Gigabyte MC13-LE1 and MC13-LE0 for AMD Ryzen 7000 in Servers

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AdrianBc

New Member
Mar 29, 2021
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While Intel has better support for ECC in the CPUs where that is enabled, including the latest Raptor Lake CPUs, e.g. by having better Linux EDAC drivers, the support for ECC in AMD CPUs has become more official than before.

Unlike for earlier Ryzens, now both for the laptop Ryzen 6000 series and for the desktop Ryzen 7000 series AMD writes clearly in their specifications that ECC is supported by the CPUs, but for ECC support it is also necessary for the motherboards to have ECC support.

Unfortunately, I am not aware of any laptop with Ryzen 6000 and ECC support. In previous generations there were certain Ryzen PRO laptop CPUs that were said to have ECC support, but neither for them I have seen any laptop with this feature.


These new Gigabyte server motherboards are fine for the applications where GPUs are not needed. I intend to build a server with a Zen 4, but I also need a big GPU in that server, to be used for computational purposes.


I have looked at Gigabyte, ASUS and ASRock, for MBs that have a 16x PCIe 5.0 slot. No Gigabyte AM5 MB has ECC support, all ASRock AM5 MBs have ECC support, and among the ASUS AM5 MBs only one has ECC support, PRIME X670E-PRO WIFI (the PRO in the MB name is essential, there are many other ASUS PRIME MBs, which do not have ECC support).

The ASUS motherboard has the most useful features, but it looks like a very expensive motherboard

ASRock has currently 5 AM5 MBs. By an unexpected coincidence, the cheapest of them ($260 at Newegg) is also the most suitable for a server, at least according to my needs: X670E PG Lightning.

I want the full 16x width to be used for the GPU, so a second slot diverting 8 lanes from the first slot is useless for me.

Besides the GPU, I need a second slot fast enough for a dual-port 25 Gbps or at least 10 Gbps Ethernet card.

X670E PG Lightning has a 4x PCIe 4.0 slot (directly attached to the CPU) suitable for that, while the other 4 ASRock MBs have slower or narrower PCIe slots (besides the 1 or 2 GPU slots).