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

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CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction
02:54 Specs and features
04:17 Memory and ECC Support
05:22 Power consumption
07:26 Why are ECC motherboards so rare?
09:10 ECC Support – Intel vs. AMD
11:50 Outro

[WolfgangsChannel]

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[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.

[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.

[jonathanmarshall]

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

[tz]

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.

[spaghettibolognese]

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

[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.

[PauloH]

I found it on aliexpress but OH GOD the price

[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?

[jurajjanosik]

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.

[ekvinox]

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

[mrsna]

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

[LucasAlves-bspf]

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!

[Kane-]

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)

[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 :)

[mortengreenhermansen]

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

[hunterchasens]

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).

[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.

[HupfderFloh]

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

[mrspartan]

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.