Xeon engineering sample motherboard compatibility

I’m in the process of gathering parts for a home server project, looking at some high core count xeons clocked between 2.1-2.4 ghz, between 85-105 tdp on ebay. They all appear to be engineering samples, I’ve been looking at asrocks cpu compatibility list and aside from them being on there, it doesn’t say whether engineering samples will work or not. its an asrock x99 extreme4, any extra information on how to find that out would be great, don’t want to blow $150-350 on a processor that wont work. if your aware of a cheap board that works with engineering samples that would be good to know too.

I don’t think anyboard will say that it supports ES CPUs. As that would encourage the purchase of ES cpus. And Intel would not be happy about that.

There is this forum that has users talking about ES CPUs and what boards they are using them on.

You could also search YouTube and see what boards and CPUs people are using.

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Looks like someone was able to get a 2680 v4 Es working in it

http://forum.asrock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=2818&title=asrock-x99-extreme-4-31-bios-310

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Can be a hit or miss really…
X99 is EOL allready, so you can probablly also find non ES sample cpu´s for reasonable prices.

the non ES chips are much higher, they’re going for about the same price (and higher) as the core i7 series chips for the platform.

Enterprise stuff really holds onto its value pretty well.

Even some cool non enterprise stuff holds onto its value pretty well.

Well, Basically All Asus X99 Boards dont support ES cpus.

MSI and Gigabyte have a good trackrecord in terms of ES Cpus.
Supermicro does support ES cpus on all their boards.
Have a SM C7X99 up for sale if you like.
Or a SM X10SRL-F

Good ebay sellers do write which boards are confirmed to work and such.

I’m currently running a e5 2628L V4 ES in my Nas.

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Since when is X99 / C612 EOL ? sure, its pretty old but Intel still lists the Chipsets as Launchend and not EOL or to be announced EOL.

And i don’t think Ivybridge is EOL either, at least rendering C60x not EOL either.

Wenn intel launches a new platform every previous platform,
is concidered EOL basically since they wont bring out new cpu’s for it.

well, valid but i’d rather call that End of Innovation!
EOL Normally means you can’t get jack shit for it anymore.

x99 is eol/near eol. I rma’d my asus strix x99, they don’t have replacement parts, they sent me a refurbished one, that happened to also be broken so still dealing with that. but it may not say EOL yet, but its deffinately nearing it.

sad to hear about that horrible experience.

Though i’ll still argue that that does not mean that the platform is EOL.

I’d really like it if it were eol since that normally means cheap cpus, but that hasn’t happened jet.

I have an SM X10SRL-F, it’s a great board. Didn’t want to go DP because of power constraints, plus you can only use half the PCIe slots on most DP boards I looked at if only one processor present.

So I grabbed the X10SRL-F and have been happy ever since. Have an E5-2650 v4 QC in it running ESXI 6.7U3 happy as a clam. 24 threads + 64GB ECC FBDIMMs. 2x m.2 NVMe for VM datastores, 8x4TB 7200RPM SFP+ 10GbE, LSI2008 HBA (9211-8i), running OmniOS for ZFS file storage and a 2012R2 domain environment (last version to support RFC2307 for Unix compatibility), Windows LTSC w/ GPU passthrough using an Nvidia P400 (rock solid), and tons of FreeBSD and Linux VMs. It’s so ridiculously sick I’m giddy as a schoolgirl just thinking about it.

Looking into a 3647 ES to replace an E3-1230v2 board that’s long in the tooth, last BIOS update was released in 2011. ESXI 6.7U3 didn’t even want to work, EFI boot hosed, had to switch to (ugh) legacy mode.

So yeah, I guess it goes without saying I endorse the ES/QC chips. Just make sure you get one that is closer to a final. Look up the stepping on servethehome.com - there’s a megathread there that’s a great resource and people to ask about specific model #s (e.g. QL1J, etc.)