Small update today. I have decided to cancel the Asrock motherboard (ROMED8-T2) and instead purchase a Supermicro motherboard ( H12SSL-NT ). There are a few reasons for this which I'll now detail but before that, both boards are very similar offering about the same capability. I do believe the Super...

Got a good update today. I was able to contact the company that shipped me the case and they did in-fact have the missing bracket so they were able to send me one really quickly. That bracket arrived today so I fitted the power supply and the rear Noctua 60mm fans. I would have liked this case to ha...

The chassis arrived today and there is a problem. The ATX bracket for the power supply was not in the box with the chassis as-advertised. This appears to be a screwup with the store I bought from either they didn't put the bracket in the box or they miscommunicated with the manufacturer. In any even...

Today I received the CPU (AMD EPYC 7443P) and HBA (Broadcom 9500-8i) for the server. Tomorrow the Chassis arrives! https://i.pixita.com/yBLXRCnfR.jpg https://i.pixita.com/K3aBdc9EL.jpg https://i.pixita.com/CehRW5Dsw.jpg This processor features 4094 pins which it needs to support its extensive I/O. 8...

The UPS arrived today and I have unboxed it and put it into service. It does work quite well but there is one caveat, the official APC software for the unit does not support Windows Server and I'm currently using Windows Server 2012 R2. Normally this would be a problem but I do have pfSense which su...

Bit of a great update today. The chassis I wanted finally came into stock which meant I was able to place my order and should have it within a few days. Since the case is now locked in I placed an order for two Noctua 60mm fans, these are the NF-A6x25 PWM fans. Quite high quality long-life fans from...

Today I wanted to answer a few questions I've had about the build and share the boot drive of the build which is by far the smallest component. The two main questions I've received from users of the Renegades chat and IRC have been 1. Why are there two NVMe SSD's in the build and why are they differ...

Thought I'd post an update today of some of the other parts I received already. Not really that interesting on their own so I'm posting them all together. So lets start with perhaps the most ridiculous component of the whole build which is the "special screwdriver" needed for the SP3 socket which bo...

My memory arrived today. This is 256GB (8x32GB) of Samsung DDR4 3200MHz CL22 ECC RDIMM Dual-Rank 3DS RAM. Good luck saying that five times fast, quite a mouthful. These are the fastest memory modules available right now when it comes to ECC capability (without overclocking). And for EPYC it's quite ...

While I wait for more parts to arrive I thought it would be interesting to explain why I've chosen to go AMD for this server after only using Intel for a very long time. My last at-home AMD based server was built in 2007 and lasted until it was replaced in 2009 by an Intel system. Since then I've on...