I would like to put an i5-12600k in it with somewhere between 64-128gb of DDR5 ECC RAM. I’ll move a 3090 over to the box as passthrough to a VM to stream games to a steam deck and other devices.
With that said does anywhere know where to get some of the aforementioned RAM?
You need UDIMMs (unbuffered), not RDIMMs (Registered). Registered isn’t supported with W680 boards. Apparently there are DDR5 non-ECC UDIMMs around, so watch out for that (I linked it before, but deleted after I checked the SKU at Kingston)
edit: I was just checking for DDR5 UDIMMs with ECC, but I only found vendors listing module under ECC that only have the default on-die ECC. Even the retailers are confused
You might want to wait until 13-series is out as availbility regarding both motherboards and DDR5 memory is very sparse at best. I’ve been looking at upgrading my own server but availability is really poor and DDR4 vs DDR5 doesn’t seem to be much of a practical benefit for Intels 12th gen. Gigabyte MW34-SP0 looks like a really nice board if you can accept DDR4 but I haven’t seen it in the wild yet.
Given availability and pricing you might want to consider a pre-built server like Dell’s T150. Earlier variants of the T40, T30, T20 series used a relatively standard mATX motherboard so you could transplant it into another case (which is what I did with my T20 server) but I’m not sure if that also applies to the T150 series.
I’m also eagerly awaiting any sign of a retail availability of DDR5 ECC UDIMMs. At first I thought that around the launch of Intel’s W680 platform they’ll surely come to the market but not even now with a close AM5 Raphael launch that should repeat the general “ECC is working but maybe not explicitly supported” model of AM4, DDR5 ECC UDIMMs are still nowhere to be seen
You’d figure with this HPC popularity, that this time around, they’d spent less time dragging their balls across rocky ground deciding on some fast JEDEC specs.
It pissed me off how long it took for official DDR4-3200 specs, so that you could buy proper specced modules that didn’t require experimenting with B-die and such. I hope they don’t repeat this one for DDR5.
I’m delaying my personal upgrade to the V-Cache Zen4’s. But by that time, I’d sure like some official DDR5-6000+ ECC UDIMMs.
Feeling similar, waited for a 7950X3D that didn’t come, I absolutely hate it when companies sit on market-ready products just because due to a lack of competition.
But meanwhile at least a few DDR5 ECC UDIMMs have entered the retail market.
Edit: my use case is wanting a reliable, high performance desktop platform (e.g. 4k@120Hz gaming with a 4090, and AI/ML evaluation workloads) that I can retire to home server (a la Forbidden Router approach, but my X570D4U+3700x can’t cluster/pool well with an Intel system, but I’d rather switch to formal ECC support, if it actually worked on W680, instead of the unbaked AMD non-implementation that maybe works, which is still so much better than what Intel has done for years) usage cases in several years.
