Suggestions for Intel Motherboard?

[RayDunzl]

Don't ask me, all day I thought today was Friday.

Just woke up from before-dinner nap, and YMZ19 was still silently ticking away, which it won't be at this time tomorrow.

Now, to not burn my burger as occurred earlier this week.

 

[lex62lex]

First, welcome to the forum and thanks for the comment. I saw this on a number of motherboards but couldn't figure out how to find such add-in cards. WHat is the advantage here relative to having a TB board by itself? For Audio, I don't need ultra high-performance.

The reason I would get an add in card over a fixed port on the motherboard is that you are stuck with the generation of thunderbolt controller that is on the board. Gigabyte has the titan ridge controller on their Designare board and people report issues with backwards compatibility where there shouldn’t be any. I don’t know if the fault is with Gigabyte or Intel, as it could be a wrong implementation in the bios or that the titan ridge controller doesn’t work in the legacy mode it should switch to with TB2. Apple uses both titan and alpine ridge controllers, which could mean that the older alpine ridge is for backwards compatibility and the newer titan ridge to get the DisplayPort bandwidth. The add in card is just mounted in a PCIE 3.0 x4 slot to get the bandwidth, either directly from cpu or from the pch, which adds a bit of latency but isn’t an issue here. A solid Gigabyte board is really the recommendation here, as they are feature rich at a good price point and they are the only vendor I know that actually has add in cards with both controller generations.

 

[lex62lex]

also the thread is literally titled suggestions for an intel motherboard.

there aren't really generic AICs for thunderbolt 3. asus has one that is supported by asus boards, gigabyte has one supported by some gigabyte boards, etc. this is at least in part because the IO socket that lex mentioned is board-dependent and not standardized. tb3 was always meant by intel to be integrated onto the board.

Vendors really like to restrict you to their product lineup, as the header on the add in cards is the same 5 pin. More than 5 pins is unnecessary as there are only that many signals. The cable you get from Asus is just tossing most of the pins on their 9/10? pin header into the standard 5 pin on the card. You could really use any card you would like, provided you have the necessary 5pin cable

 

[pierre]

+1 for Designare 390, works like a charm. Only issue I have is that m2 disks are under a GPU and they tend to be thermal throttled.

 

[mkawa]

aftermark

Vendors really like to restrict you to their product lineup, as the header on the add in cards is the same 5 pin. More than 5 pins is unnecessary as there are only that many signals. The cable you get from Asus is just tossing most of the pins on their 9/10? pin header into the standard 5 pin on the card. You could really use any card you would like, provided you have the necessary 5pin cable

interesting!

also, asus does have a couple of different versions of their thunderboltEX AICs, but i have no idea what the cross-compatibility is.

amir: i shot you a bunch of questions, put more succinctly at the bottom of the DM. the collective braintrust and experience of EE/CS/IT professionals here can sort out a build with those answers.

 

[leonroy]

I need to upgrade my motherboard to something that supports Gen 9 Intel CPUs. And if possible, get Thunderbolt input in addition.

Hard to sift through the thousands of options out there and all the gaming boards. I am thinking of Core i7-9700 or so. Not crazy overclocking and such.

My Audio Precision software is a dog and uses only two threads and only one dominates CPU wise. So aiming to get the best single core performance.

Can spend up to $250 for the motherboard but can't justify more than that.

Z390 chip-set seems to be the favorite here?

May also go with core i5 to get built-in graphics to see if it works better driving AVRs using HDMI. My current nvidia HDMI audio support is quite spotty.

Ultimate goal is to have a quiet PC as my current i5 system is.

Appreciate any leads.

And oh, seems like we don't have a computer section. Should we have one?

Yep Z390 is the Intel chipset to go for. That said given Intel's continual CPU woes (Spectre, Meltdown, Silvermont bug, Apollo Lake bug) and AMD's excellent and performant CPU lineup now's a good time to consider an AMD system. Their new Ryzen CPUs come out far ahead in multi and a bit lower in single threaded performance than their Intel counterparts:
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-3700x/6.html

One other benefit of AMD are that they support the CPU socket form factor for a lot longer than Intel so you can generally upgrade to the latest CPU years after buying a system.

As far as motherboards the title for quality and stability switches every few years. Last I checked Asus QC wasn't as good as Gigabyte and ASRock. The latter despite their name are a very serious brand indeed with a well regarded Industrial/Pro lineup. I'd go here and pick your form factor and port requirements: https://www.asrock.com/mb/index.asp

X570 or X470 are the AMD chipsets to go for. X570 having more PCIe lanes and I believe support for a newer PCIe standard. The CPU socket to use is AM4.

That said I don't think you can go wrong with Asus or Gigabyte either.

If your office is looking a little cluttered what with all those DACs and AVRs piling up for review you might want to consider a mATX or even an ITX build - depending on how many expansion slots you need a mATX build will certainly handle most needs.

These tiny PCs have come a long way and are performance and nearly feature equivalent to full size systems. Shameless plug of my build log of a tiny PC using (at the time) Intel's fastest CPU and nVidia's 1070 graphics chip:
https://www.leonroy.com/blog/2018/10/teeny-tiny-workstation/

And yes, a Tech & Gadget section for NAS/networking/media center type stuff would be very handy...

 

[amirm]

amir: i shot you a bunch of questions, put more succinctly at the bottom of the DM. the collective braintrust and experience of EE/CS/IT professionals here can sort out a build with those answers.

Thanks. And sorry for not replying. Been just too busy.

Meanwhile I have been looking at AMD 3700X CPU due to its power efficiency which I am hoping translates into more silent operation. And longer term compatibility with motherboards. SO feedback on motherboards for that would be good too.

 

[amirm]

If your office is looking a little cluttered what with all those DACs and AVRs piling up for review you might want to consider a mATX or even an ITX build - depending on how many expansion slots you need a mATX build will certainly handle most needs.

Since I have to test PCIe soundcards from time to time, and likely add Thunderbolt and GPU, I need a full size solution. Space is not an issue for the computer.

 

[leonroy]

Thanks. And sorry for not replying. Been just too busy.

Meanwhile I have been looking at AMD 3700X CPU due to its power efficiency which I am hoping translates into more silent operation. And longer term compatibility with motherboards. SO feedback on motherboards for that would be good too.

Since you're going full ATX you should be able to pop in the largest CPU coolers on offer which will allow your system to be totally silent. Can highly recommend Noctua coolers and fans (the brown colour scheme is an acquired taste though):
https://noctua.at/en/products/cpu-cooler-retail/buying-guide-cpu-coolers

For power supplies Corsair's modular range are excellent. Their PSU fans only spin up on load so they're silent most of the time and they claim to use 105C rated Japanese caps - the SF450 is likely to be more than enough - best not to over size a PSU. Samsung 970 Evo Plus are excellent SSDs and a M.2 SSD saves on cable clutter.

 

[Berwhale]

Can highly recommend Noctua coolers and fans (the brown colour scheme is an acquired taste though):
https://noctua.at/en/products/cpu-cooler-retail/buying-guide-cpu-coolers

For power supplies Corsair's modular range are excellent. Their PSU fans only spin up on load so they're silent most of the time and they claim to use 105C rated Japanese caps - the SF450 is likely to be more than enough - best not to over size a PSU. Samsung 970 Evo Plus are excellent SSDs and a M.2 SSD saves on cable clutter.

+1 for Noctua fans, the Redux models are black/grey and don't come with all the accessories, so are cheaper...

https://noctua.at/en/products/product-lines/line-redux

I can also recommend the Corsair modular PSUs, I have the RM550x.

Here's the inside of my current PC, with closed loop water cooling for the CPU and 4 Noctua fans. the case is a CoolerMaster Silencio which come acoustic treatment pre-installed (you can buy kits to do it yourself).

(the picture was taken prior to upgrading the PSU to the RM550x - the cabling is neater now as less of them are connected to the modular PSU).

PCPartPicker is a great way to put together a build, share it and keep track of the cost. Here's my current PC parts list...

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/c4sf7T

I added a Noctua PWM fan controller recently, this allows you to control the speed of multiple fans from one motherboard header and set a minumum speed for the fans so they will not stop, even if the motherboard sets them below their minimum RPM...

https://noctua.at/en/na-fc1

 

[mkawa]

since absolute reliability, price sensitivity and single thread performance are most important to you, i would stick with intel.

x570 with zen 2 is becoming pretty reliable, but the motherboards are more expensive and they still require TLC that z390 setups don't. they also suffer noticeably when it comes to single thread performance.

 

[lex62lex]

When it comes to single thread performance intel is still king. Overclocking is viable, relatively easy compared to the new ryzen chips and totally stable. If you dont mind the small performance drop and would like to go with ryzen, I would pick the 3800X over the 3700X as boost behaviour guaranteed to be better and actually hit clock targets more reliably. If you want to maximise the single thread performance on the Zen 2 architecture you need to get the biggest cooler you can get and fast RAM. I’m not convinced that most people actually need X570, as PCIE 4.0 is really unnecessary in most use cases and the chipset is really power hungry. 4 additional PCIE lanes are nice, but only if you actually use NVME storage and need it. I would get a better X470 board instead, as the provided PCIE 3.0 lanes provided are enough for a single NVME drive and two graphics cards in terms of bandwidth. The only GPU that actually needs the 16 PCIE lanes is the RTX 2080 Ti, all other cards aren’t strong enough to use more than 8 lanes of bandwidth

 

[lex62lex]

Since I have to test PCIe soundcards from time to time, and likely add Thunderbolt and GPU, I need a full size solution. Space is not an issue for the computer.

If you get the noctua NH-D15, pretty much the best air cooler ever, i doubt you will ever hear it under normal workloads (not benchmarking). The thing is nearly dead silent in an open case, and with a case that actually helps sound performance not noticeable. The bigger problem is the GPU in most builds. Aftermarket coolers are available and using the noctua nf a12 25 fans makes them as silent as it gets. It is more probable that you hear the coil whine on cheaper GPUs instead of the fans. Recommendations here are the raijintek morpheus or thr arctic accelero xtreme.

Just to add: the TDP ratings on intel and amd are measured completely differently and amd measures theirs with boost on, while intel leaves their cpu at stock clocks while measuring.

 

[mkawa]

for security reasons, i do not recommend x/b4xx chipsets to anyone, and x/b3xx chipsets have significant aging issues.

x570 board quality is also head and shoulders above x470. if he were a gamer, i would agree: b450 and a 3600 is the way to go. given his workload and goals, i don't think that's the way to go.

as for coolers and ram, if i am able to help him, i have these things. i have a lab full of stuff that i'm trying to get rid of, some of which are, conveniently, ram and big coolers (and i put big coolers on everything, to be clear).

edited to add: the nh-d15 is not the best air cooler ever, BUT! i do have an extra. i also have a couple of masterliquid 240s, and am fully capable of building custom loops if it were needed.

i also have a raijintek morpheus and an accelero iv sitting in boxes. this is my non-audio thing.

cases: i have been building into coolermaster H500s recently. great airflow, very quiet, lots of space, light and has a convenient carry handle. also, cheap. the lian li o11 dynamic is my second fave at the moment.

 

[Berwhale]

..and am fully capable of building custom loops if it were needed.

I've done lots of plumbing (Eheim pumps, custom water blocks, pretty perspex reservoirs, etc.), but I grew bored with it 15 years ago and I just buy closed loop systems now.

I also lost interest in OCing at a similar time - I peaked with a 2.4Ghz P4 running at 4GHz on a passively cooled water system (based on a Zalman Reserator) and would have needed to venture into LN2 cooling to reach any further. I had a friend who got into liquid dielectrics and total immersion of his motherboard, but that got very messy and expensive!

 

[lex62lex]

Build quality really got a boost with X570. I just don’t love the idea of a chipset fan that guarantees a feature most don’t need. The AM4 socket is also only guaranteed to work up to zen 3 next year after which the step to DDR5 RAM is planned. There is that one passive option from Gigabyte but the board costs more than most CPUs and the use case for PCIE 4.0 is so limited I would really consider an older but overall better X470 board over a newer X570 in the same price range. The bigger factor here would be getting ram that could push 3800MHz and a CPU where the infinity fabric can actually clock to 1900MHz To get the most performance out of the zen2 chip. RAM is such a big factor in performance while the motherboard changes next to nothing

 

[q3cpma]

x570 is absolutely not needed, though. I use a B450 board to do server and even parallel video encoding work without any problems and all tests didn't show any differences even with a quite large amount of overclock. I suggest you choose your mobo according to your I/O needs and NIC vendor (Intel or Realtek), mostly.

Personally, I've always used ASUS for motherboards and never had any problem of note, they make some well priced stuff without the usual Christmas tree lights pimping. For coolers, Noctua and BeQuiet! are (obviously) good, but overpriced compared to "dark" horses like Thermalright (which actually invented heatpipes) and Scythe.

 

[lex62lex]

I love the fractal design series cases. The r6 is such a great case when it comes to basically doing everything right, the s2 is basically a r6 without the front cages to give better airflow/radiator space. The lian li o11 dynamic looks really good ( I am using one myself) but sadly doesn’t fit tall aircoolers. I like AIOs and am using a corsair h115i platinum at the moment, but nothing beets an aircooler when it comes to reliability. Seasonic is my first choice for a powersupply as they overbuild their powersupplies significantly, with corsair as a close second. Both give you an option of running passively if they are not under significant load.

 

[HammerSandwich]

I concur about Seasonic. That's one of a very few products I'll shop by brand name, because multiple units have worked flawlessly & very quietly for me for 15 years. No worries with their OEM builds for Corsair, etc., of course.

Top-notch coolers strike me as overkill here. (Watercooling definitely isn't needed, so avoid the pump noise.) @amirm's talking about a processor that might hit 90W once in a while. The Tone Board of heatsinks is, IMO, the Hyper 212 Evo when it's on sale for about $20. You might upgrade to a great fan for an inaudible build, but I'd start with stock - you might get a golden sample. Stepping up, a Macho or Mugen would work well for $40-50. But this is chasing the last 3C, isn't it?

 

[restorer-john]

Stability is everything for me here as this is my everyday workhorse.

Stability is the key for me too. My current ASUS motherboard has been absolutely rock solid, whereas my previous Gigabyte was less so. My son's gaming PC has a Gigabyte which whilst offering all sorts of gaming specific optimization isn't as stable as my ASUS. The last ASRock builds I did for our call centre were pretty good.

In terms of day in day out solidity, the little Intel NUCs run 24/7 on 14 telemarketer's desks, two monitors and they never fail. Amazing little things.

Maybe you should get an ASRock...ASR.