Searching for a new motherboard

[astyle]

FWIW, IIRC, DDR5 has ECC built-in by design... so any DDR5 sticks OP gets will have ECC built in. Trouble is, DDR5 is expensive af. $100 USD will only net you an 8 GB stick of DDR5. Blame the AI-driven rammageddon.

 

[diizzy]

It's not the same thing, google it

 

[cracauer@]

FWIW, IIRC, DDR5 has ECC built-in by design... so any DDR5 sticks OP gets will have ECC built in. Trouble is, DDR5 is expensive af. $100 USD will only net you an 8 GB stick of DDR5. Blame the AI-driven rammageddon.

That built-in ECC is worthless. It just hides errors.

There are real ECC DDR5 modules. Both registered and unbuffered.

 

[blackbird9]

You used to be able to tell what you had by counting the number of chips on the dimm module, but it's got a bit more complicated recently. There are now (in ECC DDR5):- ECC UDIMMs, EC4/x72 RDIMMS and EC8/x80 RDIMMS ('U' for unregistered/unbuffered and 'R' for registered), where the highest server grade is EC8/x80 RDIMMs. The EC4/x72 is a lower-cost version of EC8/x80 (72 bits versus 80 bits), but having lower fault-tolerance.
Eg. see pages 4-5 of https://www.scribd.com/document/807434495/RAM and here https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/lp1618-introduction-to-ddr5-memory

 

[akil]

I don't recommend the Gigabyte Aorus Master X670E. The board has issues with the igc Ethernet driver, which can stop working once your USB keyboard or mouse begins rapidly connecting and disconnecting (that issues is caused by the usb extension port cable, mobo has some issues to handle that, tried many vendors). When that happens, you can lose not only Ethernet but also your input devices.USB stability on this board is a pain, and these problems are tied to the onboard Intel iwl Wi‑Fi/Bluetooth hardware. Disabling Wi‑Fi and Bluetooth is basically mandatory if you want any stability, to avoid unexpected hw failures.

There are also issues with the M.2 PCIe slots. Installing a KC3000 (same wirh WD Black) often requires 2–3 reboots after a cold start to avoid controller hangs. Additional sysctl tuning or bandwidth limiting helps reduce burst R/W behavior, but once the NVMe hangs, a hard reset is your only friend — just like with all the other issues mentioned above.This is not limited to FreeBSD; I’ve seen the same behavior on Linux and Windows.

Intel confirmed that this motherboard has several components that were improperly mounted.

My longest uptime was 3 months and it hangs... I couldn't get any dump data back for debugging.

My old Asus Sabertooth Z77 is a trillion times more stable than this board -> 7y uptime. UPS failed and had to replace it.

 

[bgavin]

IMO the SuperMicro boards are worth the money due to less hassles.

 

[Espionage724]

USB stability on this board is a pain

I learned that hard on X470 with Rift CV1 PCVR and 4 sensors (Ryzen CPU-side USB went unstable with HMD and 1 sensor; my board luckily had separate ASMedia ports to offload around), and hearing others report issues on 500-series (and now a 600) has me skeptical with USB on Ryzen.

I had an ASUS Prime X470-PRO board and disabling IOMMU was a fix for random PCI errors on Linux.

I use the Asus Prime branded AM4 board

Iirc with that X470-PRO board it had memory daisy-chained in an interesting way (apparently it's easier to reach higher speeds/overclock if they're wired one way; mine was the other way but I couldn't run 4x 3666Hz rated sticks because of that and/or 2700X/Zen2)

 

[freezmi]

I use the Asus Prime branded AM4 board. Works fine, does ECC. I think the Prime AM5 boards are equally good, but of course the memory costs much more.

thanks for the pointer, I looked up this MB and the datasheet is impressive. it even has an internal serial connector for kernel debug

but can you tell us the exact ECC memory you paired it with?
I looked at a lot of refurbished DDR4 ECC server dimms (both registered ECC and unbuffered ECC kind) and none appear on the motherboard's compatibility list, so I am unsure if they will work at all.

 

[blackbird9]

Stability is always the most important characteristic of any motherboard.

 

[cracauer@]

thanks for the pointer, I looked up this MB and the datasheet is impressive. it even has an internal serial connector for kernel debug

but can you tell us the exact ECC memory you paired it with?
I looked at a lot of refurbished DDR4 ECC server dimms (both registered ECC and unbuffered ECC kind) and none appear on the motherboard's compatibility list, so I am unsure if they will work at all.

I bought 4x 32 GB DDR4 unreg ECC on the Crucial store.

Generally I have few problems with RAM except Nemix (Newegg house brand I think?), which is junk.

 

[T-Aoki]

On-chip ECC can correct internal errors, theoretically, but cannot detect and correct errors between DIMM and CPU (connectors, PCB patterns, noises from outside, ...). So it alone is different from ECC DIMMs.