What the hell is wrong with DDR4 2666?
It's sub-par, insufficient, when you consider how much Zen's performance gains for higher RAM speed. If I'm going to spend $1000+ bucks, why the hell am I going to gimp myself for no reason? Yeah, I get it, most people on here or around don't really care when it comes to their server and just get the cheapest used DIMMs they can get on eBay (and everything else). But if you care about going above basic on a build, especially if you go Threadripper and want one machine, 3200MHz is the sweet spot right now in cost but higher is great too; only thing stopping 3600+, 4000MHz-ish is some issues with BIOS & dies (Samsung's B-dies being best). But Intel X299 boards are at 3600MHz now and I'm seeing 4000MHz+ kits working fine too. But again, no ECC. So you're forced to choose. If you're going to battle this from a perspective RAM speed doesn't matter, then don't bother. It's even worse if you're going to think this way with AMD's Zen. It makes me think of the type of argument like "what the hell is wrong with SATA AHCI SSDs? Why bother with NVMe? It's good enuff". I was sick of hearing this back at DDR3 systems as well; even after Intel's Haswell 1866 became standard at the CPU level, people still pretended 1333 was fine. Again, I get it, most homelabbers or folks on here who work in IT (and doing this for their resume) aren't really enthusiasts and just want to throw something in a black box and work, that's it. There's a whole segment, like me, that want a system above basic and care about making the most out of their setup. The
JEDEC standard with ECC is up to 3200MHz either way. So they wasted their time evaluating that? Eh.
@Stux
You mean like having to choose between consumer SSDs without PLP and enterprise SSDs with PLP?
PLP is one of those things that I like as a choice. I'm glad their is a choice. To me, it's more on level with RDIMMs. But the difference here with PLP vs ECC is, with PLP, it's an EXTRA you can decide on because there's good options in terms of drives for performance, form factors and other features; from NVMe sticks from Samsung to other brands, to SATA AHCI drives; there are various controllers from each brand, you can get MLC to TLC NAND, DRAMless or not; LOTS of options. And they all come with ECC though. You don't get this option with ECC RAM DIMMs though. It's not JUST an extra you can choose to pay for or not. You're FORCED to decide in a black and white manner, because
A) there's no higher MHz kits out there and
B) your forced to pick the right CPU and
C) also have to make sure you pick the right motherboard, even if you got the right CPU. PLP on storage drives is more agnostic in terms of working.