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Hey OP, I was reading your linked HomeLab article and you mentioned you'd rather have gotten a mobo with integrated GPUs next time.

Actually, motherboards do not include integrated graphics, it's all in the CPU/APU. The mobo you linked would not provide graphics either.

AMD unfortunately does not have a high end APU released to consumers right now (there are some 4000 series, but only to OEMs I believe). However, for a HomeLab setup, you might find a cheap GPU to be useful for many things (including hardware video transcoding).

For years and years, many motherboards did have graphics sets integrated in. These days, you'll still see that on a lot of server-class motherboards.

e.g. https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/M11SDV-4C... -- the line about AST2500 BMC graphics? That runs a VGA port.

> Actually, motherboards do not include integrated graphics, it's all in the CPU/APU.

You should probably qualify that as current generation. There's plenty of last gen Intel and AMD solutions with onboard dedicated graphics.

I think the advent of GPU acceleration in servers and APUs for low end machines has impacted demand for these motherboards in current gen products.

I'm guessing the rationale for this is that even if the server's CPU can support onboard graphics, you wouldn't want to change the CPU's load profile just by plugging in a monitor to debug something? Or even to support CPUs that have no onboard graphics support?

Mostly the second -- the high end Intel and AMD CPUs don't have integrated graphics, and nobody wants to spend precious PCIe slots on a graphics card that won't be used except at install time and emergencies... or is more useful as a GPU slot that never produces video output.

Thanks for reading and for the note! I didn't realize that about display not being available on motherboards generally.

I just built a new homelab server and ended up buying a separate GPU again. My new mobo is the SuperMicro MBD-X10DAL[0], which has no onboard display.

[0] https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/X10DAL-i

I have MSI 450 MITX board and a Ryzen 3600 that is doing NAS/homeserver duty and it refused to POST without a GPU plugged in. Given its MITX and it only has a single slot needing it for PCI-E is a real pain, I intended to use it for SATA ports so it hurt my plans quite a bit.

Its motherboard dependent but its definitely something to check with AMD Ryzen motherboards.

Hm, I guess I lucked out then. I bought the cheapest motherboard I could find (at the time) for my 3600, an ASRock B450M Pro4. It makes a bunch of annoying beeps, but doesn't stop booting.

Second this. I got an unraid server working headless with an ASRock B450M ITX board (Fatal1ty) but it's still a real pain having to put in a GPU to boot into BIOS. Was hoping this could fix that for me :(

Yeah, it's a real pain in the ass. I miss the workstations of yesteryear where you could do everything with just a serial console. Another example of technology actually getting worse over time.

Even hardware that is made to be run headless ("server-class") is hopelessly broken. They give you a proprietary graphical console that isn't even just a VNC server but has to be accessed with a web browser. And, if the server is more than a few years old, some deprecated, unsupported plugin like Java or .NET will be required. I have an old Dell R710 whose remote console I will never be able to access, because it only works with Java 6 (or so I'm told, I'm certainly never trying that; I wouldn't even know where to begin to try to set that shit up.)

you might want to upgrade your bios to get headless support. https://www.msi.com/blog/with-upcoming-amd-processors-and-co...

if you are kind enough to report back whether it works with the newest bios, that will be helpful to others

for some asrock mobo, headless is supported. my Fatal1ty B450 Gaming-ITX/ac is one of them.