Are there any compatibility issues between MB, CPU, and RAM? The MB specs indicate ECC 2666 MHz, but could I use Non-ECC even though it is not specifically stated? The cost difference isn’t that significant, so I probably will use ECC, but just curious. What about faster speed? I’m finding 3200 Mhz sometimes cheaper than 2666. Will it just automatically downclock to the motherboard’s bus speed?
For the CPU, I encountered all kinds of terms in my research H4 LGA 1151 Coffee Lake 8th and 9th generation, etc. It was slightly overwhelming, but did I get it right that E-2236 will work?
In general, no you can not use “regular” DIMM modules, and I’m surprised that they don’t list RDIMM as a choice either, probably has to do with the processor choices not supporting RDIMM.
In general the Supermicro servers prefer running RAM in pairs of modules. Not completely required as a single module is the minimum.
You could go up to the E2288G processor for the fastest clock and highest power consumption, but do you need that much? What use case are you going to have with this server? Just wondering if one of the 35watt processors might do what you need and save a lot of electricity and heat.
As far as the faster RAM, you’d need to check with Supermicro support, there might be a BIOS update that allows the faster speed. The E2236 processor also says DDR4-2666, so again it might depend. Best to stay within the specs to make sure it is stable. Theory is that the RAM will run at slower speeds if that’s all that is supported, but not what I like to do with my servers.
Thanks for the guidance. I’ll attempt to reach Supermicro and see what they confirm.
I’m going to use the server at home for some production workloads and also for lab environment where I can play. I’ll be running VMware ESXi and connecting it via iSCSI to a TrueNAS server which I’ve already built. At the moment, I have ESXi running on a Dell OptiPlex 3020 Intel Core i3-3220 16 GB RAM! It’s hosting 3 Windows VMs, 2 linux VMs, and a firewall VM. It’s maxed out RAN usage all the time, and CPU never drops below 50% so it’s time to do something before that PC hardware works itself to death.
I’m guessing you could get away with one of the lower power processors to save some heat and electricity, but that’s up to you.
Are you going to build this yourself or buy a pre-built (bare bones) server? There are some used servers on ebay that might be worth consideration, just be careful of the processor, most of the E3 XEON are only 4 cores/8 threads. X11ss type boards, I have two of these at work and they will be pretty much junk when I turn them off because of the core count. I’ll probably turn them into a more powerful pfsense than my current Atom powered firewall.