Low power with ECC and reasonable Single thread performance.........

[badass]

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?

[DDY]

I was doing some server shopping not long ago and figured a plain off-the-shelf Dell, HP, Lenovo etc. server was the way to go, a 9th gen Core Xeon 6c12t with 64GB RAM mid-tower server go for about £600-700.

The Dell Poweredge Xeon E-2124 (9th gen Core 4c4t) server I ended up buying does about 30W idle, so I'd imagine the same model with a 6c or 8c would be about the same idle power.

[badass]

Thanks - where could you find the 6c12t servers in that price range? I've checked the usual suspects and they are looking more like £900 with a lot less than 64GB RAM.

[DanceswithUnix]

For AMD ECC you need an Asrock or Asus motherboard, and either a desktop CPU or if you want really low power a pro series APU such as the 5750G.

I'm running an Asus X470 Pro motherboard with ECC

Windows won't report errors it just silently corrects them, but Linux does (Fedora 35 here):

[root@dot ~]# edac-util -v
mc0: 0 Uncorrected Errors with no DIMM info
mc0: 0 Corrected Errors with no DIMM info
mc0: csrow2: 0 Uncorrected Errors
mc0: csrow2: mc#0csrow#2channel#0: 0 Corrected Errors
mc0: csrow2: mc#0csrow#2channel#1: 0 Corrected Errors
edac-util: No errors to report.

[DDY]

Thanks - where could you find the 6c12t servers in that price range? I've checked the usual suspects and they are looking more like £900 with a lot less than 64GB RAM.

Whoops, I should add that's used prices, on Ebay.

[badass]

As an update - in my searching, it turns out the HP Microserver G10 Plus can take 64GB RAM. Theoretically it can also have 6 cores/12 threads by replacing the CPU with a Xeon E-2146G/2246G or similar. However just try to find one. Anywhere. For reasonable money!

[badass]

For AMD ECC you need an Asrock or Asus motherboard, and either a desktop CPU or if you want really low power a pro series APU such as the 5750G.

I'm running an Asus X470 Pro motherboard with ECC

Windows won't report errors it just silently corrects them, but Linux does (Fedora 35 here):

[root@dot ~]# edac-util -v
mc0: 0 Uncorrected Errors with no DIMM info
mc0: 0 Corrected Errors with no DIMM info
mc0: csrow2: 0 Uncorrected Errors
mc0: csrow2: mc#0csrow#2channel#0: 0 Corrected Errors
mc0: csrow2: mc#0csrow#2channel#1: 0 Corrected Errors
edac-util: No errors to report.

This is making me think: ASRock B550M Pro4 plus 5700x plus 128GB ECC RAM. I read that all ASRock boards can boot headless even without APU's too. They just beep on booting.

[DanceswithUnix]

This is making me think: ASRock B550M Pro4 plus 5700x plus 128GB ECC RAM. I read that all ASRock boards can boot headless even without APU's too. They just beep on booting.

That is correct, though I've run Asus boards like that as well (they might have needed a BIOS option tweaked for when to halt on POST failure).

From a quick "dmidecode" in my home server, it looks like that is the exact board I'm using. It is under a TV just in case, but usually not plugged in as TVs are always short of HDMI inputs aren't they.

Handle 0x0002, DMI type 2, 15 bytes
Base Board Information
        Manufacturer: ASRock
        Product Name: B550M Pro4

Edit: For those paying attention, the post a few above was this workstation that runs ECC on an Asus X470 board, but the home server is ECC as well. We have a few ECC machines around here, though most like the FX8350 machine are rather obsolete these days

[AGTDenton]

This is making me think: ASRock B550M Pro4 plus 5700x plus 128GB ECC RAM. I read that all ASRock boards can boot headless even without APU's too. They just beep on booting.

Can't say I've come across any brand/model that can't run headless. As DwU says, just may need to tweak the BIOS to not halt on errors such as no keyboard or VGA.
Even home based desktops can be run as such.

The Pro boards are definitely the ones to get. Especially if you intend on Windows Server being installed. As I found out to my embarrassment, Microsoft don't allow some NIC chips to have drivers for Server OS so I had to buy an Ethernet card that supported Server OS. Something they didn't used to do and I'd not built a basic server in a long time to realise that.

[DanceswithUnix]

Just to clarify, my headless boxes do have a GPU, just no monitor plugged in.

[Percy1983]

I am running a HUANANZHI X99 ZD4 matx motherboard with a xeon E5-2680 V3 12c 24t, modded bios so it can run 3.3ghz turbo on all cores.

I only have 32gb ECC in mine (4x8gb) but the spec says it supports 128gb (4x32gb).

Got the board, ram, processor and 480gb NVME boot for less than £250.00