I'm looking at building something new. My Ryzen build never happened because, well, life. Now at a point it can. However... I've seen a few of the Chinese X99 Xeon E5 builds, and that looks like a LOT of compute power for not that much money. Has anyone got any firsthand experience? Gotcha's? Not familiar with this level of enterprise CPU. Looking at a minimum of, 12c/24t, 64GB in quad channel, but open to more as long as the cost jump isn't silly. Rig will be used for various 3D/Music/video production tasks. Already have a 145W CPU so not worried about power draw in the slightest, and a quick look at comparison sites suggests an E5 2697 will slay my current setup in both single (newer) and multicore (more of them), despite a lower base clock speed.
I have a Machinest/jingua (forget the spelling) x99, 64GB DDR (2x32GB) and a single E5 2699 V4 going spare, but I used the same rig with 2x 2699's and a combination of 128gb and 256gb setups that I used for software engineering/development. I had several of them in fact and they performed better than the Sunmicro/dell/HP server counterparts I also had/have/used in terms of reliability. I'm also trying to shift it, as I've had a change of a career. If you have any questions, please do let me know.
Sods law, as mine (at long last) arrives tomorrow. Machinist MR9A Pro, 2680 v4. That said, I'm always interested in a decently priced bit of kit. Drop me a PM with what you have if you haven shifted it.
The main downside of these is power efficiency and lack of official windows 11 support. Great otherwise I believe for Linux / windows 10 builds.
Just an update to say what I got was spot on. Machinist store on AliExpress, (Biased, I used to be a machinist). Links to similar item at end of post. No affiliate, no kickbacks, just info for those interested. Machinist MR9A (Non-Pro), Xeon E5-2680v4, 2x 16GB DDR4 (with room for 2 more, quad channel), cheap little 3 fan cooler (No RGB) that is surprisingly effective, almost certainly wont need to go with water. I added a 512GB NvME bought off here that I hadn't put in a system yet, and a small SSD to transfer stuff over. The case is a old-as-dust CM Stacker STC-T01 that I've had for about 20 years. It'll get more spinning rust added when I organise it all and transfer it over, if I don't decide to rationalise all the drives into a RAID10 NAS and put it in that. It's got Linux Mint 21.3 Installed. We'll give Blender a little spin later to push it, but initial impressions are very good indeed. Kind of amazed you can build this for well under £300. Certainly blows the Bulldozer based system out of the water. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005677156371.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005170272660.html
