BUILD good low cost AMD solution

[Zedicus]

gygabyte 890fxa-ud5 REV. 2
12gb ECC
athlon x2 low power
intel nic
850w coolmax
perc h310's in it mode with the bios soft removed. (fixes some KVM issues)

a lot of gygabyte boards do allow ECC ram but its more by REVISION then by board version.

my current freenas system is NOT using any sort of virtualization.

this system has full VT-d and IOMMU so it could even be used as a VM host but the limit on ram is 32gb. all AMD CPU support ECC ram, not all vendors allow it to be used though.

i did do some testing with freenas on KVM and it is fairly do-able. it does limit the ability of growth as functional passthrough is severly limited in functionality.

 

[joeschmuck]

Your MB does not look like it supports ECC RAM, according to Gigabyte. Please post where you got the information that is does support ECC RAM, I'm curious.

Also, it's not clear on what this thread is about... Are you asking something or just trying to state something?

 

[cyberjock]

And your question is what exactly?

 

[Zedicus]

sorry it was more information as low cost and AMD build questions come up and i have seen some older threads where no good information was ever posted.

i will screen shot my bios screens and memtest so you can see ECC is functional.

 

[cyberjock]

Hate to break it to you but memtest is NOT proper validation of ECC being functional. There's already a body of evidence it's not 100% accurate and the developers have admitted as much. In fact, if I'm not mistaken their latest version doesn't even say if its ECC or not because AMD can't get their act together with a documented fool-proof way of validating ECC as functional or not.

 

[Whattteva]

Not sure about your particular CPU, but as far as I know, majority of all Athlon, Phenom, and FX lines all support unbuffered ECC.
The real question to ask is typically if the mobo supports it. It kinda' sucks that the gigabyte makes this information kinda' hard to find.

I found a post online about someone that went straight to tech support and asked about a different model and here's the response they got. Perhaps, you could just do the same thing and submit a support ticket for your board.

Answer - 1094768
Answer : Dear Customer,

GA-990FXA-UD7 motherboard does support Unbuffered ECC memory, and ECC is enabled by default in BIOS for compatible ECC memories.

On Kingston official webstie, GA-990FXA-UD7 motherboard is not listed as compatible motherboard for KVR1333D3E9SK2/8G memory.
To prevent compatible issues, it is suggested to contact Kingston driectly to confirm if it is the compatible memory for the motherboard before making purchase decision.
Reference link: http://www.ec.kingston.com/ecom/configu ... K2/8G&id=2.


Thank you

Hope that helps

 

[Zedicus]

it has ZILCH to do with AMD. ALL of AMDs CPUs since socket 939 have had ECC in the controller. the troublesome part is finding lower cost boards that let you use the feature. as AMD does not make a desktop board it has nothing to do with AMD rather the vendor enables that feature or not. and YES it is widely known that memtest is not the best way to verify ECC but i am open to other utilities that i can boot too or that show on freebsd.

ALSO, the setup of ECC on gigabyte boards is rather manual, enabling ECC does not enable the the full functionality, it only enables the ECC bios menu and you have to enable the FEATURES of ECC that you want the system to use.

DMIDECODE shows error detect method as 64:bit ECC

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah, and then you get either a watered down response that is so vague as to be useless or you get the answer you want to hear and you are back at square one... do you trust what they say? We've had several people from other forums that were told that ECC was supported and later when their RAM failed the truth came out... the board didn't actually do ECC at all.

I guarantee you that if Gigabyte gives you wrong info they won't turn around and pay the 5 or 6 figures to get it back.

So how much risk do you want to incur?

Note: I do use Gigabyte exclusively for my desktops and I love them. But I still wouldn't take these kinds of risks with *my* server.

 

[esamett]

I build uses an ASUS motherboard supporting ECC, 32GB (max) ECC DDR3 ram, and a 4 core AMD processor. The only time the CPU works hard is when I am scrubbing or moving data around from the FreeNAS command which is lightning fast. My board has slots for at least IBM M1015 controllers with fan cooling. I use two cheap/used cases to support 22 drives. Network speed is limited by my gigabit NIC and by my single core CPU speed since I use CIFS to my Windows PCs.

If you already have the hardware and will be relying upon CIFS you might just try the build and see how you like it. From my reading ECC ram >8GB is very important which you have. As cyberjock says please make sure that your Gigabyte motherboard is compatible. From my reading Asus consumer products openly support ECC. Gigabyte is said to support it but their documentation is limited. This is why I went with Asus for my home project. The forums here have much information of other options.

Good luck

 

[Zedicus]

i had the physical system with the gigabyte board in use and bound to my domain controller for a few days and it performed as expected and allowed pinpointing some issues.

most of the things i have noted worked in my LIMITED test environment. like ECC on the gigabyte board. i realize that your data is important to you. if you FEEL strongly that these relatively untested platforms may eat kittens or catch fire then i probably would not use this information in your case. there MIGHT be someone out there with more time then money that would enjoy testing some of these ideas though.

READ ON WITH CAUTION, those that already think i am crazy, now would be a good time to add me to your ignore list. (if i am the only one reading my posts thats o.k. with me, i talk to myself a lot)

ive been swapping back and forth between physical and a KVM virtual machine in the guise of troubleshooting. it looks like KVM 'works' if configured in some fairly specific ways. actually my fear in the physical box is literately a physical issue, i am out of rack space and if someone broke into my house they would be able to easily carry off the physical box on the desk because i do not have any more space in my lockable cabinet/rack.

anyway, this is one persons notes over a few days of testing, DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.
freebsd on KVM already has some known issues to work around. setting up boot drives and virtual CD drives and things. those are well documented (do not use any virtualized IDE devices) and a big issue is THERE IS NO WAY TO USE MORE THEN 2 PCI PASS-THROUGH DEVICES. PERIOD. (there are exceptions but they are NOT in any way reliable, even at 2 devises there are some issues with pci-pass-through)

if your HBA is not in IT mode it will be an issue, and you will absolutely 100% HAVE to remove the bios rom from your card or you will get VM boot errors and things will not work appropriately.

VIRTIO performance is not good on freebsd, it is not BAD but it is not GREAT, so i suggest passing a REAL intel nic through also. this limits your HBA pass-through to 1 (ONE) device. passing through the nic alleviates some other issues with conflicting resources also.

as of today (with all of my config tweaks, probably some i have forgotten to mention) i am getting the same performance virtualized or physical.

at this point this is all MOOT as no one uses or discusses VM stuff so this is more a log for me in case i need to revisit at some point.

again this was only tested for several days, and only moved a few TB of data across these systems.

 

[Whattteva]

I don't think you're crazy and I actually appreciate your insights.
Most people here tend to just dismiss any kind of hardware they don't use (some understandably from experience, some merely parroting the threads on the the forum).
It's nice to see someone that's willing to work out of the box and still take some of the abuses on these forums willingly and civilly without getting too defensive.

 

[joeschmuck]

At OP, does the BIOS in your Gigabyte MB specifically have an enable ECC RAM option or similar and ECC settings?

 

[Zedicus]

yes, it actually says "enable ECC" and once enabled a new page of features opens with every ECC setting.