Motherboard upgrade from ASUS PRIME B550M-A to ASUS ProArt B550-CREATOR

As I said today was computer upgrade day. I made a video of me doing the upgrade, it runs for about two hours: Motherboard upgrade from ASUS PRIME B550M-A to ASUS ProArt B550-CREATOR. It was pretty uneventful and so far it seems to have been successful too. Yay.

Upgrading my server today

Well I’ve been procrastinating on, and preparing for, my server upgrade and today is gonna be the day.

Later this afternoon I will be upgrading ‘longing‘ to ‘lore‘.

This will involve:

  • installing a new motherboard
  • removing a BluRay drive and replacing it with a SATA mobile rack
  • installing some new M.2 NVMe drives
  • switching from Ubuntu to Debian
  • importing my old spinning rust ZFS zpool

Fingers crossed. Wish me luck!

New motherboard: ASUS ProArt B550-CREATOR

Ordered myself a new motherboard today, the ASUS ProArt B550-CREATOR. This new board will replace my ASUS PRIME B550M-A in my new/upgraded computer ‘lore‘ (which is replacing ‘longing‘).

This new board has 2x M.2 PCIe 4.0 (as with the old motherboard), 2x 2.5Gbps Ethernet (compared to 1x 1Gbps Ethernet in my old motherboard), and 3x PCIe 16x slots (compared to 1x PCIe 16x slot in my old motherboard).

I will put in 2x M.2 PCIe 4x adapters and 2x M.2 PCIe 1x adapters which will mean I am able to install 6x M.2 drives: 2x Kioxia 256GB, 2x Samsung 990 Pro 2TB, and 2x PNY 1TB.

I will also put in a quad 2.5Gbps PCIe Ethernet adapter which will give me six 2.5Gbps Ethernet ports in total (two onboard and four on PCIe 16x).

When I’m done all four RAM slots will be full (4x Corsair Vengeance 32GB 3200MHz DDR4), both the M.2 slots will be full, all three of the PCIe 16x slots will be full, all four SATA ports will be full (3x Western Digital WD Ultrastar DC HC550 16TB and 1x ASUS BW-16D1HT PRO 16X Blu-ray burner), and both PCIe 1x slots will be full too. Also there will be a bunch of high speed USB ports available on both the front and the back of the case. I feel like I have really squeezed a lot of juice out of this system, it’s operating very close to capacity.

I’m kinda dreading plugging in the USB attachments to the front panel, but I guess if I RTFM and apply some thought I will be able to figure that out.