I got to give the wonderful folks over at https://serverfactory.com/ a *giant* shout out and thank you: they have been nothing but courteous when I reached out finally in December about the seemingly DOA (dead-on-arrival) motherboard more than a year after the original purchase. They had me return the board and arranged the rest with ASRock, the replacement arrived last week, but it took a bunch to get the minimal hardware to test it (because I didn't want to disassemble/impair my running home server).

Currently happily chugging along with a cheap 4c/8t i3-12100F and a 32GB DDR5 ECC RAM, going to move it to the workbench and hook it up to my home network over the weekend and slowly start testing it further.

Mechanically there are plenty of challenges if I decide to go through the original plan (put it into the fully passive Monsterlabo case with a powerful GPU), but given that the main server is happy, I have all the time to experiment.

A post 18 months in the making! *It's Alive!!*

Guess what, almost another half a year passed!

It took a too-hot-to-do-anything Friday evening & a puppy zonked out high on painkillers, but at last I managed to move the #homelabNG build into the Fractal case I had lying about from one of the first of my homeserver builds.

Next step would be finally migrating the current server onto the new hardware & decommissioning it (that's why two 4TB drives are missing from the new build!)

Almost half a year past, but we are finally back on the #homelabNG train!

I've recently got this really nifty 5.25" Icy Dock SSD case that can house 8 SATA SSDs amd moved the drives in there. I am planning to move the rig into a case I have lying around here so that I free the bench up for the ASRock Rack motherboard and try to work out with ASRock Support what's going on with that, while I try to move some of my services over to the new build so I can start decommissioning the old server.

The built-in two tiny cooling fans on the hard drive case are *extremely* annoying so I will have to look for some alternative ventillation once inside the case, for now I just disconnected them, as they are not under load anyway and the rest of the build is practically silent.

The first of my homeserver builds in 2020 used them old-timey spinny HDDs and a "classic" tower case. Not only was that an awful choice for noise isolation/overall system noise, but also power consumption was pretty high too (60-80W). I learned, that if I want a fully silent system, I need to not only get rid of fans (you can actually get pretty far with Noctua fans and low-power CPU/GPUs), but go full solid-state on the storage.

I started with 2 4TB Samsung QVO drives, mirrored. The final #homelabNG target is 4x 4 TB EVO, 4x 4 TB QVO (SATA) and 3x NVMe drives. While $/TB of flash storage is still high compared to HDDs, especially with recent drops in flash pricing this is a rather doable endeavor.

Currently the PG Lightning with the i5-13500T, 2x 32 GB RAM, 2x NVMe drives, 6x SATA drives, an RTX A6000 GPU and a PCI-Express SATA card pulls <45W. The biggest offenders here are not even the drives: the SATA add-in card adds close to 10W & the GPU adds ~7W in its lowest power state

Okay, so the bad news is… the W680D4ID-2T looks almost certainly borked. The PSU resets while powering on with any components, I'll have to talk to support to have it checked out.

The good news though: all the components work! Getting the PG Lightning was the right call, I can assemble the new config on a workbench almost exactly the same, while we figure out what's wrong with the other motherboard.

TIL: DDR5 ECC RAM will work on non-ECC motherboard (in non-ECC mode, of course. this is how DDR4 ECC RAM works, but the internet couldn't confirm the same applied to DDR5). That's something the W680 chipset brings to the table. I can also install 2-3 NVMe drives and 4+6 SATA drives (with an add-in SATA card in the second PCI-Express slot). Obviously I will have to make do without the management UI and the dual 10G LAN (home network is 1GbE anyway).

Also please appreciate my 42mm NVMe mounting solution
#homelabNG

#homelabNG recap: what we know so far (cue the 24 title card with a deep narrator voice going "previously..on 24..." )

- The W680D4ID-2T works, as far as basic power to the management chip is concerned, but starts throwing weird voltage errors when the actual computer is powered on (and powering on fails)
- CPU issue ruled out, the CPU works fine in the old rig
- Maybe PSU weirdness of the HDPLEX 250W GaN passive and the ASRock?
- Got an older Corsair RM 550x from an earlier build can try that one
- Also just got a "burner" LGA 1700 Celeron G6900T for cheap (58€) so I don't ruin the 250€ i5-13500T if the motherboard is truly borked

*ding-ding!* #homelabNG

The microscope arrived today. I went through the LGA 1700 socket (it's still absolute bonkers there's 1700 pins in there ) best I could and didn't see anything *obviously* bent or broken, so we now wait for a few more other components to arrive and will start debugging further + get in touch with ASRock Support if I still cannot get the motherboard working. #homelabNG

(I have also learned from a spec visualization floating about that a great many of the pins are unused and one actually needs to get quite unlucky for a single rogue pin to cause an issue)

#homelabNG update:
Sadly, something seems off with the motherboard

Noticed some weird moire in the LGA 1700 slot, might be a few bent pins, ordered a digital microscope to investigate further.

The BMC works but when assembled the motherboard doesn't boot and exhibits weird voltage issues and shorting. Could be a motherboard or PSU issue, or something at the interaction of the two.

Thankfully the CPU seems unharmed after the trip so I have ordered another motherboard (ASRock B760M PG Lightning) for now to start working on the rest of the setup (storage, OS, GPU pass-through) while together with ASRock tech support we work out what's up with the W680D4ID-2T. That one is a Mini-ATX board (won't fit the case) and only W chipsets support ECC RAM, not to mention it needs a PCI-Express add-in card for extra SATA ports, but will do for workbench just fine and can just sell it later.
#homelab

It occurred to me that “hey wait a sec, this motherboard has built in IPMI”, that is, remote managment and sure enough!

Note the missing RAM, CPU cooler — the "computer" is off, but the BMC is working after I have connected the power — and the remote management UI loads over the network!
#homelab #homelabNG

Soooo, couple hours later…

The Good:
I managed to mount the CPU with the Thermalright LGA1700-BCF custom CPU contact frame. In the left just under the contact frame there are the tiniest components om the motherboard getting in the way but you can chip a bit off the thin metal plate that is glued to the bottom edge and that makes this work. Phew.

The Bad:
Apparently the Noctua L9i won't work, the mounting screws are too short and a tall component placed very close to the mounting point is getting in the way
I have just ordered another cooler with a SecuFirm mount that should work…

The Ugly:
I'll probably just stick the cooler on top with some thermal paste, this is a T CPU (low-TDP) and should work fine for light loads/basic testing until the new cooler arrives next week.
#homelab #homelabNG