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Machinist X99 Motherboards?

Chuck(G) said:
From what I understand, these Machinist boards use chips from servers sent to China for recycling. Which explains the server RAM in them. Actually, I applaud the re-use of old server hardware.
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They use chips from wherever they can get them. There are a lot of weird motherboards where they'll rig up a desktop chipset to a server socket, or have a server chipset with a desktop south bridge or other nonsense. It usually works, but I'd stay way from the more "exotic" bizarre looking ones, like the dual socket boards.
 
I wouldn't say the VRMs are low end, more like there aren't enough of them. I'd definitely get a board that has at least a heatsink on the VRMs as LGA2011 chips do consume a lot of power.

The board I linked to earlier has a VRM heatsink. It does get quite warm if you don't have a fan blowing on it, like if you use a tower heatpipe cooler.
 
I'm wondering if I could adapt my big copper 120mm fan heatsink to that socket; I bought it years ago and it's still in the blister pack. An Ultra X-Wind U12-40602
 
It looks like that cooler is a knockoff of the Zalman flower cooler. The stud spacing on LGA2011 is much larger than 775/115x, so you'd probably have to fabricate some mounts. Mounting pressure would also be a problem, LGA2011 needs some pretty stiff mounting pressure to get even pressure distribution across the large die.
 
There are still LGA2011 compatible coolers on the market. Noctua only recently stopped supplying LGA2011 mounting kits with their coolers in-box. You could request them if needed.
 
These Machinst boards frequently come with a plastic adapter ring that allows the use of AM3 compatible coolers on LGA-2011 by providing spots for the latches to catch.
 
There are some coolers for Socket AM4 CPUs that still use the motherboard provided latches. They should be the same dimensions as AM2/3.
 
It's basically the same board I have, just a different color. I'm not a fan of the neon green, but it will work fine.

You'll definitely want a good cooler, the E5-2690v4 is a 135W TDP CPU, though it will definitely pull more than that because Intel lies about their TDP.

I have a cooler similar to this one: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805580117931.html

It runs great even at sustained full load with a single fan between the heatsinks. Just make sure you select the LGA2011 option to get the right brackets.
 
Chuck(G) said:
It is a bit strange seeing PS/2 mouse and keyboard sockets on a motherboard this late.
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Some years ago, gamers raged that the PS/2 port was removed and they couldn't use their Model M or other similarly ancient keyboards, so it got added back at some point and stayed ever since.

It's nice having a PS/2 port over USB because PS/2 has a dedicated interrupt so the CPU can't ignore it, vs USB polling. And you're not having to waste a USB port for HID devices. Some modern motherboards have a paltry amount of stock USB ports.
 
If you get the one you linked to, the memory included is likely Micron or Samsung server memory with an added heat sink. You can find the memory model information in CPU-Z once you've booted it up to buy matching modules to get another 2x16GB modules for 64GB total with quad channel memory.
The Xeon E5-2690 v4 has a 2.6 base clock and 3.5 boost, good enough for most uses and even light gaming. 14 cores / 28 threads will be plenty.
 
These boards tend to ignore Intel boosting guidelines and will crank up all 14 cores to max boost more often than not to get more consistent performance. It does make them eat a lot more power though.
 
The E5-2699v3 is the older Haswell generation. v4 chips are Broadwell. There's not much performance difference between the two generations. The 2699v3 has 18 cores and a base clock of 2.3 GHz, with a boost clock of 3.6 GHz. The 2690v4 has a slightly higher base clock of 2.6 GHz and a boost of 3.5 GHz.

The 2690v4 would be slightly faster unless you had a workload that used more cores/threads.
 
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