Gigabyte X399 AORUS Gaming 7 Works As A Linux-Friendly Threadripper Motherboard

[Adarion]

The SoundblasterX 720 thing that the product page mentions, is a software layer.

Ah, thanks. Yes, I was wondering why there would be a bigger RT Chip, but still some additional SB part. Okay, if this is just some optional W32-software it'll be okay.

[starshipeleven]

If you can't buy a Epyc-based server because Intel holds manufacturers by balls, you can still buy Naples-like ThreadRipper hardware. Don't mind the leds, there is the LAN you need, 16cores/32threads CPU, server graded components and ECC ram support up to 128GB.

ECC on consumer hardware isn't validated, so while it seems to work it's not certified to work.

[illwieckz]

ECC on consumer hardware isn't validated, so while it seems to work it's not certified to work.

Many servers from big vendors (Dell, HP…) I've put my hands on the last 9 years had very 'validated' and 'certified' problem, like one having a NIC that hangs when you just do a `lspci -v` (it was a defect for all the servers of this kind, I've got multiple ones and all were affected). Another one didn't have any option to show single drives to the OS without having to make a raid0 with one drive for each drive (who said plug an play?, who said btrfs, who said zfs? Another one that were in-factory thermal management disabled so that leaded to unattended crashes : costly vendor support replaced the motherboard multiple time and the company paid costly warrant extension for that until I found that the thermal management mechanism was disabled for this precise model and was not enable-able at all (it was written in a very small line in the documentation that this power management disablement was a feature of this precise model, other variants had, that was a server I “inherited” from the company who had hired me at this time, and it was the one in recommendation document for this kind of job), etc. etc. Oh, I also discovered that redoing the thermal paste on that server allowed us to not reach the shutdown limit (under the same very-thermal-controlled environment than before)… Well, in fact I discovered they were not using thermal paste at all, but a kind of solid carbon sheet instead (that was probably more acting as a thermal insulator since it added one additional layer of misconduct to the original one when using nothing, I've never seen that again). That was my “certified” and “validated” experience. I still have in production some of these servers which can lose their network link just doing “lspci -v”, what a joke. And you probably know that very big problem of waiting 15min to boot a server with 32Gb or ram? or things like that? And I haven't told you any horror story about faulty boot sequences due to bios misconception yet, when a drive is bootable by hundreds of computer but the server, and one random drive (same exact model) with exact same setup is, by bootable I mean the BIOS being able to find out the drive and find out the bootloader in time… I unwrapped many of brand new drives (and did the dd dance each time to put the exact same 1:1 system on it) before finding “the good one”.

I'm not sure these "uncertified consumer hardware with unvalidated ECC" will be worst than those costly and faulty-by-design hardware. The thing is : there is one kind of hardware you can't be fired for having bought them, no one can be fired for having bought HP or Dell servers you know.

[coder111]

Oh hell, I feel for you man. The thing I am really mad about is that major corporations & banks (I'm a software dev working for one at the moment) will keep buying same crap hardware from same crap vendors, and the managers making purchasing decisions won't give a damn about the actual problems... I have similar stories about problems and purchasing decisions with software...

Many servers from big vendors (Dell, HP…) I've put my hands on the last 9 years had very 'validated' and 'certified' problem...

[starshipeleven]

I'm not sure these "uncertified consumer hardware with unvalidated ECC" will be worst than those costly and faulty-by-design hardware. The thing is : there is one kind of hardware you can't be fired for having bought them, no one can be fired for having bought HP or Dell servers you know.

This is what I was talking about. Unless it is certified it won't get bought, regardless of the fact that it may work fine or not.

Because certification is a magic thing that allows the company to move the responsibility to someone else if the certified feature goes wrong, and many companies care more about legal responsibility than of shit actually working at all.

[edwaleni]

This is what I was talking about. Unless it is certified it won't get bought, regardless of the fact that it may work fine or not.

Because certification is a magic thing that allows the company to move the responsibility to someone else if the certified feature goes wrong, and many companies care more about legal responsibility than of shit actually working at all.

Correct. Except companies like Facebook don't really care about it. If the board fails for whatever reason, they simply swap it out.

Companies like Backblaze have found no measurable difference between consumer hardware and certified hardware in 24x7 use cases.

So I agree, the whole certification angle is to measure risk and deflect blame when something goes awry.

[asyn]

Can you confirm bluetooth is working well on this board?

[starshipeleven]

Can you confirm bluetooth is working well on this board?

According to the Gigabyte website, it is using a Intel AC 8265 wifi+bluetooth (it's usually a minipcie/NGFF card for laptops), so you can try googling about linux support for that.