Since we’ve been talking about ECC… I’m looking for a motherboard that does ECC *and* has a real PCIe x16 slot on it.
Right now, the best deal I can find is C$360 for a GigaByte MX33-BS0 and … a used Xeon E-2314 off eBay for C$200, so ~C$560. (Not including RAM, yikes.)
Supposedly, AMD chips as cheap as the AMD Ryzen 5 7600X (C$250) support ECC, if paired with the right motherboard – which I’m not sure even exists. I want 32GB minimum (preferably supports 64GB+), a “real” x16 slot, and either a real x4 slot or an onboard 10G SFP+ NIC… but even PCPartPicker has no idea which AM5 mobos support ECC! From Reddit, the other usual source, I learn that I can basically “try one and see”, which isn’t what I want at all!
Should I just pay mildly silly amounts of money for a previous-generation Intel solution? I can go get a used Dell PowerEdge 720 for not much money, and I have the rack to put it in, but I really really really do not want the PERC RAID controllers they all come with. (I don’t mind Dells of that era, they would otherwise be perfectly fine.)
-Adam athompso@athompso.netmailto:athompso@athompso.net Feel free to email me directly rather than cluttering the list with commercial emails, if you have something you can sell me directly.
P.S. yes I’m aware that many, but definitely not all, Dell PERCs can be reflashed to IT mode, but that creates issues with the Lifecycle Controller and some BIOS revisions. And when buying used, it’s hard to be certain which PERC is included – the R720 could come with, IIRC, 9 different RAID cards.