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Comment by 3np | Hacker News Reader

USB-C aside, I find that *TX motherboard manufacturers have been too unimaginative when it comes to I/O and haven't evolved for the past ~10y to serve growing demand in new and evolving segments.

My pet-peeve: If you want more than a single NIC in an AMD-based small form factor, your options are extremely limited. Even if you're open for importing and paying >$300 for just the board or going a couple of generations back. Meanwhile, you have a plethora of options in the exploding segment of NUC-like mini-PCs. There's almost nothing on the market in-between firmware-roulette Chinese mini-PCs and effectively ATX-sized breakout-rigs. Asrock RACK (with scarce availability) is the only exception I can think of over the past 5y. I don't get it.

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You need a PCI card NIC anyway for when Realtek introduces another high throughput triggered bug in their driver and the motherboard NIC becomes useless.

If you're getting a motherboard with multiple NICs, it's probably not limited to lowest cost NICs, so Intel is on the table. (Although, I'm still not sure if they got their 2.5g NICs to work?)

Dual NIC boards with AMD sockets does seem like a niche unfulfilled, though. There's some options on the Intel side though, something like ASRock Z690M-ITX/ax might work if you compromise on CPUs.

The server space is quite nice with the ASRock Rack models: last month, I bought ROMED8-2T and got double 10G NIC and EPYC compatibility in ATX form factor. I also paid $100 extra for Intel NICs plus an USBC port. The motherboard cost 920 dollars though.

something that might be useful to you for that; you can get m.2 slot network adapters which you could use on (some) ITX boards. there's at least 1 & 10gbe ones available.

Sure. But if you want to actually have two m.2 drives to either mirror your root filesystem or use one as a secondary? It gets tangly quickly.

inb4: CPUs as well as commonly used chipsets have enough lanes, it's not that.

It sounds like you're at the intersection of "tiny", "multiple network ports", "multiple M.2 drives", and "dedicated gpu". I wouldn't be surprised if that's a rare combination.

Could do without the dGPU given APUs. I don't think the rest of that intersection is rare at all for workstations and desktops.

I think a workstation with only one pcie slot is a bit rare?

Either way, if you're using an APU then that frees up an x16 PCIe slot, which on many motherboards can be adapted into 4 M.2 slots. That should get you plenty of networking.

Add 4- or 8-port GbE NIC to PCIe, add 64GB of RAM, add USB stick for router operating system, and you should be able to handle edge traffic for a small office.

What's your goal here??? Multiple NIC in ITX form factor, for what?

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