I am looking for the lowest cost option for a system with the following requirements..........
Max motherboard size Micro ATX
Must be able to take 64GB ECC RAM. More is highly desirable but not essential.
ECC corrections and errors must be detectable/reportable. Silent corruption is not an option! I know ECC works on a lot of AMD systems but is unsupported - and the ECC errors simply do not get reported.
Idle power usage to be as low as possible when running ESXi - with 2x3.5" Disks running I am trying to get power down to around 30w idle
Minimum 6 cores/12 threads (or 8 cores/8 threads) with decent single thread performance - at least equivalent to 2.5Ghz Haswell. i.e. probably not Atom based.
High speed networking - either a PCIe slot or 10 Gb SFP+/10GbE on the motherboard.
So far, most of what I have found are Xeon-D based systems but they are expensive. E.g. The Supermicro SYS-E200-8D
Atom based systems are cheaper but I believe the single thread performance just isn't good enough.
Some AMD embedded systems looked hopeful but the ones with 10 GbE are as pricey as the Xeon-D systems.
Is there anything in doing my research that I might have missed. Perhaps something that costs closer to £500 for the Motherboard with CPU rather than £1k?