Xeon E-2300 vs. Zen 3 system - Buying advice

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serenity

New Member
Sep 25, 2021
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I need to get some new hardware for a small homelab. Most of the machines don't need to do anything too fancy. So something like 4-8 cores would be enough. I mostly need something with good remote management/general support and multiple PCIe slots.

I'm stuck deciding between systems with Zen 3 or the new Xeon E-2300 processors.
Zen 3 EPYC is probably overkill and costs way more than some Ryzen (Pro) so I'd probably not choose some EPYC processor for now.
With Ryzen you are stuck to only two mainboards from Asrock (as far as I know) and from what I read support for the X470 was crappy, X570 seems to be better though. Also the focus of Asrock is more on gaming and less on servers and the the combination of non server processor and server mainboard is rare. For the Xeon about a dozen motherboards were announced already though only a few are available at the moment. There are some other vendors like Gigabyte, Asus and Tyan but servers are not their main focus either.
Since the Xeon is a server processors I'd expect some more support for it. Regarding connectivity there does not seem to be much of a difference for my use case between AMD vs Intel combos.

I'm currently leaning more towards some Xeon + Supermicro combo, but maybe someone has the ultimate argument against those? Waiting for the next CPU + mobo generation would probably take too long. Alder Lake is around the corner but who knows when you can really get your hands on it. Also it is a desktop processor and I don't doubt there will be a server mainboard for those.
 

Stephan

Well-Known Member
Apr 21, 2017
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Personally I am still using the 1275v6 E3-Xeon generation (Kaby Lake, 7th gen) and waiting for Alder Lake E3 Xeons, because those will have PCIe 5.0 and supposedly more slots on uATX and ATX.

From experience:

- Avoid Intel I219-V ethernet chips; they are buggy and will sometimes need a hard reset from the driver. Under Linux they needed offload disable workarounds for years. More recently some kernel drivers work fully (5.4 LTS), newer versions will reset every couple of hours; 210 chips seem ok, 5xx ethernet also. For anything >10GBit this forum likes Mellanox alot and I on top of that I like Chelsio too.

- Intel KVM through their AMT offering which is usually enabled in Cxxx chipsets works, most of the time. I used it a bit with Mesh Commander, a free software from an Intel engineer. The problem begins when you connect, watch a reboot, watch OS (with DP/HDMI hardware dongle emulating a screen, otherwise darkness because iGPU goes into powersave mode), and then wonder why the I219V interface is stuck at 10 Mbps (driver could not reset interface because the AMT code prevented it). So get a board with Aspeed 2500 if you want tried-and-true Out-of-band management. Price of that is 4-5 watts more power per board.

- ECC support on Intel E3 works with UDIMMs (RDIMMs unsupported) and boards will support it properly; AMD "desktop" grade seems more flaky. If you go red, definitely seek out forum posts on win-raid or wherever where somebody has tested ECC by shorting pins (don't do this) and has verified the board will detect and correct errors; sometimes this feature goes away in later BIOS revisions. AMD really needs to step up its game here for entry level systems.

- Don't buy 10 such systems to build your lab, start with minimum setup and one board cpu ram and cooler. Try out the software and see if everything works properly. If it doesn't you haven't paid for the other 9 yet.

- Asrock is okay, Supermicro also good.

- You could enter the scene cheaply with a used C236 board and supported cheap E3 CPU while you wait for Alder Lake. IPC and PCIe upgrade is tremendous though. Very very good single thread performance too.
 
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986box

Active Member
Oct 14, 2017
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Picked up E-2246G with Supermicro board over a year ago. Running 4-5 VMs on it and sitting idle quite a bit.
IPMI works great as the server not near livable space. Using ambient air for cooling, the server runs in the background.

Have not run into any compatibility issues with various HBA and Nic cards.
 

zer0sum

Well-Known Member
Mar 8, 2013
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X470D4U is rock solid these days with ESXi and Proxmox.
Pair it with a 5600X and you have a blazing fast hypervisor :)
And one day I can just switch in a cheap 5900/5950 and get moar cores!

I just built one with the following parts:
  • Operating System: ESXi 6.7 with nvme hack
  • Case: ZZAW C2 - 13.8L and 12.83 x 6.34 x 10.31 inches
  • Mainboard: Asrock Rack X470D4U (MATX)
  • CPU: Ryzen 5600X ( 6C / 12T)
  • Cooler: Artic Liquid Freezer II 120mm AIO, top mounted exhaust
  • Case Fan: Noctua 120mm as bottom intake
  • Memory: 2 x 32GB UDIMMS
  • PSU: Corsair SF450 SFX (80+ Gold certified)
  • Boot drive: Sandisk USB (ESXi 6.7)
  • Storage: AOC-SLG3-2M2 PCIe Add-On card, with an Intel 660p 2TB NVME and ADATA SX8200 1TB NVME
  • Network: Mellanox CX3
I still have room to add another PCIe card to this, and even 2 more onboard nvme drives (alhtough they'd be running at PCIe2x4 or PCIe3x2 speeds)
 

vcc3

Member
Aug 19, 2018
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With Ryzen you are stuck to only two mainboards from Asrock (as far as I know) and from what I read support for the X470 was crappy, X570 seems to be better though.
I want to react to "support for the X470 was crappy". I have two ASRock Rack X470D4U boards with AMD Ryzen 9 3900X (12C/24T, 3.80-4.60GHz). The boards are in 2U rack servers with twelve 3,5" SATA HDDs, two U.2 NVMe drives, one m.2 NVMe boot drive, and two dual port SFP+ network cards. I had zero problems with the boards. They was rocking solid from the first moment on and the ECC support of the memory modules was detected out of the box by Linux. The difference compared to e.g. EPYC Systems ist the the Ryzen platform is not able to report ECC errors to a BMC. So the BMC can not notify you about a memory problem, you need to monitor your OS (e.g.: edac-utils).

Output of dmesg | grep EDAC:
Code:
[ 0.426339] EDAC MC: Ver: 3.0.0
[ 4.896463] EDAC amd64: F17h_M70h detected (node 0).
[ 4.896507] EDAC amd64: Node 0: DRAM ECC enabled.
[ 4.896507] EDAC amd64: MCT channel count: 2
[ 4.896539] EDAC MC0: Giving out device to module amd64_edac controller F17h_M70h: DEV 0000:00:18.3 (INTERRUPT)
[ 4.896542] EDAC MC: UMC0 chip selects:
[ 4.896543] EDAC amd64: MC: 0: 0MB 1: 0MB
[ 4.896543] EDAC amd64: MC: 2: 16384MB 3: 16384MB
[ 4.896545] EDAC MC: UMC1 chip selects:
[ 4.896546] EDAC amd64: MC: 0: 0MB 1: 0MB
[ 4.896546] EDAC amd64: MC: 2: 16384MB 3: 16384MB
[ 4.896546] EDAC amd64: using x16 syndromes.
[ 4.896552] EDAC PCI0: Giving out device to module amd64_edac controller EDAC PCI controller: DEV 0000:00:18.0 (POLLED)
[ 4.896552] AMD64 EDAC driver v3.5.0
I would also recommend the ASRock Rack mainboards for a home lab because they have the most complete fan control I have ever seen on a server board and definitive much better for a home lab then the fan control of Supermicro Boards (I really like Supermicro mainboards and have quite some.)

There are a lot more small Xeon server boards available than Ryzen server boards and therefor it is likely that you find a small Xeon boards that fits you needs better then on of the four Ryzen server boards from Asrock Rack. However, if your only reason not to use them is that you think they are crappy, you should reconsider your decision. ;)