Yes, it would be nice to be able to build some 2019-era Xeon machines cheaply. Cascade Lake SP was a great time. But also, I would really like it if we could see AMD socket SP3 boards. I think, though, that a lot of this kit hasn't yet become super cheap in the refurbished markets, sadly.
I have a single Xeon CPU motherboard, 18 cores 64GB. Happy with it running some LLM AIs open source from Hugging Face, however have an NVidia 3060 16GB VRAM to assist. Looking at going DUAL CPU motherboard from Machinist, really great video, your personality comes through . . . thank you!
I have a question. I also have this motherboard and have the problem that Windows 11 only displays 1 socket. Although there are 2x E5-2699V4 cores: 22 threads: 44. Device manager shows 88 threads. But I find it strange that Task Manager says something different. Does anyone here have any idea why? Also all other programs like CPU-Z etc. only show 1x CPU. Linux displays everything correctly.
Could it be that the edition of Windows 11 you are using is license limited to a single socket? I believe Home edition only activates a maximum of one socket, and Pro edition is needed for two.
I bought the same motherboard and really liked the finish, but one of my Xeon E5 2687Wv4 processors doesn't recognize one of the memory channels. I changed sockets and the processor took the problem to the other socket. One other detail, I can't enter the BIOS, in fact I don't even know how to do that on this motherboard
just got the same board in the mail now, will be using it with 128gb ecc ddr4 2133mhz and 2x2699v3 for 36c/72t and 2x2tb nvme + 2 gtx1080ti for my unraid server. looking forward to get it out and up and running!
@@ahyaan2552 sadly no... i think I have a faulty cpu and I have only desktop memory (Corsair Domminator) so I'm not sure what is the reason I know the GPUs (3) that I have are fine so I'm thinking of buying a hole set so it will be compatible but it seems like waste as I have one (expensive) cpu and 64G memory and the MBM .. i just can't make it work for now I'm using one CPU on asus delux II which supports all my disks (10) and GPUs, I'm using it to run unraid with dockers and gaming VVm for my family do you think I should try to get the dual CPU MB to work and use it with onee cpus until I will get another ?
Can confirm that I got a clone of this board. Still in that orange color, but without green logo on the bottom, and heatsinks were straight black, without indents. 2 CPUs could not be recognized with a bunch of cycling and ending on F9 code, no video output. Also it managed to get to FF post code one time, but still no video output. I didn't think to try to use 1 CPU, but what I did find out was that yes...indeed it is the case for many of these boards according to Miyconst channel. Same exact issue he mentioned. Selling dual socket motherboards with only 1 cpu support. Returning mine back to seller due to defect.
Thank you for your comment. This will be useful reading for others. I was very disappointed my Jiahuayu board simply wouldn't work with two processors; luckily I did try a second time with the Machinist board, and had better luck that time. I think buying a bundle deal, where the AliExpress seller provides the board pre-populated with two processors and memory probably increases the chance of getting something working on arrival. AliExpress is, though, always a bit of a game of chance.
I had a similar experience with my Machinist motherboard (orange PCIe variant). I was at least able to get video. I was able to get to the BIOS once, and was able to see both processors, however, one of the processors I noticed had a "*" next to it - not sure what that meant. Every time I boot now, it freezes at the BIOS with motherboard code 7b. They sent me the error code table and the codes are different than any other AMI BIOS board that I've seen. Still waiting to hear back to get a replacement because I prefer this board over the other dual socket Chinese boards out there. One other thing I noticed is that it advertised as a EATX form factor, when it's really a XLATX form factor, which is why the holes don't align in most cases. I had to improvise by drilling holes in my case.
The computer with this motherboard worked fine. But when I turned it on again, it froze with the error code "b7". Erasing the BIOS with a jumper did not help. It still hangs on this code. It is impossible to enter the BIOS. What does the code "b7" mean?
Greetings from across the pond! I just purchased this motherboard, and have all of the components to build my ESXi server. I've been getting some A7 errors, which seem to be memory errors - I was able to test 32x8 registered Micron memory by re-seating them in bank 1 to get past the A7 error; however, now I'm getting a A3 error, which seems to be the CPU. I was able to get into the BIOS just once, which allowed me to make some adjustments, but every other time I attempted to get to the BIOS, it freezes, and I get a 7b error on the motherboard. Do you happen to have any guidance?
May you please check a couple things out for me ? Which raid configurations does the motherboard support and does it have a wake on after power loss in bios . Thank and great video 😊
I do run this as a production server, so cannot readily shut it down to go into the BIOS to look at these settings. I am planning a maintenance to add some more NVMe drives soon, so I will during that take a look and then reply.
In retrospect, I do recall for sure that the BIOS does have the always/last state/never choices for actions on supplied power. But will still need to wait until next restart to check for RAID settings.
@@andrewsturmey thank you I just got some 4U Rosewill RSV 400U-R cases and I’m thinking of to expand my hobbies into the server side now. I want to start with easy task like home automation and plex server . Then moving on to a steam library
My wife just recently set up a new VM for running Home Assistant, and she's integrated much of our in-home IoT gear into it, but we've not done a lot more with it yet. I do have also a VM running TrueNAS that has 6 NVMe drives passed through to it (in a RAIDZ1), doing file sharing for the network. Other VMs I have on there include a Wireshark/GRETAP endpoint that I use to securely bridge my in-home LAN to my stuff at the datacentre, a DHCP/RA and blackholing DNS resolver server, Exim/SpamAssassin SMTP relay, an authoritative BIND DNS for my internet domains, Asterisk VoIP PBX, email mailbox server, HAProxy frontend for various sites, custom Node-based webserver for a few things, UniFi server for managing my APs, and lots of other random things I “need”! Been using BSD and Linux for server things since around late 1998, and probably shouldn't be running quite such a hard-to-maintain setup really nowadays, but it's fun.
Great coverage, brother! I'd like to see you build more. Maybe you can build out custom servers, sell them, & build YT content around such a channel. Not enough people (if any) are even doing this. Would you say that it is money well-spent on AliEx?
Money well spent is a tricky one to answer. In terms of what you are getting in this specific case, a dual-socket server platform, then definitely a good value, especially given how feature rich it is. But is buying X99 a good value proposition in general, is a harder question to answer. If, like me, this purchase was perhaps more about having a lot of PCIe lanes, it has delivered excellently in terms of spend to achieve that. But for general-purpose CPU work per spend (or per watt), then going with an mid-range modern consumer board and chip would probably be better.
16:05 that's the fun part: there is no E-ATX specification. It's all made up by motherboard and case manufacturers when they should be using a proper specification like SSI EEB.
Спасибо за видео! Так же купил эту плату, на Али, доставка была со склада в РФ, обошлась в 10100 рублей с бесплатной доставкой, за 4 дня. Это примерно 125$. Заказывал только плату, без процессоров и памяти, их буду заказывать чуть позже, выйдет примерно еще плюс такая же сумма. Так же уже куплена подержанная видеокарта r9 fury nano, цена 4000р. И блок питания планирую на 1kW, так как возможно добавлю еще одну карту в crossfire, пока что его подбираю, стоит не мало. Процессоры сначала поставлю дешевые, 2x 2690v3 за 1360р штука на том же сайте. Потом сменю возможно на 2699 v3. Лучшие конечно 2699p v4, но их даже упоминания нету почти нигде, но как вариант апгрейда в далеком будущем есть =) Материнка интересная, жаль про нее мало информации находится в сети, хотелось бы узнать про возможности разгона памяти и процессоров.
Overclocking is possible. It will need a custom BIOS flash to enable the feature. I have not done this on my server, as I am targeting stability, rather than absolute maximum performance. Consider that the power consumption and thermal load will be very high. A more modern platform makes more sense in many scenarios, but X99 remains an enjoyable hobby platform in my opinion, especially in geographies where it is more difficult to get new hardware and at a reasonable price.
@@andrewsturmey Yes I am considering it as a hobby as well, although it will be the main PC as it is better than the current one. Financially it does turn out to be much more convenient than current hardware, but still comparable in terms of performance. I have plans to additionally cool the VRM area, with small coolers and possibly put water cooling on the CPU. Really liked your case, with the mirrored aisle effect. But will also have to look in favour of the most ventilated one, especially when installing multiple graphics cards in crossfire mode. Still looking around =)
Great. Yes, the infinity mirror was an airflow trade-off for visual enjoyment. There is a vent, all the way around all 4 edges at the front, and it does allow for a fairly high rate of airflow with the 2×120mm fans, but of course not as good as a full front grate. I did do a burn in of around 10 hours of video encoding, during which the room became quite hot, but the thermals inside the case remained well under control. For most of my other builds, I use Fractal cases; I especially enjoy the Meshify range.
I was considering to replace my atual dual socket with this one, My problem now is my pc was not hibernation/suspend suport, and the pcie are limited to 2 16x bays. (not sure if the second is performace as that) Does this board support sleeping mode?
Thank you for the question. I've watched a lot of X99 reviews on Miyconst's channel, and he generally reports poor S1-S4 support on Chinese X99 boards. The official documentation says nothing more than “Sleep mode: Support” about this, which isn't very helpful. Because I run ESXi on mine as an always-on server, I haven't got a way to test this directly, I'm sorry to say.
@@andrewsturmey I follow miyconst but I don't remember about a review on this particular model. In my case I want to it use as a development machine (with docker) and I want to suspend on the end of that with a complete shutdown
The case is a GameMax Abyss. I think any EATX form-factor case would be fine, just depends if you care about aesthetics or cooling performance more. This one isn't exceptional for cooling, but plenty for me in the environment I have it, with plentiful case fans.
Does the power supply you are using have 1 CPU power socket or 2 CPU power sockets? If it has 1 CPU power socket, how do you combine the sockets? I plan to build a dual-processor X99 motherboard.
The power supply I'm using does have 2 CPU power outputs. From what I have seen of most Chinese boards that do have 2 CPU power connectors, they're wired in such a way you only have to connect 1 of them. But do consider in this case that this does mean a lot of current going via a single output, which at full load might be a problem for some power supplies.
As a general rule, most people with experience in the X99 scene would tell you that reliability of these Chinese boards isn't guaranteed. If you're going to use a single machine to run a hosting business, you're taking a risk. This said, I have had this machine running for a year without any problems whatsoever, and so reliability is possible. Remember, of course, that anything “business critical” should have some degree of failover provision, as well as a backup and recovery plan.
Hello, I bought the same model of motherboard with 2 E5-2690-V4 CPUs. But the card only works if I install only one CPU. If I install both CPUs the card hangs with code 79. Do you have any idea where my problem could come from?
I had it on my Jiahuayu board. For me, this occurred when I was using unregistered non-ECC memory. As soon as I swapped it all out for ECC, it worked. No idea if this might be relevant to your scenario.
@andrewsturmey great video (although explaning on the memory slots can help for those how don't have memory for all the slots) do you have the manual for the MB? can you share a link to it something I bought one also but I'm only getting couple (5 i think) beeps and error code of A6 but have no clue what is wrong (as the memory,cpu and gpu are ok..)
Because I got this board as part of a bundle, pre-populated with both processor sockets as well as all memory slots, it didn't need to be a consideration this time, for me. It didn't come with a manual, and from what I can tell, no such thing exists. Seems like most people go through a lot of laborious trial and error to figure out what does and doesn't work. I suppose that's the downside of this particular community of Chinese-made boards. On my other board, the Jiahuayu, I never did manage to get it to work with a second processor installed. Lots of suggestions hinted at needing to use ECC memory, and a certain population order, but I didn't really want to spend more money at that time, to be able to have enough variety of test memory on hand to try all the combinations.
What you see as A6, is probably Ab. I reached out to seller asking about this error because I received it as well. This is a Video card or M.2 SSD self-inspection error. The support guy who reached back out to me said to check to see if enough power is going to the graphics card, and remove the M.2 cards. Boot without GPU and M.2's and see if it will get to AA (which is normal). Once you get to that point, re-install your GPU and see if you get picture. The memory error codes are FF, 00, C0, D0, CF, F1, A3, and CD. If you have bad memory, place one stick into memory slot 1 (first one closest to CPU1 slot), and test each memory stick. Apparently you'll need to do some fudging around to get them to seat properly, as was my case.
Good day. You can go to www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003975176649.html to see the exact lot I bought. Note that this exact lot isn't available anymore (and has an extortionately high price showing), but the same retailer seems to have other bundles involving this board still.
Hm.. Are you sure sir that the second drive on the MB is nvme one? I think all I saw on Ali said the second drive is a SATA one, not nvme. Dual sockets machines imho are good for Proxmox, when you can just disable HT and dedicate a certain amount of physical cores to VMs. That's what will work the best I think. In such PC cases with a solid front panel front fans just do not work at all. You can easily mount 6 more HDDs instead of useless 120mm fans, and have them 8 in total, and that could be a good NAS (as one of the VMs).
Let's be honest, this isn't a sensible build. Going with an infinity mirror front panel instead of a mesh is definitely not a choice of practicality. The front fans pull in a small but adequate amount of air via the tiny side grille space on the front panel, but more importantly they give home to blue LEDs! I can confirm both onboard NVMe slots are full direct-to-CPU x4 PCIe lanes, which is nice. And I guess with a full four x16 slots of the same, you could in principle go with 18 total NVMe drives in a NAS. But yes, if you don't want an all-flash NAS, because you want higher capacities or lower cost-per-GB, front bay disks would work better. I can confirm indeed that virtualisation is an excellent use-case on this box. I cannot fault it, 20 months later; very reliable and pretty good performance.
It's one of the best boards in the X99 scene, I would say. Almost none of these Chinese boards built around the C612 chipset are good on the power states front though. Other reviews have suggested Machinist is no different, sadly. As I use this machine as an always-on VMware server, then I've not even tried features like sleep or hibernate, so I couldn't provide any first-hand feedback on this.
This generation of chip has 4 memory channels. And this board, with its 2 sockets, has 8 memory slots; with each 1 slot connected to a discrete memory channel on a discrete chip. In principle, the highest potential performance.
can you help me? My friends and I both bought this board, we both built it with 2 identical processors (2680v4), and we are both having the same problem. When connecting the 2 processors, the card does not provide video at all. Now, when the second processor (CPU 2, slot on the left) is disconnected, leaving only CPU 1, the video card activated, it enters the BIOS, etc. Do you know what the problem could be? Is there any setting that changes this?
I've seen this reported before. This and other Chinese boards using the C612 chipset support both unbuffered and registered memory, but I've seen others report that there are limits. People say that when going beyond a certain number of powered DIMM channels, they could only boot the machine with DDR4-2400 Registered ECC sticks, and unbuffered RAM stopped working. Could that be relevant to your setups?
Hello I am copy catting your buyild near enough did you use 2 8 pin CPU supplies? My board has one on each side as well as the 24 pin in the middle do I need to use 2 CPU supplies my guess is yes but would appreciate confirmation if you are able to please.
I have plugged in both EPS power connectors, but I can confirm it's not electrically necessary, if the PSU can deliver enough current on a single connector. I'd suggest both, if you have enough PSU connectors and cables.
Great! Thank you very much for this! Did you receive users manual? I didn't... There website is not updated with this mobo specs.. I sent an email for MACHINIST and they don't respond.
I have heard that they're quite responsive if you have a confirmed faulty hardware, to handle replacements and such, but they aren't at all good with general support inquiries. To the best of my knowledge, no manual exists for this board, and people mostly just experiment with stuff until it works.
@@andrewsturmeyThe situation with the manual is disappointing, it seems that Machinist doesn't seem to silkscreen the labels of which pins are which onto the board. It's a shame as they are self-documenting when designing the board. It seems that they just don't print them. Very odd.
I have consistently heard that quality control isn't the strongest trait of these Chinese board manufacturers. But I think returns and replacements are generally possible. I'm fortunate enough not to have had a problem.
At current time of writing, the original bundle listing no longer exists. But the AliExpress store I bought from can at www.aliexpress.com/store/912059400 be found, and they do have standalone Machinist X99 D8 MAX listings.
I noted my towel in a room that was not mine, and that the dario did not cough on the appropriate step. Curtains! If I was the captain of the SM U24, I would not have known what direction that shirt was going. Also, Ian Botham was once run out by a cunningly called 5f (and I'd don't mean a cleaning straw). To actually answer your request, I once 'built' a flammable 'robot'. I don't recall precise Lee how many pigeons (coooooooo-ers, mate) it contained and utilized, but I suspect it was insufficient. Mr B would certain Lee say so.
Nice video! I'm planning to install 2x E5-2697v4, but the board seems to 'officially' support until v3. Did you perform any bios upgrades to make it support v4, or did it just work? Also, does it support virtualization?
I didn't need any updates. Seems like the v4 chips work just fine. And yes, all the virtual-specific stuff is right there in the BIOS and in ESXi 8.0b works fine for me with it.
All you have to do now is pay the electricity bill. I had two of these boards running Seti and Folding at Home until the first bill hit the mat. They are buried in a cupboard now with a warning notice.
The era of Xeon E5v4 is not a good choice for low power use. Any of the 16+ core chips were ≥120W, and so that's already a bad starting point for a dual CPU machine running 100% load 24×7. Pair that with the fact these Chinese X99 boards generally implement poor power management, and you're going to see a better value return on your power very quickly with a more modern machine.
@@andrewsturmey Agreed and certainly not with a Milliband on the scene. He alone doubled the price of a kWh in a week. Great fun building and experimenting though.
nice video..and can see you like a kid with a new tooy..that face is priceless.lol..happen the same to me as well,so..good.. im on huananzhi x10x99-16d ,but i will love to know ,what do you think ,since this videos...and if works all good..many thanks,mate...
Hello I have the same system running both cpus are visible in BIOS however when I check from task manager and CPUz I can see only 1 socket running. Any way to fix this issue. Much appreciated ps when I run benchmark I see one cpu
Any chance you're trying to do this with a Windows 10/11 edition that is license limited to one socket? Most times people report this it's because they're not running the Pro edition. You could also boot of a Linux live image to check it sees both sockets.
I am pleased to hear you have enjoyed success. I'm interested to know what software you're running that enjoys scaling well across a very parallel core count.
Is your motherboard still working okay these days or is it now having issues? I ask because I am interested in purchasing this motherboard with a couple of e5 2699 v4's.
@@andrewsturmey Thank you for replying to my message. I was also looking at the Huananzhi F8D Plus as they look very similar to the Machinist dual socket motherboard you are using. Just out of curiosity would you happen to know how many VRM mosfets per socket are on your motherboard? I can’t seem to find a clear enough picture to see for my self. They would be the little black squares just in front of the little motherboard heatsinks at the top and between the socket and heat sink.
I'm sorry, I've tried to have a look, but no luck, unfortunately. I got a stepladder out to see if I could get above it, and take some photographs through the side panel, but the heatsinks and fans are really big and obscure everything. I cannot readily shut the machine down to get it out either. I could see some mosfets and inductors, but no way I'm going to be able to give you an answer with any confidence. I am curious as to what you would consider a good number of them. I'd also be inclined to think that it remains a bit of a lottery anyway, with the quality considerations of the component sourcing a lot of these Chinese manufacturers do.
Nice video. I have a question, i have more or less the same setup. But when i check the status in cpuz, it reads only 1 cpu. While i have 2 xeons installed like yours. Bios though reada both. Am i missing something? Moreover my motherboard temp is 105 degree Celsius. And i cannot get around that. Even after startup. When i touch the board after shutdown it doent feel like 105 degrees. Any idea?
Could it be that you're using the Home edition of Windows? I believe that is license-restricted to one socket. It's the only thing I can think of which might cause what you're seeing. Perhaps consider preparing something like a bootable Ubuntu install media? You can run it as a live image and check to see whether both sockets are addressable then. As for the sensors, then I don't think they're all that reliable. While running HWMonitor on either of my two X99 boards, one thing I can say for sure is that although a small number of the sensors give believable readings, most seem to always return a fixed number or move a tiny amount around a number that doesn't make a lot of sense. CPU temperatures always seem right though.
@@andrewsturmey Thanks a lot Andrew for the hint, that could be the case, I actually used a home edition, I just used it because it was the only USB that I found. I will create an ubunto system to check that out then. As for the heat from Mobo, I have searched a lot, but cannot find any solution. I had to dismantle all the heatsinks in the Mobo to check if they were misplaced and changed the thermal paste on the Intel chip, which was like a stone. But I didn't test it after this checkup so far, as I didn't have any time yet. The Mobo is an Asus Z10PE-D8 WS that has dual xeons e5-2699 v3
Hello! I wouldn't bet on Chinese motherboards. All the ones I dealt with were terrible in terms of power consumption, and only a few of them managed to equip a BIOS that reduced power consumption to real, as a rule, the “Chinese BIOS” feeds the CPU directly from the NPP 😀 S1-S5 is not implemented sufficiently in hardware, which makes it impossible to correct these shortcomings via BIOS (WOL, power resume..). The operation of UDIMM RAM is questionable, this is only possible using Intel ME, Intel SPS will only work with RDIMM, LRDIMM. The priority of using Intel ME or Intel SPS depends on the PCB architecture. I equipped some MACHINIST MB (C612) with BIOS with Intel ME, and some could only function with Intel SPS. X99-D8 MAX has a JTPM1 connector, therefore, it is possible to develop a TPM2.0 module specifically for this board. And on a sad note, I can note that I suggest that the owners of this board create a BIOS, but there are too few of them and they cannot organize themselves, so there will most likely be neither a BIOS nor a TPM 🥺 And the price of this motherboard is very inflated by the Chinese compared to aftermarket offerings (this is appropriate, the "new Chinese X99" uses a used C612), ASUS, Supermicro, DELL, Fujitsu, etc... can get cheap, definitely these boards with less number of shortcomings and preparing a BIOS without Chinese surprises 😉
This is an excellent insight, and something anyone considering this board should take very seriously. I can certainly confirm this build I've done gulps down energy very inefficiently.
@@andrewsturmey If the community gets together, I will create a BIOS and TPM2.0 for this board. Interest in Chinese boards has decreased due to high costs and lack of proper support for many problems.
I run FFmpeg, and the settings used, specific to the video codec, are: -c:v libx264 -crf 16 -profile:v high -level:v 5.2 -preset veryslow -x264-params open_gop=1
My understanding is that each channel on each processor goes to a discrete slot. Certainly the slots identify as A1 through H1, implying to me this is right. We can assume fully populating the board gives 4 memory channels per processor.
Cutting network pci card was genius dude. I give you thumbs up and subscription also. Jest tell us. Is your wife watch your video? May be this is the reasone why I missed prices for the hardware.
I'm pleased the Dremel work on the network card was a highlight. That's how real server professionals do it! And yes, my wife knows I've wasted a lot of money on my two X99 projects! Also, my ongoing electricity bill for such inefficient age of technology continuing to run.
@andrewsturmey Then I hope you never see Miky The Blue Eye 👁 💙 😅 If I spend so much money for Aliexpress defenetly my wifi will going to show me "Miky the Blue Eye".
I can say this solution works very well for me as a server specifically. You should certainly compare to the cost of building a low-to-mid-range desktop based around something like Ryzen 5 5500 though, and its comparable benchmark.
Is there a hidden xmp option in the AMI bios? I just built my server and the ram latency seems it be an issue at load for me. Additionally, is there a way to enable turbo or XTU?
I didn't see any automatic option for XMP, but all timings can be specified manually in there, if you know what your memory's profiles support. If you're running dual processors, also consider that memory access to non-local NUMA nodes (i.e. one processor accessing the other processor's connected memory channels) is very high latency. Dual processors only make things faster for quite particular workload scenarios. Miyconst has a great TH-cam channel that you should look up. He has content pertaining to enabling boost clocks on Xeon on these platforms. It's not something I've needed to do for my use cases, and so haven't experimented with this at all. Also, to the best of my knowledge, XTU isn't supported on these server platforms, though I'd be surprised if you couldn't set all the settings it has, directly in the BIOS.
@@andrewsturmey Can you please point me in the right direction to where you can manually specify the timings? The BIOS I have with mine (same board) seems very limited in options by design. I see in the IntelRCSteup menu I can adjust freq but that is about it :(
I cannot look directly on this Machinist board, as I have the server running 24×7 usually. However, I do recall my Jiahuayu board's BIOS being as-near-as-makes-no-difference the same for these settings, and so I'll refer to that. • Go into “IntelRCSetup” ▸ “Memory Configuration” ▸ “Memory Timings & Voltage Override”. • Set “DIMM profile” = “Manual”. • Refer to the memory's reference document for XMP profile settings for each value. If you are missing those settings, then you probably will need to find a guide on how to patch and reflash the BIOS to expose the settings. That is probably a bit nearing the edge of my day-to-day familiarity to advise on.
I bought the original Jiahuayu board to build a dual-socket home server, as I wanted to move some of my VMs from the datacentre to be local. I only then bought this board because I couldn't get the second socket to work in the first board. I did manage to repurpose the other one as a basic file server for storing backups. I do have a new Huananzhi board that arrived at the end of last year, that I've not done anything with yet, which I must get around to unboxing and finding some sort of use for.
I can confirm that all 4 of the PCIe slots are x16 connected directly to CPUs. Do consider that the middle pair of slots are directly next to one another, and so the top one of the two would only be able to take a single-wide card, such as the Nvidia workstation or datacentre models, or low-end consumer.
@@АлександрПетровский-я7б i think 4090 have pci-e v4.0 but 2011-3 platform only 3.0. So it will only be half the maximum speed of 4090, in theory, but it will depend on the task.
hi andrew...i will like to buy,that headtorch ,you wearing...looks powerful one,and im like you,assembling motherboards...even in the night..lol..tanks andrew
Greetings Do you advice buying a motherboard like this or should I go for single processor or just forget about this Chinese motherboard. And goto maybe mini or normal servers
Thank you for your comment. I would certainly only consider a build like this if it's as an enthusiast pursuit. In terms of simplicity and performance for your money, a more ordinarily sized, single processor build, based on a modern processor would be better. Chinese X99 is a lot of ‘fun’ though.
First of all, great video. It's hard to find much information about this platform, let alone this specific motherboard. This was helpful. Second, I have been searching for an answer to a question and can't seem to find one. Perhaps your insight can help me. I've seen comments that say an IOMMU toggle is nowhere to be found in the BIOS. But others say that it is. I suspect those that can't enable IOMMU have an older BIOS version. However, I can't find any kind of confirmation of that. Would it be possible for you to check yout BIOS and see if it is an option? If so, what is the BIOS version? I ask because GPU passthrough is going to be critical to my planned Proxmox server and workloads. I already have two 2698v3 CPUs I salvaged from a local server. So it would be nice to be able to put them to use. Any help would be appreciated. Cheers.
I can confirm that on both X99 boards I have, this is present. In fact, I would go as far as to say that this scene seems to have the most presented configurability in any BIOS setups that I've ever come across. Plus, the community has good information about modifying BIOSes to enable even more weird and wonderful edge-case stuff. While I didn't mention it in either of my videos, I did try out PCIe passthrough specifically, though it wasn't a GPU, but rather unusually a 4-port USB card. All seen fine by the guest and worked without problems. Don't know how you might get on with vGPU, but no reason for me to think that wouldn't work either. Worth noting that my experience on this is all with VMware ESXi, but really early on when I was troubleshooting with the other board, I did live boot into Debian and did need to briefly use a QEMU/KVM invocation; also worked fine, though didn't involve any passthrough.
@@andrewsturmey As long as enabling IOMMU is available in the BIOS I should be able to get it to work with a GPU. Coincidently, another PCIe card I will need to passthrough will be a USB card. So that's good to know you didn't have any issues. From what I have found on the Proxmox forums, X99 appears to be a well established and used often. Though, information about this specific Motherboard is very rare. Nevertheless, I will be going with this board. Thank you very much for your help and information.
No problem. Pleased I could provide some information. Lots of IOMMU-related settings, most for things I've never heard of and assume are best left to platform defaults. My passthrough of a USB card was for as direct as possible a connection of UAS storage to a TrueNAS VM as a place to ship ZFS snapshots for backup. If I had to guess, I'd say your use case sounds like a desktop OS. That is something I have experimented with before, making a dual-headed setup with one Windows and one Ubuntu running concurrently off the same machine. Wasn't on X99, but did work well.
@@andrewsturmey Hi. Does it possible to combine two NVME in RAID 0? I have same motherboard and stiil trying to find any information how to RAID is to RAID 0. Any ideas?
I think it's not trivially possible simply with BIOS setup. The age of this architecture and processor family predates mainstream adoption of today's NVMe connection and form factor, so I expect there would need to be a lot of extra work on the part of the motherboard designer to do so. That isn't to say you couldn't install Linux using just a small part of the first NVMe, and then do a partition-based RAID 0 setup in the remaining space across two drives, and still get the associated performance improvements for a data volume.
I'm wondering if this board allows you to activate virtualization from the BIOS like most modern boards. I think I heard you say you were going to install ESXi on this board. Just want to verify.
With factory BIOS settings, mine came with all the virtual features enabled by default. I'm running ESXi 8 with no problems, though during installation it did give an ‘end of life’ type warning that this processor generation might not be supported in a future version.
@@andrewsturmey Out of curiousity how is the machine performing? I was thinking about using this mobo for a VM server. I'm leaning more towards a supermicro board now.
Taking into consideration that these E5-2683 v4 processors are 2016 models, and therefore many generations old at this point, I'd have to say the performance is excellent. From what I can tell, the board is causing no detriment whatsoever. Certainly the emerging Chinese board makers showing to be of good quality, such as Huananzhi and Machinist, are putting out decent stuff at a very accessible price point, but in comparison with your mentioned Supermicro, they're still not up there yet. I've used a lot of Supermicro professionally, in the datacentre, and it's simply really good. If you need something completely dependable, that's still a better choice than this. But like I said, likely more expensive, and I've certainly no complaints about my Machinist.
Running ESXi 8.0b on this hardware, I've not had the ESX host or any Linux, BSD, or Windows guests panic/bugcheck at all. I will say, though, that although I've got a mixture of ages of Linux and BSD kernels, my Windows guests are all very old Windows versions.
I'm considering purchasing this motherboard, but I have heard bad things about the machinist bios. The main thing I'm interested in is pcie bifurcation. Planing to run many nvme drives. Does this motherboard support pcie bifurcation?
I actually think the stock BIOS that comes with this board is really quite good; although you don't exhaustively get every capability possible, I doubt many people using this platform as a server would find anything missing. I have two PCIe 4×4 NVMe cards on this board now. Bifurcation works flawlessly, albeit there's no auto-detection, so you do have to set the ports manually in the BIOS.
We've gone past a year and a half without a reboot at this point, and not a single sign of a problem. Mine, at least, seems durable. But always remember that the Chinese X99 boards can be a bit of a reliability lottery at times.
O, nooo. Again, won't boot. No-o... Restart? Training 8 dimm slots only. How long? Finally! Running. The case is real server :) Leds are so important. 😂😂😂
Server mobo with these dimm slots orientation? O, nooo 😂😂😂😂 The good news is, at least Noctua orientation is correct. It is for desktop. Not to mention for low price per performance of Noctua g@rbage.
I am waiting for the price and cinebench r23 score. Then will post comment like this one. One i9 cpu and cheap mobo with ddr5 192GB RAM for 2K and score 40K is good idea. Your "server" will never hit 40K score on cinebench even with dual xeon. I9 13gen for 400$. And it work at first start.
Hands down, nobody should be buying X99 here in 2023 for price vs performance, or any amount of future-proofness. For the same money, buying current or previous generation Intel or AMD desktop gear is definitely, definitely the right thing to do. Also, these Chinese boards are a huge gamble, like most things on AliExpress, and so someone can easily end up with a whole lot spent on nothing to show for it. You have my full agreement on all of your recent comments. This was a fun project for me. But I would be disappointed had I gone into it hoping for value for either money spent or time spent.
A word of warning, though; dual-processor operation does bring high memory access latency cross-socket. While software that is aware of this can handle it cleverly, that does not generally include games. Games often run worse with a second processor.
Indeed it does. I can confirm first boot after the CMOS battery was removed is especially slow, but it's still much, much longer than a typical consumer board even thereafter. Not a big problem for a server that's rarely rebooted (I think since this video I've only rebooted twice), but annoying when first setting up and iterating changes.
Great video! Thank you for bringing us along on your journey!
I hope to see more in the future!
Charismatic and heart warming tech video! Thank you for sharing your experiences 😄🤓🙌🏼
Love the video. Amazing and professional Build, Talk and humor. well done mate
I have 2 of these systems used for render farms. Great deal for 44 cores/ 88 threads w/M.2! Waiting for a cheap dual x299 board...
Yes, it would be nice to be able to build some 2019-era Xeon machines cheaply. Cascade Lake SP was a great time. But also, I would really like it if we could see AMD socket SP3 boards. I think, though, that a lot of this kit hasn't yet become super cheap in the refurbished markets, sadly.
I have a single Xeon CPU motherboard, 18 cores 64GB. Happy with it running some LLM AIs open source from Hugging Face, however have an NVidia 3060 16GB VRAM to assist. Looking at going DUAL CPU motherboard from Machinist, really great video, your personality comes through . . . thank you!
What 3060 has 16gb of vram? I want one of those lol I've got the 12gb model
Thank you for sharing your experiences, it was interesting !
That's how i envisioned Alfred Hitchcock doing the analysis
I have a question. I also have this motherboard and have the problem that Windows 11 only displays 1 socket. Although there are 2x E5-2699V4 cores: 22 threads: 44. Device manager shows 88 threads. But I find it strange that Task Manager says something different. Does anyone here have any idea why? Also all other programs like CPU-Z etc. only show 1x CPU. Linux displays everything correctly.
Could it be that the edition of Windows 11 you are using is license limited to a single socket? I believe Home edition only activates a maximum of one socket, and Pro edition is needed for two.
Very nice setup! I’m willing to do the same and your video was very helpful and informative. Thanks!
02:10 that sniff made me spit my coffee out laughing! 🤣
I bought the same motherboard and really liked the finish, but one of my Xeon E5 2687Wv4 processors doesn't recognize one of the memory channels. I changed sockets and the processor took the problem to the other socket. One other detail, I can't enter the BIOS, in fact I don't even know how to do that on this motherboard
Just a dude building a PC in his bedroom. TH-cam was build on these kind of videos!! well done
Heck yes. And one person's banal is another's bedazzlement.
Great looking mobo and build! Was it purchased brand new or a pre-used mobo?
Almost all was new. The motherboard bundle, although coming with a brand new board, did use refurbished processors and memory.
@@andrewsturmey Right, get that. Thanks for sharing.
just got the same board in the mail now, will be using it with 128gb ecc ddr4 2133mhz and 2x2699v3 for 36c/72t and 2x2tb nvme + 2 gtx1080ti for my unraid server. looking forward to get it out and up and running!
did you succeed?
this is more or less my plan also (with xeon 2696v4) but I can't pass the bootup for some reason
@@cnimrod did you succeed in getting it working
@@ahyaan2552 sadly no...
i think I have a faulty cpu and I have only desktop memory (Corsair Domminator) so I'm not sure what is the reason
I know the GPUs (3) that I have are fine
so I'm thinking of buying a hole set so it will be compatible but it seems like waste as I have one (expensive) cpu and 64G memory and the MBM .. i just can't make it work
for now I'm using one CPU on asus delux II which supports all my disks (10) and GPUs, I'm using it to run unraid with dockers and gaming VVm for my family
do you think I should try to get the dual CPU MB to work and use it with onee cpus until I will get another ?
@@cnimrod I had the same error like you about booting, you have to check frequency memory into the BIOS and force BIOS to use your memory frequency
Can confirm that I got a clone of this board. Still in that orange color, but without green logo on the bottom, and heatsinks were straight black, without indents.
2 CPUs could not be recognized with a bunch of cycling and ending on F9 code, no video output.
Also it managed to get to FF post code one time, but still no video output.
I didn't think to try to use 1 CPU, but what I did find out was that yes...indeed it is the case for many of these boards according to Miyconst channel.
Same exact issue he mentioned.
Selling dual socket motherboards with only 1 cpu support. Returning mine back to seller due to defect.
Thank you for your comment. This will be useful reading for others. I was very disappointed my Jiahuayu board simply wouldn't work with two processors; luckily I did try a second time with the Machinist board, and had better luck that time.
I think buying a bundle deal, where the AliExpress seller provides the board pre-populated with two processors and memory probably increases the chance of getting something working on arrival.
AliExpress is, though, always a bit of a game of chance.
I had a similar experience with my Machinist motherboard (orange PCIe variant). I was at least able to get video. I was able to get to the BIOS once, and was able to see both processors, however, one of the processors I noticed had a "*" next to it - not sure what that meant. Every time I boot now, it freezes at the BIOS with motherboard code 7b. They sent me the error code table and the codes are different than any other AMI BIOS board that I've seen. Still waiting to hear back to get a replacement because I prefer this board over the other dual socket Chinese boards out there. One other thing I noticed is that it advertised as a EATX form factor, when it's really a XLATX form factor, which is why the holes don't align in most cases. I had to improvise by drilling holes in my case.
Bruh thanks for "Not" letting us know who this seller is so we can avoid getting ripped too - Thanks Asshole!
Also, I can only apologize on behalf of my (unknown-to-me-until-now) 464 clones for none of them having commented after having taken a viewing.
The computer with this motherboard worked fine. But when I turned it on again, it froze with the error code "b7". Erasing the BIOS with a jumper did not help. It still hangs on this code. It is impossible to enter the BIOS. What does the code "b7" mean?
Greetings from across the pond! I just purchased this motherboard, and have all of the components to build my ESXi server. I've been getting some A7 errors, which seem to be memory errors - I was able to test 32x8 registered Micron memory by re-seating them in bank 1 to get past the A7 error; however, now I'm getting a A3 error, which seems to be the CPU. I was able to get into the BIOS just once, which allowed me to make some adjustments, but every other time I attempted to get to the BIOS, it freezes, and I get a 7b error on the motherboard. Do you happen to have any guidance?
May you please check a couple things out for me ? Which raid configurations does the motherboard support and does it have a wake on after power loss in bios . Thank and great video 😊
I do run this as a production server, so cannot readily shut it down to go into the BIOS to look at these settings. I am planning a maintenance to add some more NVMe drives soon, so I will during that take a look and then reply.
😂 you live those names huh? ❤❤ Great work
In retrospect, I do recall for sure that the BIOS does have the always/last state/never choices for actions on supplied power. But will still need to wait until next restart to check for RAID settings.
@@andrewsturmey thank you I just got some 4U Rosewill RSV 400U-R cases and I’m thinking of to expand my hobbies into the server side now. I want to start with easy task like home automation and plex server . Then moving on to a steam library
My wife just recently set up a new VM for running Home Assistant, and she's integrated much of our in-home IoT gear into it, but we've not done a lot more with it yet. I do have also a VM running TrueNAS that has 6 NVMe drives passed through to it (in a RAIDZ1), doing file sharing for the network.
Other VMs I have on there include a Wireshark/GRETAP endpoint that I use to securely bridge my in-home LAN to my stuff at the datacentre, a DHCP/RA and blackholing DNS resolver server, Exim/SpamAssassin SMTP relay, an authoritative BIND DNS for my internet domains, Asterisk VoIP PBX, email mailbox server, HAProxy frontend for various sites, custom Node-based webserver for a few things, UniFi server for managing my APs, and lots of other random things I “need”!
Been using BSD and Linux for server things since around late 1998, and probably shouldn't be running quite such a hard-to-maintain setup really nowadays, but it's fun.
Great coverage, brother! I'd like to see you build more. Maybe you can build out custom servers, sell them, & build YT content around such a channel. Not enough people (if any) are even doing this. Would you say that it is money well-spent on AliEx?
Money well spent is a tricky one to answer. In terms of what you are getting in this specific case, a dual-socket server platform, then definitely a good value, especially given how feature rich it is.
But is buying X99 a good value proposition in general, is a harder question to answer. If, like me, this purchase was perhaps more about having a lot of PCIe lanes, it has delivered excellently in terms of spend to achieve that. But for general-purpose CPU work per spend (or per watt), then going with an mid-range modern consumer board and chip would probably be better.
16:05 that's the fun part: there is no E-ATX specification. It's all made up by motherboard and case manufacturers when they should be using a proper specification like SSI EEB.
Спасибо за видео! Так же купил эту плату, на Али, доставка была со склада в РФ, обошлась в 10100 рублей с бесплатной доставкой, за 4 дня. Это примерно 125$. Заказывал только плату, без процессоров и памяти, их буду заказывать чуть позже, выйдет примерно еще плюс такая же сумма.
Так же уже куплена подержанная видеокарта r9 fury nano, цена 4000р.
И блок питания планирую на 1kW, так как возможно добавлю еще одну карту в crossfire, пока что его подбираю, стоит не мало.
Процессоры сначала поставлю дешевые, 2x 2690v3 за 1360р штука на том же сайте. Потом сменю возможно на 2699 v3. Лучшие конечно 2699p v4, но их даже упоминания нету почти нигде, но как вариант апгрейда в далеком будущем есть =)
Материнка интересная, жаль про нее мало информации находится в сети, хотелось бы узнать про возможности разгона памяти и процессоров.
Overclocking is possible. It will need a custom BIOS flash to enable the feature. I have not done this on my server, as I am targeting stability, rather than absolute maximum performance.
Consider that the power consumption and thermal load will be very high.
A more modern platform makes more sense in many scenarios, but X99 remains an enjoyable hobby platform in my opinion, especially in geographies where it is more difficult to get new hardware and at a reasonable price.
@@andrewsturmey Yes I am considering it as a hobby as well, although it will be the main PC as it is better than the current one. Financially it does turn out to be much more convenient than current hardware, but still comparable in terms of performance.
I have plans to additionally cool the VRM area, with small coolers and possibly put water cooling on the CPU.
Really liked your case, with the mirrored aisle effect. But will also have to look in favour of the most ventilated one, especially when installing multiple graphics cards in crossfire mode. Still looking around =)
Great. Yes, the infinity mirror was an airflow trade-off for visual enjoyment. There is a vent, all the way around all 4 edges at the front, and it does allow for a fairly high rate of airflow with the 2×120mm fans, but of course not as good as a full front grate.
I did do a burn in of around 10 hours of video encoding, during which the room became quite hot, but the thermals inside the case remained well under control. For most of my other builds, I use Fractal cases; I especially enjoy the Meshify range.
I was considering to replace my atual dual socket with this one, My problem now is my pc was not hibernation/suspend suport, and the pcie are limited to 2 16x bays. (not sure if the second is performace as that)
Does this board support sleeping mode?
Thank you for the question. I've watched a lot of X99 reviews on Miyconst's channel, and he generally reports poor S1-S4 support on Chinese X99 boards.
The official documentation says nothing more than “Sleep mode: Support” about this, which isn't very helpful. Because I run ESXi on mine as an always-on server, I haven't got a way to test this directly, I'm sorry to say.
@@andrewsturmey I follow miyconst but I don't remember about a review on this particular model.
In my case I want to it use as a development machine (with docker) and I want to suspend on the end of that with a complete shutdown
Some xeons won't work with specific mainboard even if the manual says it is. Look for some forums to pair minboards to theirs counterpart.
Which cabinet do you use? I have the same motherboard i am confused which cabinet I use I am from indian can you suggest any cabinet Thanks.
The case is a GameMax Abyss. I think any EATX form-factor case would be fine, just depends if you care about aesthetics or cooling performance more. This one isn't exceptional for cooling, but plenty for me in the environment I have it, with plentiful case fans.
Any one figured out how to enable power on loss with this motherboard?
I have the same board and I am getting the error code 73. Is that bad? What's causing it and how to solve it? Thanks
Does the power supply you are using have 1 CPU power socket or 2 CPU power sockets? If it has 1 CPU power socket, how do you combine the sockets? I plan to build a dual-processor X99 motherboard.
The power supply I'm using does have 2 CPU power outputs. From what I have seen of most Chinese boards that do have 2 CPU power connectors, they're wired in such a way you only have to connect 1 of them. But do consider in this case that this does mean a lot of current going via a single output, which at full load might be a problem for some power supplies.
Does it relaible for foundation of a hosting business.
As a general rule, most people with experience in the X99 scene would tell you that reliability of these Chinese boards isn't guaranteed. If you're going to use a single machine to run a hosting business, you're taking a risk.
This said, I have had this machine running for a year without any problems whatsoever, and so reliability is possible. Remember, of course, that anything “business critical” should have some degree of failover provision, as well as a backup and recovery plan.
@@andrewsturmey I am thinking to make it database server not compute and I will have copy of that all database in same x99
Will it work
hi! what bios version? do you know where can i get the latest one?
Hello, I bought the same model of motherboard with 2 E5-2690-V4 CPUs. But the card only works if I install only one CPU. If I install both CPUs the card hangs with code 79. Do you have any idea where my problem could come from?
I had it on my Jiahuayu board. For me, this occurred when I was using unregistered non-ECC memory. As soon as I swapped it all out for ECC, it worked. No idea if this might be relevant to your scenario.
Thanks for the info I will order some
Did both cpus work now with ecc memory?
Nice build. I like the case. Can you share case name and model information?
The case is a GameMax Abyss. Not particularly typical to use with a server, but I've hardly made many sensible choices for this build.
What a lovely video.
@andrewsturmey great video (although explaning on the memory slots can help for those how don't have memory for all the slots)
do you have the manual for the MB? can you share a link to it something
I bought one also but I'm only getting couple (5 i think) beeps and error code of A6 but have no clue what is wrong (as the memory,cpu and gpu are ok..)
Because I got this board as part of a bundle, pre-populated with both processor sockets as well as all memory slots, it didn't need to be a consideration this time, for me. It didn't come with a manual, and from what I can tell, no such thing exists.
Seems like most people go through a lot of laborious trial and error to figure out what does and doesn't work. I suppose that's the downside of this particular community of Chinese-made boards.
On my other board, the Jiahuayu, I never did manage to get it to work with a second processor installed. Lots of suggestions hinted at needing to use ECC memory, and a certain population order, but I didn't really want to spend more money at that time, to be able to have enough variety of test memory on hand to try all the combinations.
What you see as A6, is probably Ab. I reached out to seller asking about this error because I received it as well. This is a Video card or M.2 SSD self-inspection error. The support guy who reached back out to me said to check to see if enough power is going to the graphics card, and remove the M.2 cards. Boot without GPU and M.2's and see if it will get to AA (which is normal). Once you get to that point, re-install your GPU and see if you get picture. The memory error codes are FF, 00, C0, D0, CF, F1, A3, and CD. If you have bad memory, place one stick into memory slot 1 (first one closest to CPU1 slot), and test each memory stick. Apparently you'll need to do some fudging around to get them to seat properly, as was my case.
Hey there. Awesome video. Which Noctua fan did you get cant seem to find 2011-3. 6:12
I am pleased you enjoyed the video. These are Noctua NH-U12DX i4.
Hi, where did I buy all this - Can you please share the link to the seller?
Good day. You can go to www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003975176649.html to see the exact lot I bought. Note that this exact lot isn't available anymore (and has an extortionately high price showing), but the same retailer seems to have other bundles involving this board still.
Wow, amazing setup!
Do you have quad or octa channel memory with all the 8 slots populated? I'm planning on getting this mobo for two 2696v3.
Tia.
I do have 8 × 16GiB DIMMs installed, and I can confirm all four memory channels on both processors are being used concurrently; full 8-way action.
Hm.. Are you sure sir that the second drive on the MB is nvme one? I think all I saw on Ali said the second drive is a SATA one, not nvme.
Dual sockets machines imho are good for Proxmox, when you can just disable HT and dedicate a certain amount of physical cores to VMs. That's what will work the best I think.
In such PC cases with a solid front panel front fans just do not work at all. You can easily mount 6 more HDDs instead of useless 120mm fans, and have them 8 in total, and that could be a good NAS (as one of the VMs).
Let's be honest, this isn't a sensible build. Going with an infinity mirror front panel instead of a mesh is definitely not a choice of practicality. The front fans pull in a small but adequate amount of air via the tiny side grille space on the front panel, but more importantly they give home to blue LEDs!
I can confirm both onboard NVMe slots are full direct-to-CPU x4 PCIe lanes, which is nice. And I guess with a full four x16 slots of the same, you could in principle go with 18 total NVMe drives in a NAS. But yes, if you don't want an all-flash NAS, because you want higher capacities or lower cost-per-GB, front bay disks would work better.
I can confirm indeed that virtualisation is an excellent use-case on this box. I cannot fault it, 20 months later; very reliable and pretty good performance.
I'm looking to purchase this board. Also, how well does it handle sleep state or hibernation? Thanks
It's one of the best boards in the X99 scene, I would say. Almost none of these Chinese boards built around the C612 chipset are good on the power states front though. Other reviews have suggested Machinist is no different, sadly.
As I use this machine as an always-on VMware server, then I've not even tried features like sleep or hibernate, so I couldn't provide any first-hand feedback on this.
M2 dual raid ?
hmm doesn't e5 26xx v4 chips have 8 the lanes for 8 ram slots does this mean that the motherboard doesn't utilize the cpu's full potential
This generation of chip has 4 memory channels. And this board, with its 2 sockets, has 8 memory slots; with each 1 slot connected to a discrete memory channel on a discrete chip. In principle, the highest potential performance.
can you help me? My friends and I both bought this board, we both built it with 2 identical processors (2680v4), and we are both having the same problem. When connecting the 2 processors, the card does not provide video at all. Now, when the second processor (CPU 2, slot on the left) is disconnected, leaving only CPU 1, the video card activated, it enters the BIOS, etc. Do you know what the problem could be? Is there any setting that changes this?
My motherboard D8 MAX MACHINIST
I've seen this reported before. This and other Chinese boards using the C612 chipset support both unbuffered and registered memory, but I've seen others report that there are limits. People say that when going beyond a certain number of powered DIMM channels, they could only boot the machine with DDR4-2400 Registered ECC sticks, and unbuffered RAM stopped working. Could that be relevant to your setups?
Hello I am copy catting your buyild near enough did you use 2 8 pin CPU supplies? My board has one on each side as well as the 24 pin in the middle do I need to use 2 CPU supplies my guess is yes but would appreciate confirmation if you are able to please.
I have plugged in both EPS power connectors, but I can confirm it's not electrically necessary, if the PSU can deliver enough current on a single connector. I'd suggest both, if you have enough PSU connectors and cables.
espero otro video explicando a fondo
Lovely bit of eccentricity this one. Well done.
Great! Thank you very much for this! Did you receive users manual? I didn't... There website is not updated with this mobo specs.. I sent an email for MACHINIST and they don't respond.
I have heard that they're quite responsive if you have a confirmed faulty hardware, to handle replacements and such, but they aren't at all good with general support inquiries. To the best of my knowledge, no manual exists for this board, and people mostly just experiment with stuff until it works.
@@andrewsturmeyThe situation with the manual is disappointing, it seems that Machinist doesn't seem to silkscreen the labels of which pins are which onto the board. It's a shame as they are self-documenting when designing the board. It seems that they just don't print them. Very odd.
How much points, you make in CPU z?
Two, one for each CPU.
Hello @andrewsturmey, do you have access to IOMMU functionalities?
Yes, everything you'd expect of IOMMU in Broadwell is usable. BIOS is very feature-exposing, and all settings you might need to tweak seem present.
@@andrewsturmey thank you.
Sadly I bought a FD8 plus from Aliexpress and 2 memory slots were damaged, I returned the equipment, hopefully I'll have best luck next time
I have consistently heard that quality control isn't the strongest trait of these Chinese board manufacturers. But I think returns and replacements are generally possible. I'm fortunate enough not to have had a problem.
@@andrewsturmey yeah I've given it back and bought again. Everything is going well, I'm using it for AI training
Where did you buy it, can you send me the link?
At current time of writing, the original bundle listing no longer exists. But the AliExpress store I bought from can at www.aliexpress.com/store/912059400 be found, and they do have standalone Machinist X99 D8 MAX listings.
Which key is for entering in bios? I have the same motherboard. Thanks
It responds to either “DEL” or “ESC” to enter the BIOS. The onboard speaker chirps a little bit, right before the possibility to press the key.
I noted my towel in a room that was not mine, and that the dario did not cough on the appropriate step. Curtains! If I was the captain of the SM U24, I would not have known what direction that shirt was going.
Also, Ian Botham was once run out by a cunningly called 5f (and I'd don't mean a cleaning straw).
To actually answer your request, I once 'built' a flammable 'robot'. I don't recall precise Lee how many pigeons (coooooooo-ers, mate) it contained and utilized, but I suspect it was insufficient. Mr B would certain Lee say so.
If you needed more pigeons, you could always improve upon your welding skills.
Nice video! I'm planning to install 2x E5-2697v4, but the board seems to 'officially' support until v3. Did you perform any bios upgrades to make it support v4, or did it just work?
Also, does it support virtualization?
I didn't need any updates. Seems like the v4 chips work just fine. And yes, all the virtual-specific stuff is right there in the BIOS and in ESXi 8.0b works fine for me with it.
Is this system still working 1 year later?
Yes, I can confirm it is. It's doing some important stuff in my personal estate. As of today, it is showing 402 days since it was last rebooted.
All you have to do now is pay the electricity bill. I had two of these boards running Seti and Folding at Home until the first bill hit the mat. They are buried in a cupboard now with a warning notice.
The era of Xeon E5v4 is not a good choice for low power use. Any of the 16+ core chips were ≥120W, and so that's already a bad starting point for a dual CPU machine running 100% load 24×7. Pair that with the fact these Chinese X99 boards generally implement poor power management, and you're going to see a better value return on your power very quickly with a more modern machine.
@@andrewsturmey Agreed and certainly not with a Milliband on the scene. He alone doubled the price of a kWh in a week. Great fun building and experimenting though.
how to enable ram ecc mode ?
I didn't see any BIOS settings specific to enabling the feature. From what I can tell, if you install ECC memory, it will use the ECC feature.
nice video..and can see you like a kid with a new tooy..that face is priceless.lol..happen the same to me as well,so..good..
im on huananzhi x10x99-16d ,but i will love to know ,what do you think ,since this videos...and if works all good..many thanks,mate...
Hello I have the same system running both cpus are visible in BIOS however when I check from task manager and CPUz I can see only 1 socket running. Any way to fix this issue. Much appreciated ps when I run benchmark I see one cpu
Any chance you're trying to do this with a Windows 10/11 edition that is license limited to one socket? Most times people report this it's because they're not running the Pro edition. You could also boot of a Linux live image to check it sees both sockets.
@@andrewsturmeyThanks a lot . upgraded to pro and problem solved 😊
@@andrewsturmey that was it thank you so much : =) just doubled my performance after 7 months
I am pleased to hear you have enjoyed success. I'm interested to know what software you're running that enjoys scaling well across a very parallel core count.
@@andrewsturmey I am gaming 😎
Is your motherboard still working okay these days or is it now having issues? I ask because I am interested in purchasing this motherboard with a couple of e5 2699 v4's.
Yes. It's still working well. No hardware problems to speak of. I also upgraded it since the video with 2.5Gb/s ethernet.
@@andrewsturmey Thank you for replying to my message. I was also looking at the Huananzhi F8D Plus as they look very similar to the Machinist dual socket motherboard you are using. Just out of curiosity would you happen to know how many VRM mosfets per socket are on your motherboard? I can’t seem to find a clear enough picture to see for my self. They would be the little black squares just in front of the little motherboard heatsinks at the top and between the socket and heat sink.
I'm sorry, I've tried to have a look, but no luck, unfortunately. I got a stepladder out to see if I could get above it, and take some photographs through the side panel, but the heatsinks and fans are really big and obscure everything. I cannot readily shut the machine down to get it out either.
I could see some mosfets and inductors, but no way I'm going to be able to give you an answer with any confidence. I am curious as to what you would consider a good number of them. I'd also be inclined to think that it remains a bit of a lottery anyway, with the quality considerations of the component sourcing a lot of these Chinese manufacturers do.
Nice video.
I have a question, i have more or less the same setup. But when i check the status in cpuz, it reads only 1 cpu. While i have 2 xeons installed like yours. Bios though reada both. Am i missing something?
Moreover my motherboard temp is 105 degree Celsius. And i cannot get around that. Even after startup. When i touch the board after shutdown it doent feel like 105 degrees. Any idea?
Could it be that you're using the Home edition of Windows? I believe that is license-restricted to one socket. It's the only thing I can think of which might cause what you're seeing.
Perhaps consider preparing something like a bootable Ubuntu install media? You can run it as a live image and check to see whether both sockets are addressable then.
As for the sensors, then I don't think they're all that reliable. While running HWMonitor on either of my two X99 boards, one thing I can say for sure is that although a small number of the sensors give believable readings, most seem to always return a fixed number or move a tiny amount around a number that doesn't make a lot of sense. CPU temperatures always seem right though.
@@andrewsturmey Thanks a lot Andrew for the hint, that could be the case, I actually used a home edition, I just used it because it was the only USB that I found. I will create an ubunto system to check that out then.
As for the heat from Mobo, I have searched a lot, but cannot find any solution. I had to dismantle all the heatsinks in the Mobo to check if they were misplaced and changed the thermal paste on the Intel chip, which was like a stone. But I didn't test it after this checkup so far, as I didn't have any time yet.
The Mobo is an Asus Z10PE-D8 WS that has dual xeons e5-2699 v3
Hello! I wouldn't bet on Chinese motherboards. All the ones I dealt with were terrible in terms of power consumption, and only a few of them managed to equip a BIOS that reduced power consumption to real, as a rule, the “Chinese BIOS” feeds the CPU directly from the NPP 😀 S1-S5 is not implemented sufficiently in hardware, which makes it impossible to correct these shortcomings via BIOS (WOL, power resume..). The operation of UDIMM RAM is questionable, this is only possible using Intel ME, Intel SPS will only work with RDIMM, LRDIMM. The priority of using Intel ME or Intel SPS depends on the PCB architecture. I equipped some MACHINIST MB (C612) with BIOS with Intel ME, and some could only function with Intel SPS. X99-D8 MAX has a JTPM1 connector, therefore, it is possible to develop a TPM2.0 module specifically for this board.
And on a sad note, I can note that I suggest that the owners of this board create a BIOS, but there are too few of them and they cannot organize themselves, so there will most likely be neither a BIOS nor a TPM 🥺 And the price of this motherboard is very inflated by the Chinese compared to aftermarket offerings (this is appropriate, the "new Chinese X99" uses a used C612), ASUS, Supermicro, DELL, Fujitsu, etc... can get cheap, definitely these boards with less number of shortcomings and preparing a BIOS without Chinese surprises 😉
This is an excellent insight, and something anyone considering this board should take very seriously. I can certainly confirm this build I've done gulps down energy very inefficiently.
@@andrewsturmey If the community gets together, I will create a BIOS and TPM2.0 for this board. Interest in Chinese boards has decreased due to high costs and lack of proper support for many problems.
what program cmd do you use ? to transcode ?
I run FFmpeg, and the settings used, specific to the video codec, are:
-c:v libx264 -crf 16 -profile:v high -level:v 5.2 -preset veryslow -x264-params open_gop=1
This motherboard support 4 memory chanels per cpu or in total?
My understanding is that each channel on each processor goes to a discrete slot. Certainly the slots identify as A1 through H1, implying to me this is right. We can assume fully populating the board gives 4 memory channels per processor.
Cutting network pci card was genius dude. I give you thumbs up and subscription also. Jest tell us. Is your wife watch your video? May be this is the reasone why I missed prices for the hardware.
I'm pleased the Dremel work on the network card was a highlight. That's how real server professionals do it!
And yes, my wife knows I've wasted a lot of money on my two X99 projects! Also, my ongoing electricity bill for such inefficient age of technology continuing to run.
@andrewsturmey Then I hope you never see Miky The Blue Eye 👁 💙 😅 If I spend so much money for Aliexpress defenetly my wifi will going to show me "Miky the Blue Eye".
thinking of making a budget PC both for gaming and work, would you recommend machinist brand? im buying a Xeon E5 2697AV4.
I can say this solution works very well for me as a server specifically. You should certainly compare to the cost of building a low-to-mid-range desktop based around something like Ryzen 5 5500 though, and its comparable benchmark.
Is there a hidden xmp option in the AMI bios? I just built my server and the ram latency seems it be an issue at load for me. Additionally, is there a way to enable turbo or XTU?
I didn't see any automatic option for XMP, but all timings can be specified manually in there, if you know what your memory's profiles support. If you're running dual processors, also consider that memory access to non-local NUMA nodes (i.e. one processor accessing the other processor's connected memory channels) is very high latency. Dual processors only make things faster for quite particular workload scenarios.
Miyconst has a great TH-cam channel that you should look up. He has content pertaining to enabling boost clocks on Xeon on these platforms. It's not something I've needed to do for my use cases, and so haven't experimented with this at all. Also, to the best of my knowledge, XTU isn't supported on these server platforms, though I'd be surprised if you couldn't set all the settings it has, directly in the BIOS.
@@andrewsturmey thanks this is helpful
@@andrewsturmey Can you please point me in the right direction to where you can manually specify the timings? The BIOS I have with mine (same board) seems very limited in options by design. I see in the IntelRCSteup menu I can adjust freq but that is about it :(
I cannot look directly on this Machinist board, as I have the server running 24×7 usually. However, I do recall my Jiahuayu board's BIOS being as-near-as-makes-no-difference the same for these settings, and so I'll refer to that.
• Go into “IntelRCSetup” ▸ “Memory Configuration” ▸ “Memory Timings & Voltage Override”.
• Set “DIMM profile” = “Manual”.
• Refer to the memory's reference document for XMP profile settings for each value.
If you are missing those settings, then you probably will need to find a guide on how to patch and reflash the BIOS to expose the settings. That is probably a bit nearing the edge of my day-to-day familiarity to advise on.
@@andrewsturmey got it thanks. It is indeed not an option in the machinist. Time to dig for a patch
For what purpose are you all using these boards for if you don't mind me asking?
I bought the original Jiahuayu board to build a dual-socket home server, as I wanted to move some of my VMs from the datacentre to be local. I only then bought this board because I couldn't get the second socket to work in the first board.
I did manage to repurpose the other one as a basic file server for storing backups. I do have a new Huananzhi board that arrived at the end of last year, that I've not done anything with yet, which I must get around to unboxing and finding some sort of use for.
Can this movo run 4 GPUs at x16 3.0?
I can confirm that all 4 of the PCIe slots are x16 connected directly to CPUs. Do consider that the middle pair of slots are directly next to one another, and so the top one of the two would only be able to take a single-wide card, such as the Nvidia workstation or datacentre models, or low-end consumer.
Okay thanks so much
How many PCIe lines support this motherboard from each PCIe-connectors?
Does it support 4 GPUs with x16 lanes each?
x16 work all 4. 32 from 1 cpu + 32 from 2 cpu.
@@Daniel-mp7bv Wow! 4x RTX4090 may be running at full speed
@@АлександрПетровский-я7б i think 4090 have pci-e v4.0 but 2011-3 platform only 3.0.
So it will only be half the maximum speed of 4090, in theory, but it will depend on the task.
im runing for like 4 years/ xeon e5 2666 v3 same machinist with 64 gb ram and 6800 now .. i woud say im happy with the 130 buks for mb+ram+cpu spent
hi andrew...i will like to buy,that headtorch ,you wearing...looks powerful one,and im like you,assembling motherboards...even in the night..lol..tanks andrew
It is good. It's a Letour W608 and here is a link to exactly what I bought:
▸ www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07QK6GXRT
Hi! Thx for such interesting video!
Greetings
Do you advice buying a motherboard like this or should I go for single processor or just forget about this Chinese motherboard.
And goto maybe mini or normal servers
Thank you for your comment. I would certainly only consider a build like this if it's as an enthusiast pursuit. In terms of simplicity and performance for your money, a more ordinarily sized, single processor build, based on a modern processor would be better. Chinese X99 is a lot of ‘fun’ though.
First of all, great video. It's hard to find much information about this platform, let alone this specific motherboard. This was helpful. Second, I have been searching for an answer to a question and can't seem to find one. Perhaps your insight can help me.
I've seen comments that say an IOMMU toggle is nowhere to be found in the BIOS. But others say that it is. I suspect those that can't enable IOMMU have an older BIOS version. However, I can't find any kind of confirmation of that. Would it be possible for you to check yout BIOS and see if it is an option? If so, what is the BIOS version?
I ask because GPU passthrough is going to be critical to my planned Proxmox server and workloads. I already have two 2698v3 CPUs I salvaged from a local server. So it would be nice to be able to put them to use.
Any help would be appreciated. Cheers.
I can confirm that on both X99 boards I have, this is present. In fact, I would go as far as to say that this scene seems to have the most presented configurability in any BIOS setups that I've ever come across. Plus, the community has good information about modifying BIOSes to enable even more weird and wonderful edge-case stuff.
While I didn't mention it in either of my videos, I did try out PCIe passthrough specifically, though it wasn't a GPU, but rather unusually a 4-port USB card. All seen fine by the guest and worked without problems. Don't know how you might get on with vGPU, but no reason for me to think that wouldn't work either.
Worth noting that my experience on this is all with VMware ESXi, but really early on when I was troubleshooting with the other board, I did live boot into Debian and did need to briefly use a QEMU/KVM invocation; also worked fine, though didn't involve any passthrough.
@@andrewsturmey
As long as enabling IOMMU is available in the BIOS I should be able to get it to work with a GPU. Coincidently, another PCIe card I will need to passthrough will be a USB card. So that's good to know you didn't have any issues.
From what I have found on the Proxmox forums, X99 appears to be a well established and used often. Though, information about this specific Motherboard is very rare.
Nevertheless, I will be going with this board. Thank you very much for your help and information.
No problem. Pleased I could provide some information. Lots of IOMMU-related settings, most for things I've never heard of and assume are best left to platform defaults.
My passthrough of a USB card was for as direct as possible a connection of UAS storage to a TrueNAS VM as a place to ship ZFS snapshots for backup.
If I had to guess, I'd say your use case sounds like a desktop OS. That is something I have experimented with before, making a dual-headed setup with one Windows and one Ubuntu running concurrently off the same machine. Wasn't on X99, but did work well.
Her majesty postal service ..
Long may Her Majesty's legacy serve as a beacon to our people. Long live the King!
Oh that jazzy part....
Are both M2 NVMe slots PCIe 3.0x4?
Or one of them is version 2.0?
I can confirm both connected with direct CPU lanes, not via chipset. No contended bandwidth, both are PCIe 3 x4.
@@andrewsturmey Hi. Does it possible to combine two NVME in RAID 0? I have same motherboard and stiil trying to find any information how to RAID is to RAID 0. Any ideas?
I think it's not trivially possible simply with BIOS setup. The age of this architecture and processor family predates mainstream adoption of today's NVMe connection and form factor, so I expect there would need to be a lot of extra work on the part of the motherboard designer to do so.
That isn't to say you couldn't install Linux using just a small part of the first NVMe, and then do a partition-based RAID 0 setup in the remaining space across two drives, and still get the associated performance improvements for a data volume.
Nvmea raid setup help me
I'm wondering if this board allows you to activate virtualization from the BIOS like most modern boards. I think I heard you say you were going to install ESXi on this board. Just want to verify.
With factory BIOS settings, mine came with all the virtual features enabled by default. I'm running ESXi 8 with no problems, though during installation it did give an ‘end of life’ type warning that this processor generation might not be supported in a future version.
What cooler from noctua is that?
They are Noctua NH-U12DX i4.
@@andrewsturmey Out of curiousity how is the machine performing? I was thinking about using this mobo for a VM server. I'm leaning more towards a supermicro board now.
Taking into consideration that these E5-2683 v4 processors are 2016 models, and therefore many generations old at this point, I'd have to say the performance is excellent. From what I can tell, the board is causing no detriment whatsoever.
Certainly the emerging Chinese board makers showing to be of good quality, such as Huananzhi and Machinist, are putting out decent stuff at a very accessible price point, but in comparison with your mentioned Supermicro, they're still not up there yet.
I've used a lot of Supermicro professionally, in the datacentre, and it's simply really good. If you need something completely dependable, that's still a better choice than this. But like I said, likely more expensive, and I've certainly no complaints about my Machinist.
thank for sharing!!!
Running ESXi 8.0b on this hardware, I've not had the ESX host or any Linux, BSD, or Windows guests panic/bugcheck at all. I will say, though, that although I've got a mixture of ages of Linux and BSD kernels, my Windows guests are all very old Windows versions.
thank you very much for you response
I'm considering purchasing this motherboard, but I have heard bad things about the machinist bios. The main thing I'm interested in is pcie bifurcation. Planing to run many nvme drives. Does this motherboard support pcie bifurcation?
I actually think the stock BIOS that comes with this board is really quite good; although you don't exhaustively get every capability possible, I doubt many people using this platform as a server would find anything missing.
I have two PCIe 4×4 NVMe cards on this board now. Bifurcation works flawlessly, albeit there's no auto-detection, so you do have to set the ports manually in the BIOS.
@@andrewsturmey Thanks for the response.
Is it durable?
We've gone past a year and a half without a reboot at this point, and not a single sign of a problem. Mine, at least, seems durable. But always remember that the Chinese X99 boards can be a bit of a reliability lottery at times.
Thank you
All datacentre need more jazz
I hear you recently went to Kristiansand to visit a datacentre. How would you rate the jazz of the servers you installed there?
i have an HP z600 2 XEON 192gb RAM. and work great. i want a new one. and i want to buy the HUANANZHI X99-F8D PLUS.
Kepp going,
O, nooo. Again, won't boot. No-o... Restart? Training 8 dimm slots only. How long? Finally! Running. The case is real server :) Leds are so important. 😂😂😂
amazing
that's so powerful
Server mobo with these dimm slots orientation? O, nooo 😂😂😂😂
The good news is, at least Noctua orientation is correct. It is for desktop. Not to mention for low price per performance of Noctua g@rbage.
I am waiting for the price and cinebench r23 score. Then will post comment like this one. One i9 cpu and cheap mobo with ddr5 192GB RAM for 2K and score 40K is good idea. Your "server" will never hit 40K score on cinebench even with dual xeon. I9 13gen for 400$. And it work at first start.
Hands down, nobody should be buying X99 here in 2023 for price vs performance, or any amount of future-proofness.
For the same money, buying current or previous generation Intel or AMD desktop gear is definitely, definitely the right thing to do.
Also, these Chinese boards are a huge gamble, like most things on AliExpress, and so someone can easily end up with a whole lot spent on nothing to show for it.
You have my full agreement on all of your recent comments. This was a fun project for me. But I would be disappointed had I gone into it hoping for value for either money spent or time spent.
I want this only for gaming
A word of warning, though; dual-processor operation does bring high memory access latency cross-socket. While software that is aware of this can handle it cleverly, that does not generally include games. Games often run worse with a second processor.
Me? Me!
Very funny 😂😂😂😂
links to alllllllllllllll theeeee stufffff thx!!!
Peas ruin a meal
It's a while since we popped into The Anchorage for some crab, scallop, and sorrel lasagne.
The boot takes. so. looooong.
Indeed it does. I can confirm first boot after the CMOS battery was removed is especially slow, but it's still much, much longer than a typical consumer board even thereafter. Not a big problem for a server that's rarely rebooted (I think since this video I've only rebooted twice), but annoying when first setting up and iterating changes.
O, I see. This mobo... someone eat two ram channels:) 😂😂😂 No-o-o.
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