuntu).
Menu paste this: sudo nano /etc/default/grub
Hit enter. Put in sudo password.
Locate: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT
This often has "splash" as part of the command line.
Add the iommu=pt pci=noaer inside the quotes with a space between each keyword=parameter pair.
I have to use the menu paste to get it inserted.
Cntl-O -> Enter to write out the file.
Cntl-X to quit nano.
Run this command next to update GRUB so it will apply the changes during the next boot.
sudo update-grub
Re-boot system.
You should now be able to install and boot with a gpu card in the "3rd long slot".
A Proud member of the O.F.A. (Old Farts Association). Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)
Tom M wrote:However both
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No luck both cards are still running slowly.
Incase it isn't obvious this MB is clearly "not suitable to task" for running three video cards on the MB.
Tom M
A Proud member of the O.F.A. (Old Farts Association). Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)
Tom M wrote: Do you have a
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I also have the agenda of trying to run more than 2 video cards on a BOINC system.
Tom M
A Proud member of the O.F.A. (Old Farts Association). Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)
Keith Myers wrote: "Love" my
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I may look at a Crosshair VII for a 3 gpu rig.
How much did the MB, Cpu, Ram (and anything else necessary) cost?
Tom M
A Proud member of the O.F.A. (Old Farts Association). Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)
Seconded Keith on the EPYCD8,
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Seconded Keith on the EPYCD8, really nice for multi-GPU setups. I have 3 of these boards.
Asrock Rack EPYCD8
Supermicro H11DSi-NT rev2.0
Both of these boards being Server/Enterprise level products are incredibly stable.
Some other boards I've used in the last few years...
Supermicro X9DRX+-F
ASUS P9X79-E WS
If you want multi-GPU on a cheaper board, and don't care about reduced PCIe bandwidth (Einstein doesn't need much, but I planned my builds around supporting GPUGRID which DOES need the extra bandwidth), then I would HIGHLY recommend an intel platform. anything from X270/B250 and newer. As Tom has found out, the consumer AMD-based platform in general doesn't play as nice as Intel with regard to multi-GPU beyond 3 or 4 GPUs. whereas I've had no problem running even 9-10 GPUs on most intel platforms without much trouble (provided I had enough PCIe/m.2 slots to use).
also just be cognizant about how many GPUs you have and how many cores/threads you have. this is a bit more important on Nvidia GPUs than AMD GPUs as Nvidia applications usually require a full CPU thread to support the GPU task, and if you over commit, you will see task slow downs. AMD GPU applications seem to use about 0.25-0.33 CPU per GPU so you could get away with more there.
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Jim1348 wrote: I build Ryzen
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I use the X570 version of this board, paired with a R9 5950X and a single RTX2080ti (both watercooled) as my main desktop system. The board is what I would call "adequate" or good "bang for the buck". the VRM cooling is only *just* good enough and the huge chunky aluminum heatsink really isnt the best for cooling. But I realize I'm really pushing it with a 4.45GHz 16-core all-core overclock. I could probably squeeze some more performance and stability out of it with a better board but I'm content with it at the moment. still waffling on if I should replace it with an EPYC-based setup.
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Ian&Steve C. wrote:Seconded
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Thank you Ian.
I also found the Intel Servers to be robust. And have had "variable" results with some of the Intel mining MB's.
I may have to break down and get a B250 model and be done with it.
==edit==
Just found the EPYCD8 MB for under $500.
===edit====
Tom M
A Proud member of the O.F.A. (Old Farts Association). Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)