Opteron or Xeon First Build

Hi,

I am new to this and have been reading the guides on wiki and having a look around the forum. I am hoping to build a new system with virtualization in mind, so that both my wife and I can work independently off 1 rig. My wife mainly does FB, excell and accountancy stuff whilst I am into photo editing using PS CC and 4K monitor and the odd game. We would probably want to run Kodi as well to a TV, though we havent used it for 4 years.

I understand that we will both need separate GPUs and peripherals and I intend to use ECC ram as we can't afford to have corrupted files and disks which happened with our Seagate NAS. The thing that has me confused is that to run virtualization effectively will depend on the number of cores and ram assigned to each, so is it better to get an AMD Opteron 6344 with 12 cores or an Intel Xeon E3-1275V3 with 4 cores and faster clock speed?

Opinion would be much appreciated, thanks

I'd look at a FX-series AMD. The 8370E might be a good job.  If you get the correct board, you get working ECC RAM support.

I have a FX6300 (6 core 3.5GHz, 95W) on a M5A97 LE R2.0 board, and ECC works on it.  Power consumption is decent, too, about 25W idle.

I'd look at a FX-series AMD. The 8370E might be a good job.  If you get the correct board, you get working ECC RAM support.

 

I have a FX6300 (6 core 3.5GHz, 95W) on a M5A97 LE R2.0 board, and ECC works on it.  Power consumption is decent, too, about 25W idle.

You wouldn't recommend going down the server processor root?

The only reason to buy a "server" CPU is for ECC support.  As the FX series, with the correct motherboard does ECC just fine, and all AMD chips do full virtualisation, I think they're a good solution.

I have an E3 Xeon and corresponding board sitting, and I really do prefer using the FX.  The 6-core is just better for running UnRAID with a few VMs.  If I think I need an upgrade, an 8350 or 8370E is a very cheap upgrade.

It really depends on how much you want to spend and if you want ecc memory.  If I remember correctly AMD supports ECC on almost all of their CPUs  and MB chipsets, Intel you have to buy a server MB chipset that supports ecc I don't thing consumer boards do and a CPU that also supports it, some of the consumer CPUS do but not all of them.  AMD is cheaper than Intel but runs hotter so you need more fans witch mean more noise to keep it cool.

I went the ecc route because I had a bad stick of memory witch cause errors on my one of my drives and when I tried to replace and rebuild I got errors on all my drives and lost all my data.  So when I built my new server I decided to have the extra layer of protection.

I personally recommend Intel Xeon series, as I have stayed away from AMD for some number of years now. The power andpower efficiency is simply not there.

I host multiple VM's, gaming and media center, off of a single e3-1245v3 with zero problems. Even Plex and a bunch of other dockers and plugins.

Thank you everyone for your advise 

I was looking at getting used E5-2695 v2 chips which can be had for reasonable price, pairing it with a supermicro board for ecc ram, and as many sata3 hdds that i can afford.

One other thing to consider when going into the Xeon line is that stepping up to the e5 level gets you ACS support for much better management of your IOMMU groups. I went with a E3 1276 build with a great SuperMicro x10SLF board, but when I installed my graphics card for my windows virtual machine it put my graphics card in the same IO group as my storage controller. I am running fine, but there is a possibility of a leak and a potential corruption.

I'm currently in the process of upgrading to a E5 V3 setup using an x99 ASRock board that I got cheap. I'm not sure if I'm going to go E5 1600 or E5 2600 yet but both support ACS natively according to this link http://vfio.blogspot.com/2015/10/intel-processors-with-acs-support.html

One other thing to consider when going into the Xeon line is that stepping up to the e5 level gets you ACS support for much better management of your IOMMU groups. I went with a E3 1276 build with a great SuperMicro x10SLF board, but when I installed my graphics card for my windows virtual machine it put my graphics card in the same IO group as my storage controller. I am running fine, but there is a possibility of a leak and a potential corruption.

 

I'm currently in the process of upgrading to a E5 V3 setup using an x99 ASRock board that I got cheap. I'm not sure if I'm going to go E5 1600 or E5 2600 yet but both support ACS natively according to this link http://vfio.blogspot.com/2015/10/intel-processors-with-acs-support.html

Thank you very much for that, something I took for granted with all Xeons but this has definitely cemented my thoughts about using an E5

X99 has 10 native SATA ports, too. 

X99 has 10 native SATA ports, too. 

Is there an AMD alternative motherboard series to this at all to go with the FX8370E?

X99 has 10 native SATA ports, too. 

 

Is there an AMD alternative motherboard series to this at all to go with the FX8370E?

Unfortunately the AM3+ chipsets are all fairly ancient, the 970 is the most recent and it only has 6 SATAs.    Best on the AMD side is 8 ports on A88X, but it's FM2+ and they don't support ECC.

I have used the Asus A88X Gamer board, which is really nice for UnRAID - 8x SATA ports, Intel i211 NIC, and onboard video, plenty of fan headers, and good power consumption.

Ok thanks for the info. I'll need to think again the.

X99 has 10 native SATA ports, too. 

 

Is there an AMD alternative motherboard series to this at all to go with the FX8370E?

 

Unfortunately the AM3+ chipsets are all fairly ancient, the 970 is the most recent and it only has 6 SATAs.    Best on the AMD side is 8 ports on A88X, but it's FM2+ and they don't support ECC.

 

I have used the Asus A88X Gamer board, which is really nice for UnRAID - 8x SATA ports, Intel i211 NIC, and onboard video, plenty of fan headers, and good power consumption.

Just seen this following CES 2016 for AMD -> http://www.techradar.com/news/computing-components/processors/building-an-amd-desktop-pc-just-got-a-lot-easier-1312677