Question on old Supermicro motherboard (E5 v3/v4 + DDR3?)

greetings all,

is there such thing on old Supermicro motherboards (or any reputed brands) that supports E5 v3/v4 with DDR3 RAM? like those found on common Chinese x99 ??? (leaning towards dual socket & hoping to get lots of RAM)

my use-case is for virtualization playground like eve-ng and/or Windoze AD and stuff + TrueNAS, etc…

leaning towards DDR3 (due to budget), as a single stick 32GB DDR4 is 2x more the cost compared to DDR3 32GB (if to populate 8x/16x 32GB RAM sticks)

hint: i’ll endure its power consumption (if all goes to fruition)

any hints, pointers, suggestions is appreciated.
thank you for your time reading my post.

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the X99 stuff still has a weirdly inflated value actually. and about the only non-china board i can recommend is the AsRock stuff. most of the consumer stuff does NOT support ECC REG and that will toss out saving any value on the build.

really the china boards, a boatload of ECC REG server ram, and the cheapest E5-V4 cpu you can find is still a good way to get into home lab. but first and second gen EPYC, and ECC DDR4 are getting cheap enough that it is worth at least looking at.

and maybe even ryzen or other home gear depending on your real build needs.

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am aware also on those EPYCs as well…
those H11/H12 boards from SM and equivalent counterparts…

then again, DDR4 is quite expensive

forgot to mention, am from Philippines…
if only i live in the US… i would be happy as server related stuff (on the 2nd hand market) is affordable

my options for now is:
-: i land into X9 SM board (E5 v1/v2 + DDR3)
-: Chinese X99 w/ DDR3 RAM

will try again sometime to search for an SM board or similar that is v3/v4 + DDR3

There was some name brand servers that came with boards like that but i really doubt any of that stuff, other than the china boards, is available anymore. Most of the china boards are fine, i have built probably a dozen of them for low end servers over the years.

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The CPU will be the limiting factor here - as far as I can tell Intel E5 v3/v4 CPUs always require DDR4 memory. If you want to use DDR3, then you want E5 v2s.

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there are: “special” CPU versions…
but most or all of them (below) are ‘unlisted’ on intel for some reasons…
processors listed below can support both DDR3 or DDR4

E5 2629 v3
E5-2649 v3
E5-2666 v3
E5-2669 v3
E5-2673 v3
E5-2676 v3
E5-2678 v3
E5-2696 v3 (techpowerup info: E5-2696 v3)
E5-2686 v4
E5-2696 v4 (wikipedia info: E5-2696 v4)

sample reference Chinese board: HUANANZHI X99 DUAL-T8D

so…, either i chose that Chinese board or SM X9DR3-F (or similar)

btw…, it is a bit hard to search on SM website as all old motherboards are not included in the matrix/list

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I am familiar with the E5-2696 v3, as it was a favourite for overclocking by modifying microcode, but I had missed that it supported DDR3. I thought that was limited to the 2011 socket E7s. TIL.

If someone mentioned this already, I didn’t see it. If you go with a dual socket x99 definitely double check that you can get pci passthrough working if that’s important to you. I’ve heard a lot of these chinese boards will say it works but actually doesn’t

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there are modified BIOS files floating around that fix a lot of the ‘issues’ these boards have.

how much effort do you want to put into being low cost, is always a valid concern though.

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i am aware on those things… and i do need PCIe passthru…

and as Zedicus & drbsg mentioned, there are BIOS/mods that will make it a bit better or fix issues…

the Chinese boards has its own quirks like huge offset of thermal readings, no sleep mode…, but tolerable…

i might lean towards: SM “X9DR3-F” (still trying to search)

or…, is there a list of all X10 variants of SM boards perhaps i can find??

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v3/v4 with DDR3 was supermicro X9 era, that is starting to get affordable on ebay.
X10 was the first to get DDR4 I think.

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are you able to recall if you came across this ‘elusive/unicorn’ unit perhaps?

anyways,
i just watched: Supermicro X9DA7
& i just learned that bifurcation is also hit-N-miss also on Supermicro boards? :frowning: may anyone confirm?

i was under the impression that all SM server boards (X9, X10, etc) supports bifurcation

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It’s worked for the one X9 model I needed to use it on. I installed a pci-e card that holds 2x m.2 devices. But I am sure I upgraded to latest published firmware before attempting that.

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