This made me reconsider the ASRock board for now, and in its place I decided to get a similar class (and era) Xeon board that supports PCI slots instead. More or less combining two machines into one now, to make room for new things in here as well.
So here's my pivot plan for a new build around my also geriatric (but supremely reliable and beloved) Scope PCI cards:
Core parts list
- 1x SUPERMICRO MBD-X11SSA-F Motherboard (new, retail)
- 1x Intel Xeon E3-1285 v6 (new/unused, ebay)
- 4x Supermicro MEM-DR416L-SL01-EU24 16GB DDR4 2400 ECC UDIMM Memory RAM (new, retail)
- 1x EVGA 210-GQ-0650-V1 GQ, 80+ GOLD 650W, Semi Modular, Power Supply ($44 on sale, half price blowout)
- 1x GIGABYTE GeForce GT 1030 2GB GV-N1030OC-2GI Video Card (new, on sale and very low power draw)
- 1x XPG SX8100 Series: 1TB M.2 NVMe 3D NAND Gen3 Gaming Internal SSD (new, sale price)
- 1x SAMSUNG 860 EVO Series 2.5" 500GB SATA III MLC SSD ($55 on sale, and not the QVO model)
- 1x HP S700 Pro 2.5" 128GB SATA III 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) 2AP97AA#ABL ($29 on sale)
- 1x Corsair iCUE 4000X RGB CC-9011205-WW ATX Mid Tower Computer Case (new, on sale for $79)
- 1x CORSAIR iCUE H100i RGB PRO XT, 240mm Radiator, CW-9060043-WW (on sale, half price)
Note a few things the Xeon+Supermicro AMI BIOS board lets me do:
- Set 1 setting to toggle between full TDP (base speed all cores), full TDP (turbo on all cores, not peaking core(s)), and full turbo (enable higher speeds with less cores)
- Completely enable and disable modern power saving controls and sleep states
- ECC ram and BMC+IPMI will log errors with onboard components into the EFI and readable by 3rd party software
- Control whether specific peripheral devices are enabled via EFI, older/compatible BIOS or both
- The m.2 slot is compatible with a much wider array of devices
- No onboard sound and the onboard video can be disabled via jumper
- all other onboard devices easily disabled via EFI/BIOS, jumper or both
- 4 different PCI slots off of a single PCIe bridge
- Allocate IRQ, power levels, speeds and compatibility states for the entire PCI & PCIe spec for ALL PCI slots, PCIe slots, NVME/M.2 and so on.
I also will have 2 spinning HD's in this box, which are pulled from another working build that I have repurposed into a gaming rig for my wife, but those are already on hand and not listed. So in total I will have the following drive configuration:
- 1TB NVMe boot/app drive.
- 500GB "projects" drive (samsung 860 EVO SATA SSD)
- 120 GB "samples" drive (HP SATA SSD, this is NOT my primary daw rig so this is plenty)
- 2TB WD Black SATA HD (1TB partition for storage & more samples, 2TB partition for backup volume to image the 1TB ssd)
- 2TB WD Black SATA HD (storage & archival for all installers used on this system which also get mirrored to a RAID NAS volume that has every installer for all machines in here going back 2.5 decades)