Tiny or small form factor Xeon workstations (or Ryzen with official ECC)?

[Thinkcat]

Hello

Got interested in mini tower Xeon workstations (Thinkstation P320 and such), but wondering if these are available in a yet smaller form factor. I haven't heard of a desktop mini with a Xeon, but whoever has done this research before, please tell me what you found.

 

[Stephan]

Unfounded opinions: Xeon-D in mini ITX but they are either expensive, Unobtainium, idle at way too high wattage, almost no expandability, too slow/old. Who needs that... Best to stay in uATX or ATX form factor. C236/246 with Coffee Lake Refresh Xeon would be good, UDIMM not RDIMM though. Bunch of slots, Fujitsu boards idle at next to nothing, stable. But either are boards expensive or CPUs are expensive or nowhere to be found. Not sure what happened with W680 chipset, also Unobtainium still? And more expensive DDR5 RAM. With Ryzen a board might say "yep, can eat ECC RAM", but nobody will be able to verify, if CPU really corrects and reports errors. Might change from one BIOS version to the next even. Schrödinger's ECC, just don't look. Bunch of irritating USB issues to boot on that platform. Who wants that... I looked into all this, because I wanted ECC and Xeon. Small. I looked very long... Settled on Asrock Rack 3647 boards with off-roadmap 24-core 8259CL Xeons. ECC works, idles at 50 watts with IPMI on, plenty PCIe slots. There should be a Thinkstation P320 SFF = small form factor. Maybe check those out. Wouldn't go smaller.

 

[i386]

Do laptops count?
If yes: lenovo has xeon options in the thinkpad p series. They are pretty expensive

 

[BlueFox]

HP Z2 G4/G5 Mini are small and support Xeon CPUs and ECC memory. Intel NUC9VXQNX would be an option too, though it's a few generations old.

 

[Thinkcat]

Unfounded opinions:

Thanks. I want to use two 3.5" hard disks for storage and one M.2 or 2.5" SSD for OS. Seems like Thinkstation P320 and P330 SFF would fit the bill. The SFF after that contain only one 3.5" bay. Also it clearly seems there is no tiny or mini from Dell or Lenovo with any type of Xeon.

Do laptops count?

No. And price is another problem. I forgot to say that I'm looking for used ones.

HP Z2 G4/G5 Mini are small and support Xeon CPUs and ECC memory.

Thanks. I was only looking at Elitedesks and wasn't aware of these. Z2 SFF have two 3.5" bays. And the minis have Xeons. G5 is too pricey and seem to have Comet Lakes, G4 have Coffee Lakes and CL Refreshes. G3 SFF doesn't seem to exist, but G3 mini does. Z4 are towers and no SFF. After G5 comes G8 and G9.

As things stand now, I think I've fallen in love with a P320 or P330 SFF, just need to stretch my budget to meet what is available and find a good deal. I am still running Asus P8C WS with an E3-1245 v2 and wish to find something that would take less space and be slightly newer.

I wonder if there has been any real progress from Skylake -> Kaby Lake - > Coffee Lake -> Coffee Lake Refresh -> half a dozen other lakes, because at least Wikipedia says that Coffee Refresh is just a Skylake with different manufacturing process. So given that I only need 4 cores, 8 threads, is there any reason to get anything newer than Skylake? Other than Meltdown and Spectre fixed in hardware at some point.

 

[Stephan]

Look at ctx_clock Benchmark - OpenBenchmarking.org

Specifically comparing a Kaby Lake Intel Core i3-7100 (Meltdown mitigated, 1372 clocks) with a Coffee Lake Refresh Intel Core i9-9900KS (160 clocks, hardware fix). That is a factor of 8.5x slower. As "sar -w 1 10" shows, my desktop Arch Linux does 2500 context switches per second. At 3.5 GHz, 1372 clock cycles is 400ns. 2500 times that means the CPU is wasting 1 millisecond per second. SuSE found this can mean 0-15% slower performance.

 

[Thinkcat]

I wonder… are there multiple different motherboards for P330 SFF? Or if I buy just any P330 SFF, even an i5 Coffee Lake, I can swap a Coffee Lake Refresh Xeon and ECC memory into it and have everything working? This is, CL to CL Refresh, i5 to Xeon and non-ECC to ECC. Of course, just to be safe, I prefer to look for CL Refresh, Xeon and ECC out of the box.

 

[Sean Ho]

P330 SFF is C246; it had a gen2 with stock 9th-gen chips, but the first gen should also support them with BIOS update. It also had stock SKUs with E-2100 and 2200 cpus and ECC UDIMMs.

 

[Thinkcat]

Thanks for all the information. I have one Refreshing Lake of Coffee coming my way. With a load of non-ECC memory though, so gotta take care of that when it arrives.

 

[Thinkcat]

According to Wikipedia, Coffee Lake supports 128 GB total memory. Lenovo states that P330 SFF Gen 2 supports 64 GB, but there is a note that says "The max memory is based on the test results with current Lenovo® memory offerings. The system may support more memory as the technology develops." Is it safe to assume that I can buy two 32 GB (DDR4 ECC) DIMMs for it? If so, what makes and models are recommended?

The more I keep looking into it, it seems like 32 GB DDR4 ECC UDIMM do not exist. I assume an E-22xx Xeon does not support RDIMM or LRDIMM and every 32 GB ECC DDR4 DIMM I have looked into has turned out to be an RDIMM. Strangely, without ECC there are 32 GB DDR4 UDIMM.

 

[Sean Ho]

E-2200 + C246 should also take non-ECC UDIMM, I think. Definitely not RDIMM or LRDIMM.

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[adman_c]

32GB ECC DDR4 UDIMMs absolutely exist. I have 2 sitting in my server here running on a W480. The link from Sean Ho is valid, and you can buy new from amazon as well. I bought mine from memory.net.

 

[Thinkcat]

Memory.net does not advertise any 32 GB ECC DIMM for Thinkstation P330. Also, W480 is a newer generation. I'll keep on looking for something that is affordable and available in Europe. And compatible, at least according to someone.

 

[adman_c]

You’re saying many different things. Above you said that 32GB DDR4 ECC UDIMMs do not exist, and both Sean Ho and I indicated that they are, in fact, readily available. Then you indicated that memory.net does not advertise any 32GB ECC DIMM for the Thinkstation P330. Which is true and unsurprising given that Lenovo itself lists the max memory capacity for that system as 4x 16GB. That doesn’t mean that 32GB DDR4 ECC UDIMMs don’t exist (they do). It also doesn’t mean that such memory would not work in the P330 (they might). I don’t believe that it’s a limitation of the C246 chipset, but again, I don’t know. As far as available in Europe, again, I can’t help you. And I don’t know what affordable means to you, but 32GB ECC UDIMMs at 2666 or 3200 go for right around $100 here in the states.

 

[Thinkcat]

To get back to this, I haven't yet switched from my previous machine to the ThinkStation, but that will happen soon.

I see many offers for that Micron 32 GB ECC DDR4 UDIMM. Question is, is it the only game in town, or is there an easy way to find other 32 GB ECC DDR4 UDIMMs? I mean, what is your preferred method for this? The price comparison site I usually use is a mess and gave me RDIMMs when I definitely wanted it to show UDIMMs. This was the reason for my initial despair about their availability.

 

[ghost792]

To get back to this, I haven't yet switched from my previous machine to the ThinkStation, but that will happen soon.

I see many offers for that Micron 32 GB ECC DDR4 UDIMM. Question is, is it the only game in town, or is there an easy way to find other 32 GB ECC DDR4 UDIMMs? I mean, what is your preferred method for this? The price comparison site I usually use is a mess and gave me RDIMMs when I definitely wanted it to show UDIMMs. This was the reason for my initial despair about their availability.

Check with eBay seller mem-store. I’ve purchased memory from them on multiple occasions and they are very responsive to questions about compatibility.

Security Measure

www.ebay.com

 

[heromode]

Here are 16 and 32GB ECC udimm's in Europe. I use the Mushkin Proline 2666 with c246 + Xeon E-2186G, no problems.

Arbeitsspeicher (RAM) Speicher mit Typen: DDR4/DIMM/mit ECC/kein Registered Modul/Unbuffered Memory, Einzelmodulgröße: 16GB/32GB Preisvergleich Geizhals EU