Are you looking for a 5960X? If so look into the Xeon 1660v3 or the 1680v3. Both are unlocked and can actually be had for cheaper than a 5960X just make sure you have a board that supports it like I do.
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since both those xeons are unlocked and 8C16T, it is hard to argue for the larger price of the 1680.
I have seen the 1660V3 fall to like 300$, just saying.
Sadly the i7 equivalent Broadwell Xeons havn’t appeared or even dropped in price significantly enough. Oh jea, V4 is fully locked it seems so scratch that. FFFF Intel.
One possible Usecase, to repeat it again, is with ddr4 Reg Ecc since there is this Haswell imc problem and Reg ecc can be substantially cheaper (Used*?) then normal or even good clocking memory.
Nearly all x99 boards support Reg Ecc with a xeon. It not working seem to be the exception.
Still not a fan of Haswell-E because of the IMC issues. Broadwell-E without going Xeon is what I’d go for if I was starting from scratch.
What processor do you recommend?
I also use two X99 systems (ASRock X99 WS, one with a 4-core v3 Xeon, one with a 6-core v4 Xeon), after the first year the UEFI and system stability became “perfect” (not a single crash in about four years nearly daily use; altough system uptime is only up to a month due to planned restarts).
I also like that X99 has become able to be quite “low-power” relative to offering 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes - a (bare-minimum setup (CPU, Motherboard, 2 x 32 GB RDIMM, 1 SATA SSD, an ancient Radeon 5450 and a Titanium 750 W PSU) only draws about 30 watts idling on a Windows desktop.
Another nice thing is that you can possibly use X99 motherboards with up to 512 GB of total system memory (just like C612).
I had the opportunity to test a Samsung 64 G-2666-LRDIMM with a Xeon E5-1620 v3 and it worked almost out of the box: After a CMOS reset there must be a module installed in slots B1, C1 and D1, a module in slot A1 is only recognized if you manually set the BIOS DDR4 frequency setting from “Auto” to 2133.
Samsung 32 GB-2933-RDIMMs act the same way. Only DDR4-2400 (and lower) UDIMM and RDIMM work in any slot after a CMOS reset.
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For clock speed, the 6850K.
For 8 cores, the 6900K.
I kept trying to help him out, I had it running on x99 when he kept saying it wasn’t possible. I posted a few times on his site and it only amounted to him thinking I was showing off, sent him a zipped efi, not sure if anything came of it.
Anyway if you have trouble then try underclocking your cpu by 100mhz under base clock, it may boot and you can troubleshoot and whatnot from there.
That’s odd. My Xeon lets the RAM run at 2666Mhz. Of course I am not using ECC DIMMs either.
Maybe that mentioned behavior is specific to the ASRock X99 WS (latest UEFI 3.50 is installed), if I install a Xeon I can only select a DDR4 frequency up to the standard frequency of that particular CPU generation (2133 for Haswell-EP and 2400 for Broadwell-EP)
Since I got the same motherboard model twice with different CPUs I came to the conclusion that X99 maybe always acts like this when installing (L)RDIMMs speced for higher frequencies than 2400.
2133-RDIMMs and 2400-UDIMM work just fine in any slot after a CMOS reset.
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Thats kinda an interesting suggestion.
I didn’t look into Xeon options yet.
I have a spare case laying around, so maybe if i can find a 8C Xeon,
then that might be interesting aswell.
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X99 is perfectly fine, though getting away from gen 1 boards might prove to be a challenge, price wise.
Got a 5820K sitting dormant in a storage room because of a garbage motherboard that loves to flake out, either that or the CPU is toast
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I just upgraded to a Xeon E5-1660 v3, which was only $229 on eBay. That’s the good news, the bad news is I think I bent a LGA socket pin when I put it in upside-down by mistake at first. 
One of my RAM slots no longer recognizes the RAM, so I have to run my 4 sticks with one on the wrong slot, which gives me triple-channel RAM instead of quad.
Also, the 2nd GPU slot got beat up by a triple-fan r9 390X and a bad latch I had earlier that may have contributed to that, so I need a new case, or new motherboard, to put the 2nd GPU in for VFIO. (My current case doesn’t have enough space at the bottom for that.)
With the stuff this computer has been through, it’s a wonder it still works. 
I might just switch to Ryzen 3xxx, but I really like x99.
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I am getting ready to put together my 3rd X99 build today. Let’s see how it goes!
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I got a new x99 motherboard, refurbished actually… I plugged in one of my SSDs into an SSATA port and it kept dropping out, but it seems to be working OK so far with both a different port and a fresh cable. (I didn’t want to bother testing an intermittent problem to see which it was…) it seems to work fine now though, and has a lot of SATA ports anyway. 
I just like this platform so much, and switching to another platform while keeping my eight cores / 16 threads and decent VFIO compatibility is more expensive.
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I tried to shoot you a message about this post but was unable to so just leaving this here. Wanted to let you know that I have copies of his compiled X99 .dmg (dated Oct 2017) if you would like a link to my gdrive for the download let me know.
Turns out I’m not upgrading to Broadwell-E because of broken overclocking due to a microcode update, and TSX instructions don’t work on Broadwell-E.
Keep the DMGs handy though. Someone will need it because RampageDev has gone AWOL.
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