Topton AMD Ryzen "mini" PC ECC RAM compatibility and DC barrel jack dimensions?

[Behave-Calculate]

Hey all!

I'm finally getting up off my butt and building a proper-ish homelab. I'll worry about making it pretty and racked as I go, but at least for now, I have a decent UPS, I have a machine that's suitable for backend storage, and now, I wish to have a machine that I can run some virtual machines upon. I also want to keep my electricity bill in the realm of normalcy (which I understand is a tall ask in this business), but I want to have a LOT of available compute. As I do this for work, I also want to have some level of reliability - and I think my best bet to hit the real sweet spot in terms of power efficiency and performance is the Topton AMD Ryzen mini PC discussed by STH on this video and at this page. It's got a fat Ryzen CPU that's still comfortably sitting in mobile TDPs, dual-NVMe slots (triple, in fact, but that third one is just silly) capable of RAID 1, and support for up to 64 GB of RAM (maybe more!) - all the makings of a reasonably power efficient, highly performant virtualization cluster host. Three of these in a cluster would be more than I could ask for for a long, long while.

It's got everything I think I need, but I was hoping anyone with any experience with this box (or anyone at the STH crew? Eh? Eh? ) could help me out with a couple answers to my questions:

1. Does it support ECC RAM, as many Ryzen-based platforms do?
2. What are the dimensions of the DC barrel jack, and more specifically, are there any common major laptop brands who's AC adapter barrel plugs would fit into it?

The reason I ask is pretty straightforward - I want maximum stability for my VMs (hence the ECC RAM), and I don't want to rely on the "Replacement AC Adapter" to power my "mission critical" home virtualization cluster. I understand that you can power it via the type-C PC port, but even there I'm uncertain as to which type-C charger to get - though IF I have to go that route, I will. The slight increase in USB type-C power consumption is more than worth having a quality power delivery system to these machines.

Thanks for any help!

EDIT: also shameless pandering but I thought I should add, thanks for all the WONDERFUL and highly informative content you guys do for us! I hope to add back in my own little way, namely, by documenting this process all the way through as I can. I'll post my storage server in here later, as it is neat and any recommendations anyone might have would be super helpful.

 

[Alpha]

Whilst Ryzen doesn't intentionally prohibit ECC memory support on consumer CPUs like intel does, it still requires additional wiring on the motherboard in order to support ECC. This obviously makes the design more difficult and can be a selling point. So I don't think any motherboard that doesn't explicitly claim ECC support will have ECC memory in the hardware design.

I also think that the pursuit of ECC memory in Homelab is a complete red herring. Used hardware gamers are only going after ECC because the RDIMMs that came with their old servers are so cheap.
In reality, Homelab workloads are simply not enough to generate errors in memory. My NAS has 128G ECC RDIMMs, and I haven't had any ECC error events in at least the last 6 months that logs are available.

 

[Behave-Calculate]

Okay. Well, that's good to know. I like the idea of maximizing stability where possible, and thought that I could maybe fetch some ECC to make it work, but yeah, that's a good point. I'll save a few bucks and pick up some Crucial sticks and be on my way.

 

[Behave-Calculate]

Is there any word from the ServeTheHome staff and/or anyone else on what dimensions (and, specifically, which brand of laptop) the DC barrel jack takes? I'm trying to figure out what chargers to order for them. :|

 

[Behave-Calculate]

I've just gotten three of these that I ordered via the Amazon link here. Technically not the Topton model, but CWWK, but it's the same thing. I am pleased to say that the AC adapter that I received for these is much heftier and UL-certified as compared to the "Replacement AC Adapter" that Patrick posted in the video. I'll post a picture soon, along with some other info (specifically, which brand of laptop AC adapter should work with the barrel jack) that I thought was missing from the video.