Storage controller in x16 slot of AMD690 mobo

[Quindor]

Hey People,

New to these forums. Have been lurking off and on, but that's it. But, considering my question, I was thinking this was the best place to ask.

Currently I own a Poweredge 1800 with dual Xeon 3.0Ghz and 11 spindels account for around 2.5TB of storage. Very very nice machine. But... power usage is a 'bit' high. The electric company wishes to give me a business account.

Thus, together with another server I have at home, I thought I'd consolidate. Making this new server the replacement for 17 spindels in total....

So, looking around for a little cheap motherboard that can accept a real storage controller and at least 4GB memory, my eyes came across the Asus M2A-VM ( http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=101&l3=496&l4=0&model=1568&modelmenu=2 ).

This motherboard features the AMD 690V chipset with integrated graphics. It's mATX but still offers a PCI-E x16 and a PCI-E x1 and also 2x PCI. It has a integrated PCI-E ethernet controller and thus offers everything I need. I'll fill the 2x PCI with 100Mbit NIC's for firewalling needs and use the Gigabit port for Storage needs.

Now, ... my question.

This board features onboard graphics. Perfectly sufficient for use as a server. So, in the x16 slot I'd like to use a Adaptec RAID 3805. This is a SAS controller wich has 128MB cache, 500Mhz intel proc and uses an x4 bus to talk to the rest of the world.

My only question is, will this work? Will it fit (I think it should)? But rather, is this slot for graphic cards ONLY or will any card be possible (as in the adaptec or maybe an areca controller.).

If anyone can enlighten me, great. In theory I believe it should work, just unable to find any examples of it.

Why this board and AMD? Idle power consumption. All in all, idle power of this combo wtih a x2 4800+ should be around 50Watts..... quite nice.

Hope someone can help me.
Quindor

 

[Peter]

Welcome to Anandtech!

The primary question is, will this AMD chipset disable its integrated graphics as soon as you put /anything/ into the PCIE-16 slot? If it doesn't, then you're sorted. There is nothing special about the "graphics" PCIE slot other than the aforementioned side effect, and PCIE cards made for lesser slots always fit the wider ones. PCIE-4x cards do fit into PCIE-16x slots, and the PCIE link auto-negotiation will let them work at 4x.

May I also suggest you consider putting a dual-port NIC into the PCIEx1 slot, rather than go with twin cheapos on the rather pathetic 33 MHz PCI bus?

Finally, please mind that the word is "integrated". Thanks

 

[Quindor]

Ah, yes, integrated is better indeed.

The 2x100Mbit nics are purely to provide a firewall port for a WiFi accespoint and a DSL modem. Nothing near even 100Mbit. I'm using a 3 tier firewall construction at home, only way to provide secure wireless (in my opinion). The networks themselves are connected using tunnels, rules and mostly VPN's. So using some network cards I allready have, this should suffice just fine.

I see, in my technical opinion it should also work and you hit it right on the nail with the question if the onboard graphics will get disabled when something is plugged into the x16 slot.

Let's hope someone reads this thread and knows or has tried this before!

Thank you for providing the info and if anyone else has something to add, please do!

Q.

 

[Quindor]

I have since this post orderd all the hardware and installed it. And I'm happy to report that it's working perfectly.

I'm using an Adaptec 3805 (8 port SAS controller) in de x16 slot. The onboard graphics continue working as before, and the controller seems to work perfectly also. (Did 800MB/sec cache reads to confirm bandwith).

So, for people whom wish to build a cheap but fast server. An Asus M2A-VM seems to be a good choice.

Have 2x PCI-E in it, also working just fine.

Q.

 

[Peter]

Thanks for reporting back! Enjoy your new machine!