headless ASRock A520M-HVS based system

Yes, the ASRock A520M-HVS motherboard can boot without a GPU or APU. You can run a server with the Ryzen 3 4100 CPU and access it only via SSH. If you're looking to buy VPS Linux for your server, that should work well for your setup.

Edited by Xaltar - 22 Mar 2024 at 8:23pm

Yes, the ASRock A520M-HVS motherboard supports headless operation, meaning it can boot without a GPU or APU. You can run your server with the https://discordfontsgenerator.com/ Ryzen 3 4100 and access it solely via SSH for your intended setup.

If you don't need ECC memory support, the non-PRO thing wouldn't matter.

All of 4100, 4300G, 4350G, and many others are physically the same chip (Renoir, monolithic), with various portions of the chip disabled.

Fully enabled Renoir (4750G) has 4-core CCX + 4-core CCX + 8CU Vega iGPU. Each CCX has 4MB L3, so the total L3 is 8MB.

R3-PRO-4350G and R3-4300G are almost identical, with one of the CCX's completely disabled. So they're both 4-core CCX + 3CU Vega, with just 4MB L3, because the other CCX is completely disabled.

R3-4100 is a different beast, with both CCX's enabled, but with 2-cores disabled in each. So it's 2-core CCX + 2-core CCX + 0CU Vega (disabled). Total L3 is 4MB+4MB=8MB.

https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/ryzen-3-4100.c2757

Although you get twice the L3 in 4100, each half is only accessible directly by 2-cores, and any sharing means they have to go through the fabric logic. And the fact that both CCX's are powered ON means it will have slightly worse idle power consumption, compared to 4350G/4300G. On the other hand, since 4100 has the iGPU completely disabled, it might consume slightly less power there. I've no idea how the total compares. I imagine it's pretty close. So I wouldn't think 4100 consumes any more power than 4350G/4300G.

My R3-PRO-4350G system looks like:
X470 Gaming-ITX/ac Fata1ity
Two sticks of Micron 3200MT/s CL22 16GB ECC UDIMMs
Two Samsung NVMe 970Pro (512GB + 1TB). One on PCIe adapter
Extra Intel i210 on WiFi m.2 slot, so two GbE.
Mini-Box's M3-ATX DC-DC Power Supply
One 120mm fan
Running FreeBSD

It idles at about 15W. Note this is the actual DC load, not mains power.
It can run off my solar+battery setup.

Is that 23W measured at wall? What kind of power supply? At this kind of low-power levels, most standard power supplies are relatively inefficient. I can't imagine idling HD5450 consuming that much power at idle, although a few watts is still quite a bit in percentage terms.

Instead of buying another motherboard, can't you just buy a R3-4300G? Or is that more expensive?

I've no experience with running any AM4 board without a GPU (iGPU/dGPU). All of my systems have at least the iGPU.

I am using LC POWER LC420 350W PSU.

I bought a 5700G. The idle power consumption at the wall went down to 17W. 108W under full cpu load.
For information, the whole system is:
- ryzen 7 5700G
- b450m-hdv r4.0 (bios 7.40)
- F4-3200C16D-32GIS
- SAMSUNG PM981 256GB M.2
- LC-Power 350W