Which x370 board? Availability/Memory/ECC/IOMMU

Just getting my thoughts and frustrations out there. Constructive feedback appreciated.

Motherboard:

I'm currently backordered for the Asus Hero on Amazon. But it's looking more like it's going to be another month before I ever see the board. Asus and Gigabyte are my preferred brands. I already have a Ryzen 1700 in my hands and I'll be happy if it's stable at just 3.8. At some point I want to be able to do PCI passthrough but I can multboot for now. I'll be happy with a older graphics board in the 4x but want to at some point to be able to play some games with passthrough. Like everyone else I'm wondering why AMD and the motherboard vendors didn't work out options for segregating and prioritizing graphics cards for the x370 boards.

Any recommendations for a 4x card? Just need a basic 2D desktop with video acceleration and maybe a little OpenGL for Linux and TrueOS.

Memory:

I was disappointed to see that I can't find any 3200 single ranked 16GB modules that can reach that speed. Since this is a new system I wanted to put 32GB in it now and maybe max it out in a year when I retire it as a server. Looks like the only way to achieve that is with 4x8GB non ecc modules and I'll only be able to expand later to 64GB with slower memory.

I do plan on retiring this board in a year as a server. and max it out at 64GB ECC. So it looks like I may just have to settle for 3200 2x8GB non ECC now. But I'm having trouble even sourcing the exact 2x8GB modules on the QVL. So I'm almost at the point of just getting 2x16GB of Kingston ECC modules and just be done with it. I think you can get that in 2400. But if I'm going to do that it's making me second guess my choice for a motherboard.

Do any of the major board manufactures disable ECC? Second should I not just go with a lower tier board if I'm not going to use 3200 memory? Going with a less expensive board is temping but I'm wondering if BIOS updates especially for the IOMMU issues would be less supported on second tier boards.

I really wish the board manufactures and AMD were more vocal on this stuff at least on a technical level. Especially AMD. Something like: Oh we have that working in alpha on Asus and Asrock hardware but are still validating it which might take another 4 months... and oh if you really want to here is our ftp for beta BIOS but we guarantee nothing and it might just fry your board.

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As far as ECC support goes, after looking at Wendell's review of the Gigabyte Aorus X370 Gaming 5 (GA-AX370-Gaming 5) where he claims that ECC is confirmed working, I took a tour on Gigabyte's website and found that they present a lot of contradicting information for most of their AM4 motherboards with regards to ECC support. So I contacted their eSupport and asked them to clarify which, if any, of their AM4 motherboards that actually support ECC RAM running in actual ECC mode. They replied:

Only GA-AX370-Gaming K7 and GA-AX370-Gaming 5 support ECC memory with ECC mode, it’s related to hardware design.

At the time they only listed the following AM4 motherboards on their website, so I can't speak for newly launched or future motherboards:

  • GA-AB350-Gaming 3 (rev.1.0)
  • GA-AX370-Gaming 5 (rev.1.0)
  • GA-AB350-Gaming (rev.1.0)
  • GA-AB350M-Gaming 3 (rev.1.0)
  • GA-AB350M-D3H (rev.1.0)
  • GA-AB350M-DS2 (rev.1.0)
  • GA-AX370-Gaming K7 (rev.1.0)

An ASUS representative here in Sweden, however, told me that currently they don't support ECC on any of their AM4 motherboards, and that there are no planned BIOS updates to change this. This was roughly two weeks ago.

So if I were you, I'd go with the GA-AX370-Gaming 5 and two 16GB 2400MHz UDIMM DDR4 ECC 2xR8 such as Crucial's CT16G4WFD824A.18FB1 which are confirmed working according to the QVL. Later on you could get another pair for a total of 64GB, though since they are dual rank I guess that would limit the clockspeed to 1866MHz. Also, @wendell seems to be working with Gigabyte to solve the IOMMU issues on this specific motherboard.

I can also confirm ECC is disabled on the MSI Tomahawk board. And that ECC also works on the Taichi.

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OK, that's stupid...
AMD have stated, their memory controller supports ECC and can work with it. So board manufacturer must go out of their way to limit the compatibility, because... Why exactly?
Or am I missing something?

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Well, for ECC to work you need both the CPU and the motherboard to support it. From what I heard, unlike Intel, AMD does not provide a complete BIOS source code base for the motherboard manufacturers. The manufacturers are thus left to implement a lot of features on their own, supposedly based more on only technical documentation from AMD, which takes a lot more time rather than just modifying and/or copy-pasting existing code.

So I'd say that the manufacturers are not actively preventing ECC from working, they are just not investing time and money into implementing support for it in the first place, most likely since it's not considered a major selling point.

After all, Ryzen is targeting the consumer market, and even though AMD confirmed that Ryzen does come with ECC support, they also stated that it has not gone through workstation-/server-grade validation, so I suppose it isn't that surprising we are missing out on some workstation/server features.

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I dont really think its that stupid atall.
Because the market which these particular boards are targeting at,
isnt nessesary a niche were ECC support is really that important at all.
Why offer support for a feuture that 99.9% of the targeted user groups,
for that particular board wont benefit from?
I mean why do people make a big deal of this, that a board targeted towards gamers (obviously),
doesnt support enterprise type feutures like ECC?

I mean there is a reason why we have diffrent market segments in motherboards.

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Well, if the implementation costs nothing, why lock it out?
I guess

So it probably doesn't cost nothing, but I think I may be able to find ecc ram cheaper than a standard desktop ram.
Anyways, I understand that. I didn't expect implementing ecc to be any trouble.

True. Sometimes 32GB of ECC RAM can be had for 50 USD.

Well because there are diffrent market niches for boards.
Enthusiast or Workstation kind of boards for example,
on which they could exally use ECC support as a selling target on the box.
If you get what i mean.

I still think that we are going to see WS types of X370 boards in near feuture aswell.
On which things like improved iommu groupings and ecc support would,
be a huge selling point.

Thats exally kinda selling tactics to make money on free feutures.
Msi and Asus just use these kind of tactics allot.
That Asrock is as kind as just support all the feutures on pretty much all their boards.
Is of course great from Asrock for the consumer.
Thats why Asrock should deserve more credits for it.
But in the end its all a matter of just marketing tactics, which Asus is milking at for years.
Atleast thats my vision on it.

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I understand all that...
I look at this thing and I see gigabyte's Dual Bios technology.
They put it on every board. They can easily use it as selling point for only the top of the range boards, but NO, they put it on every board.
I fully understand segmentation, so I get your point... I just don't quite agree with the execution...

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From a consumer standpoint i couldnt agree with those kind of tactics either of course.
But yeah certain mobo manufacturers just try to milkout every segment of the market.

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I think your right. The GA-AX370-Gaming 5 and 32GB of ECC sounds better to me right now. They will probably refresh these boards before XMas with version 2's. So for a version 1 board it probably isn't wise to get top of the line just now. I just canceled the Asus. I'll just have to wait a couple months until the motherboards stop being unicorns.


As for everyone else in the thread ECC is important to me since I have maintained a minimum of 4 full sized computers are all times for myself. I recycle my workstations into my servers; or if you want to get fancy you can call them my personal cloud at home. For servers that stay up for months at a time and are mostly idle it's worth it. For a windows workstation that you reboot often not so much. Motherboards that don't have ECC are passed on to friends and family or resold.

The workflow now is a windows workstation and I SSH/VNC into all the real computers and VM's. If I want to use Linux or Freebsd on the main system I have to either multiboot or run them from VM's inside windows which since it is windows I must reboot often so it doesn't need ECC and I could live with 32GB of non ECC.

But if they ever get passthrough working then I won't have to hard reboot the main system as much but rather just reboot the VM's. Meanwhile I'll have FreeBSD and Linux on in the background which with ECC means that those VM's can be up and stable for over a year.

I can live with a drop in frames of up to 10 percent (have you seen the performance of cards lately?) if it means I can switch and do real work at a moments notice. If I want full performance I can always multiboot to windows directly which for me might be once I month. I am very lazy.

For those of you that think you don't need VM's like this... think of having windows with ZFS all on the same box and at close to full performance as if windows supported ZFS natively. So you will never lose your data again because you can snapshot and stream backups live in addition to the performance. Partitioning is also so much easier since your dealing with pools of shared storage.
Zvols and iscsi... nuf said. This also applies for a Linux desktop machine. If they ever get passthrough working and the slots segregated then I can put a non raid controller card into one of the x8's.

P.S. If Supermicro had an x370 out I'd jump on it.

Asrock X370 Taichi or X370 professional gaming seem to support ECC.