Thread for those of you with Chinese x99/x79/x58/etc boards

[Radium_Angel]

What has your experience been? Past or present, I figure we could use a thread here to discuss these salvage boards. I have built 3 systems using x99 boards with Xeon CPUs.  Two for myself, and one for a friend. They have all been "Machinist" brand boards. The first one I built was in 2020 and suffered from several known issues at the time, mainly:

(1) Temp readouts were pure fiction

(2) and often locked the system up attempting to read anything other than CPU/GPU

(3) USB 3.0 ports were highly temperamental and would more often than not, lock the system up when used for anything more than brief data transfers.

(4) Suspect VRMs

 

(4) was easily fixed with a horizontal cooler on the CPU blowing downward and an exhaust fan out the back. 

(1-3) were never resolved.

 

The board was Linux friendly and I never suffered BSoDs under Windows or issues under Linux. The one I built for a friend suffered a power surge that wiped out the PSU, but left everything else untouched (which surprised me, I hadn't expected the board to be that robust) so it was an easy fix. A testimony to the PSU more than anything I suppose.

 

The latest Machinist board I am using, x99-k9 v2, solves all of the issues that plagued the first version. VRMs now have beefy heatsinks (and some of the x99 boards for sale even have active VRM cooling) accurate temps all around with no lockups, and USB 3.0 no longer causes hardlocks. I'm using a Xeon e5-2690 v4 CPU (14c/28t) and under benchmarks it's equal or better than my Ryzen 5 5600g system, for a fraction of the cost.

 

As a matter of fact, the board/cpu/RAM combo set me back under 70$ during an xmas sale which was really massive bang for the buck.

It comes with a m.2 nVME and m.2 NGFF SATA connector and neither (at least according to CPU-Z) interfere with the PCIe lanes of the GPU, which is nice.

 

I understand buying these boards is still a hit n miss affair (several of them come with consumer chipsets rather than server ones, but the sellers on AliExpress have been more forthcoming about this sort of thing)  and of course support is still reliant on unofficial websites, but there is a fair amount of knowledge out there. The Eastern Europeans seem to be big fans of these boards because of the bang for the buck.

 

So, what has your experience been like?

[porina]

 

Above is one I had. No stability problems. I never did get higher SATA speeds out of it.

[Radium_Angel]

26 minutes ago, porina said:

I never did get higher SATA speeds out of it.

I did forget to mention the x99-k9 I have has 6 SATA 3.0 ports and from the very brief testing I did, they seems to be true to their word. I do recall the earlier ones were only SATA 2.0.

The BIOS has one million options to tinker with (including overclocking) to your heart's content, but I will be damned if I know what 75% of the settings do. I may post some screenshots here (I'm not at the PC right now) and maybe LTT can help figure out if they are useful to turn on or leave alone.

My original two boards came like yours, plain boxes, my new v2 one came in a shiny box full of product info etc like a mobo from a mainline manufacturer. Machinist at least, is moving up in the world.

[Jerakl]

I don't have one but I've started seeing these (and other older chipset boards - a sandy bridge one to be precise) pop up on my Suggested amazon products and I've always been curious lmao

[Radium_Angel]

2 minutes ago, Jerakl said:

I don't have one but I've started seeing these (and other older chipset boards - a sandy bridge one to be precise) pop up on my Suggested amazon products and I've always been curious lmao

I wouldn't go Sandy Bridge these days, but if you ever wanted to build a Linux-friendly box to learn on, these would be one good way to go.

There is a fellow on YT that exclusively reviews these Chinese salvage mobos if you are interested. And he's not afraid to call out junk as junk if need be.

https://www.youtube.com/c/Miyconst

[Jerakl]

5 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

I wouldn't go Sandy Bridge these days, but if you ever wanted to build a Linux-friendly box to learn on, these would be one good way to go.

There is a fellow on YT that exclusively reviews these Chinese salvage mobos if you are interested. And he's not afraid to call out junk as junk if need be.

https://www.youtube.com/c/Miyconst

Not really my alley, but I was just curious about where they were coming from and how they came about tbh

[Radium_Angel]

3 minutes ago, Jerakl said:

Not really my alley, but I was just curious about where they were coming from and how they came about tbh

China is a dumping ground for tons of old servers, and some very wise person decided to start repurposing all the parts. I'm not certain how long it's been going on, but they've definitely been getting better over time. 

[Blue4130]

7 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

China is a dumping ground for tons of old servers, and some very wise person decided to start repurposing all the parts. I'm not certain how long it's been going on, but they've definitely been getting better over time. 

 

I've got a VERY generic one that my wife used as a daily machine for quite a few years and it has now been turned into a small server. It's been fine for the better part of 7 years. No issues at all, but it is quite limited. No OC, no nvme, two ram slots. Won't run headless, so the x16 slot is taken by a GPU which limits the options for extra drives past the 4 sata unless I want to go with janky x1 sata cards.

[Radium_Angel]

11 hours ago, Blue4130 said:

a VERY generic one

It's kind of amusing to see how all the basic stuff is still in the same place on the new boards, just with prettier colour schemes

[Blue4130]

15 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

It's kind of amusing to see how all the basic stuff is still in the same place on the new boards, just with prettier colour schemes

Yea, it's really had me thinking that I likely have a Huananzi board from before they started actually spending cash on marketing (putting their name on boards) The layout is so similar to all of the other ones. The only markings that are meaningful are E5 ver 3.3a and LGA2011. Not a name or company ID to be seen.

[Radium_Angel]

19 minutes ago, Blue4130 said:

Yea, it's really had me thinking that I likely have a Huananzi board from before they started actually spending cash on marketing (putting their name on boards) The layout is so similar to all of the other ones. The only markings that are meaningful are E5 ver 3.3a and LGA2011. Not a name or company ID to be seen.

Does CPU-Z say or show anything of note?

[Blue4130]

On 1/13/2023 at 10:20 PM, Radium_Angel said:

Does CPU-Z say or show anything of note?

I just checked it, Just lists it as x79 intel and  "To be filled in by OEM"

[Radium_Angel]

15 minutes ago, Blue4130 said:

I just checked it, Just lists it as x79 intel and  "To be filled in by OEM"

lol yeah, kinda typical TBH of those early boards.