OK lemme preface this by saying I’ve been researching my ass off, but there is a lot to take in here. One of my biggest struggles getting into this hobby so far is the gigantic range in pricing. Trying not to fall into the trap of either buying a $1K mobo or a $100 r720 and being like “OK, done, I’m a homelabber now”. Ideally I want to build something and piece it together at a good price, but understand why and what Im buying as I do. Been looking at options from Asrock which while awesome are pretty fn pricey. What does keep coming up are a variety of x99 boards for dirt cheap. Some from random Chinese sellers, some not. Not looking to have me hand held here, I am fully willing to grind out my own research, but could definitely use an option on whether either of those options would be a waste lf my hard earned cash.
As context, I want to run a Nas and plex off the bat, In addition to some.self hosting (vaultwarden, git, AD, etc.) Also coming into some cheap nvidia tesla p40s So ultimately deep learning is a big goal. That being said my main concern is having room to grow and learn and try new stuff withoutt being restricted by the hardware, and I’m a bit paralyzed by in indecision here.
Anyways, like I said not looking to be spoonfed, just trying to wrap my head around what i should/can get started with (and what I have no fn clue about and need to read up on)
Thanks evweeryone. .
I did some Googling and the general consensus seems to be stay away from the Chinese boards, while some have no issues, many have and don’t recommend them. I guess my question is why go with x99 at all? The technology seems to be almost 10 years old yet they seem to have a pretty large fanbase and are regarded as reliable workhorse motherboards. Are you looking for a dual CPU high core count solution? What is your budget? Is power consumption important? Have you looked into AMD EPYC solutions? What kind of case do you have in mind?
Yeah maybe that’s why they caught my attention. Money is certainly an object but I’m willing to piece it together slowly over time. Pretty much can only spend a few hundred bucks at a given moment before I need to wait for either a paycheck or a great deal, and really can’t justify dropping thousands on a setup, but I also don’t want to cheap out. I have plenty of storage (24tb in 4tb enterprise drives and then another 10 or so handful of other 1tb) but nothing else yet. I have a couple great deals on large eatx cases with tons of drive Bays. Thinking I might as well go big if I have the space (also it seems more cost effective to go with the lff boards). And yes I was at least initially thinking a dual cpu setup would be ideal, but seems there are a lot of mixed feelings about that so im less sure on that tbh. Looked at xeons mostly, but I do see/hear the epycs are great. I’ll do some research on what’s in my price range there today. Thanks for replying btw!