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>server segment where MBs are significantly more expensive False-ish Single socket server boards are on par with home motherboards. They only become expensive

>server segment where MBs are significantly more expensive False-ish Single socket server boards are on par with home motherboards. They only become expensive when you start wanting 2+ NIC's and A LOT of sockets. But then yes your feature thing is mostly true. > and lack a whole slew of additional features nice for desktop machines. False-ish Intel's server socket (for non E7's) is 2011v3 which is also their enthusiast socket. I dropped a XEON E5v4 2030 into a 2011v3 ""ethusiast board"" and it worked without a problem. Sure my enthusiast board doesn't support ECC RAM, and I can't over clock a XEON. But a 2011v3 board in and of itself is only ~50-60 more then an EXTREME low end <$100 stock standard home user motherboard. You get what you pay for if you want a dirt cheap board to drop a server class CPU into you can find it.

dom0 9y ago
Motherboard price is square to the number of sockets. (This is actually accurate, look it up; and for somewhat good reason).
- valarauca1 9y ago
  Once you move into 2+ sockets you're already paying $5000+ for a CPU so what's an extra $4000 for a main board?
Aloha 9y ago
I got to my inexpensive build by buying trailing edge hardware, still much faster than what I had, buy cheaper than current generation hardware.
paulmd 9y ago
You don't need to go to a server board for ECC - a lot of the X99 boards actually do support it. Not all of them (EVGA doesn't, a lot of Gigabyte boards don't) but a lot do (Asrock usually does). And you can find motherboards in pretty much any price range except the barest of dirt cheap. There are motherboards like the GA-X99-SLI that regularly hit $125 or lower. Cheapest thing on Newegg right now is a $150 Asrock board that supports ECC. The only price range that you "can't get" for X99 is the under-$100 price range, i.e. the super-shitty low-end chipsets. And you actually can get it if you are willing to take an open-box item. I paid $60 after tax for my last X99 board. Also realize that most of the people who are bitching up a storm about X99's $150 motherboards likely turned around and paid $250 for an X370 board when Ryzen launched. I mean, you gotta get one of the nice ones with the external clockgen so you can get your $300 Samsung B-die memory kit to run stable, right? (but that's totally different! /s)
- sireat 9y ago
  Problem is that you cannot have both via current (from 2011+ on) Intel route: high clock speed on the CPU(achieved by OC) AND ECC. You want ECC you have to get Xeons. You want OC you have to get regular mainstream K chips or enthusiast -E chips without ECC support. I think the last chipset which let you OC Xeons and still use ECC was X58 on 1366 socket. Disclaimer: I am not counting tiny BCLK OC available on Xeons.
  - paulmd 9y ago
    Definitely true. Tangent: a lot of people wonder who would pay $1700 for a 6950X. The answer I always give is "people want to do intensive work and gaming on the same system". Otherwise the 4/6C chips are better choices for the money. The great weakness of that system is - as you note - the lack of ECC. I strongly, strongly recommend building two different systems for this situation. Depending on your needs it can almost be more economical to do it this way. i3s (and now Pentiums) support ECC and make good ZFS servers. The 4C Xeons aren't too bad either. You can also do some cheap E5 Xeon builds using engineering samples. Many-core Xeons are more than sufficient for the kind of stuff you need ECC for, even at relatively low clock rates. A 10C at 2.4 GHz is roughly comparable to 6C at 4.13 GHz (I use mine in Handbrake). And uses 2/3 of the power to boot. And then you can focus on gaming performance in your gaming system. Like 3x as much for a given level of performance. It's a lot like laptops. You're going to spend a lot more if you insist on only owning one system that can do everything. The segmentation here does suck, I would rather see it supported even on consumer hardware, but practically speaking I don't think Intel is going to change this any time soon. Even if AMD does. (and note: unless the manufacturer is willing to stand behind ECC, Ryzens's "unofficial" ECC support holds about as much weight as using Intel's engineering samples)
  - valarauca1 9y ago
    Because ECC and OC are targeted at different audiences. If you want both... you don't understand one or the other. ECC is to guarantee system stability. Solving rare event that become regular once you have hundreds of boxes running. OC INCREASES system instability. You put more power into a chip, increasing the probability of incorrect or malformed answers. Now both these scenarios are rare, especially for single box home enthusiasts. Generally if you have a stable OC you won't hit garbled instruction results. Likewise you may almost never have an error that ECC would present. --- Having OC and ECC basically says, "I want to solve one extremely rare error while opening myself up to another!" This is an idiotically unsound decision.

dom0 9y ago

Motherboard price is square to the number of sockets. (This is actually accurate, look it up; and for somewhat good reason).

valarauca1 9y ago
Once you move into 2+ sockets you're already paying $5000+ for a CPU so what's an extra $4000 for a main board?

Aloha 9y ago

I got to my inexpensive build by buying trailing edge hardware, still much faster than what I had, buy cheaper than current generation hardware.

paulmd 9y ago

You don't need to go to a server board for ECC - a lot of the X99 boards actually do support it. Not all of them (EVGA doesn't, a lot of Gigabyte boards don't) but a lot do (Asrock usually does). And you can find motherboards in pretty much any price range except the barest of dirt cheap. There are motherboards like the GA-X99-SLI that regularly hit $125 or lower. Cheapest thing on Newegg right now is a $150 Asrock board that supports ECC. The only price range that you "can't get" for X99 is the under-$100 price range, i.e. the super-shitty low-end chipsets. And you actually can get it if you are willing to take an open-box item. I paid $60 after tax for my last X99 board. Also realize that most of the people who are bitching up a storm about X99's $150 motherboards likely turned around and paid $250 for an X370 board when Ryzen launched. I mean, you gotta get one of the nice ones with the external clockgen so you can get your $300 Samsung B-die memory kit to run stable, right? (but that's totally different! /s)

sireat 9y ago
Problem is that you cannot have both via current (from 2011+ on) Intel route: high clock speed on the CPU(achieved by OC) AND ECC. You want ECC you have to get Xeons. You want OC you have to get regular mainstream K chips or enthusiast -E chips without ECC support. I think the last chipset which let you OC Xeons and still use ECC was X58 on 1366 socket. Disclaimer: I am not counting tiny BCLK OC available on Xeons.
- paulmd 9y ago
  Definitely true. Tangent: a lot of people wonder who would pay $1700 for a 6950X. The answer I always give is "people want to do intensive work and gaming on the same system". Otherwise the 4/6C chips are better choices for the money. The great weakness of that system is - as you note - the lack of ECC. I strongly, strongly recommend building two different systems for this situation. Depending on your needs it can almost be more economical to do it this way. i3s (and now Pentiums) support ECC and make good ZFS servers. The 4C Xeons aren't too bad either. You can also do some cheap E5 Xeon builds using engineering samples. Many-core Xeons are more than sufficient for the kind of stuff you need ECC for, even at relatively low clock rates. A 10C at 2.4 GHz is roughly comparable to 6C at 4.13 GHz (I use mine in Handbrake). And uses 2/3 of the power to boot. And then you can focus on gaming performance in your gaming system. Like 3x as much for a given level of performance. It's a lot like laptops. You're going to spend a lot more if you insist on only owning one system that can do everything. The segmentation here does suck, I would rather see it supported even on consumer hardware, but practically speaking I don't think Intel is going to change this any time soon. Even if AMD does. (and note: unless the manufacturer is willing to stand behind ECC, Ryzens's "unofficial" ECC support holds about as much weight as using Intel's engineering samples)
- valarauca1 9y ago
  Because ECC and OC are targeted at different audiences. If you want both... you don't understand one or the other. ECC is to guarantee system stability. Solving rare event that become regular once you have hundreds of boxes running. OC INCREASES system instability. You put more power into a chip, increasing the probability of incorrect or malformed answers. Now both these scenarios are rare, especially for single box home enthusiasts. Generally if you have a stable OC you won't hit garbled instruction results. Likewise you may almost never have an error that ECC would present. --- Having OC and ECC basically says, "I want to solve one extremely rare error while opening myself up to another!" This is an idiotically unsound decision.