Help me build a system -- mATX Ryzen or X99

[anoother]

Hi all,

Looking to upgrade my main rig. Picked up a Ryzen 7 1700 and 2x16GB DDR4 UDIMMs during the Black Friday sales, and an ASRock AB350M-Pro4 motherboard. However, I'm now planning to return the Ryzen and Pro4; I'd like to use all the PCIe slots, but if using a U.2 adapter in the M.2 slot, you lose the ability to place long cards into the X1 slot adjacent to it -- the M.2 socket and retainer are 'raised up' too far off the board and could interfere.

Here is my analysis of mATX Ryzen boards; you can see they all seem to have a similar issue: ryzen motherboards

Let's not get started on the dearth of X370 mATX boards; if a half-sensibly-designed one of those existed, I would not have a conundrum. Still open to Ryzen if I've overlooked something, though.

It's looking like X99 might be a decent option -- Ample PCIe connectivity and a proven platform. These are my requirements in terms of motherboard:

- Micro ATX
- ECC support (UDIMM and, preferably, RDIMM)
- 4 DIMM slots
- V4 CPU support
- [preferable] 1x M.2 or U.2 PCIe
- [preferable] 1x SATA Express
- [preferable] Overclocking/Max turbo bin support for Xeons

It seems like the Gigabyte X99M-Gaming 5 ticks most boxes, but I'm not sure if it actually supports ECC -- any experience?

In terms of CPU, I'd still like to use the 2x16GB UDIMMs I picked up, so I guess a V4 CPU is a must? There seem to be a lot of QS/ES samples available at reasonable prices; what should I look out for? Any known errata?

 

[alex_stief]

I once owned an Asus X99-M WS motherboard. It supports RDIMM with a Xeon CPU installed. Same applies to the "SE" variant of this board that comes without built-in wifi.
Most X99 Boards from ASRock also support RDIMM with a Xeon CPU installed.

When it comes to overclocking, I would recommend a Xeon E5-1650v3, 1660v3 or 1680v3. These are completely unlocked. Lower-tier v3 Xeons and all v4 Xeons are locked, just as all Xeon E5-2xxx.
My build had the Asus X99-M WS, a Xeon E5-1650v3 and 4x16GB DDR4-2133 reg ECC from Samsung.
I was able to overclock the memory to a stable DDR4-2666. The CPU could hit up to 4.8GHz for short benchmarks, but I used 4.5GHz core / 4.2GHz uncore for stable and more efficient 24/7.
So with overclocking in mind, I would recommend using one of the v3 Xeons I mentioned. 16GB (R)DIMMs are not a reason to switch to v4 Xeons, they run just fine with v3.

 

[anoother]

Thanks for the extensive info.

16GB (R)DIMMs are not a reason to switch to v4 Xeons, they run just fine with v3.

Ah yes, the desktop/mobile Haswell DDR3 MCU does not support 16GB UDIMMs -- I guess this limitation does not apply on s2011-3 as it's all DDR4? I picked up some 16GB UDIMMs at a decent price for the Ryzen plan, so was planning to keep those for this system, for now.

 

[alex_stief]

Yes, you can keep them. You might find some information that X99 with Haswell-E only supports 8GB DIMMs. But that is only because this platform was introduced before 16GB UDIMMs hit the market. With a recent bios version, most X99 boards support 16GB DIMMs even with Haswell-E CPUs.