c246 or z390 ?

Y

you2

[H]ard|Gawd
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Aug 10, 2004
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I'm thinking about upgrading my 2500k this year - mostly because the mb is beginning to show minor issues and it seems like 8 years is long enough.
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Leaning towards c246 since it had 8 sata ports; any advantage to the z390 ?
 
With the c246 you'll be limited to Xeon E series chips. I'd stick with the z390 unless you have a need for ECC. It shouldn't be hard to find a z390 board with 8 SATA ports
 
As the others have said, the C246 is pretty much for xeons with the xeon requirement for ECC memory.
Not really needed for a general purpose home PC. You would be far cheaper (and better) off with the Z360 & lineup of 9th gen i7 & i9 CPUs. Not only that but there is far better 3rd party support out there for the mainstream Intel desktop systems.
 
The z390 with 8 sata ports use ams chip for the extra 2; as intel chipset only supports 6. The c246 supports 8 native. Also confused becauase the c236 and c246 motherboards have support for video but the xeon e series do not have video (or at least the specs I saw showed no gpu).

lucidrenegade said:
With the c246 you'll be limited to Xeon E series chips. I'd stick with the z390 unless you have a need for ECC. It shouldn't be hard to find a z390 board with 8 SATA ports
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C246 doesn't support any of the consumer parts - to really take advantage of the Intel ecosystem you will want a 9700K or a 9900K as they ship at very aggressive clock speeds and can go even higher overclocked.
If you are planning on running stock and are content with 4GHz the Ryzen 2700X becomes a strong contender - its street price is substantially less than even the 9700K's, it has hyperthreads, and it comes with a really good stock cooler.
 
What 'consumer parts' are not supported by the c246 ? Can you just mention a couple ?

The problem I have with ryzen is the chipset. I want lots of sata ports.

bwang said:
C246 doesn't support any of the consumer parts - to really take advantage of the Intel ecosystem you will want a 9700K or a 9900K as they ship at very aggressive clock speeds and can go even higher overclocked.
If you are planning on running stock and are content with 4GHz the Ryzen 2700X becomes a strong contender - its street price is substantially less than even the 9700K's, it has hyperthreads, and it comes with a really good stock cooler.
Click to expand...
 
you2 said:
What 'consumer parts' are not supported by the c246 ? Can you just mention a couple ?

The problem I have with ryzen is the chipset. I want lots of sata ports.
Click to expand...

If you want tons of sata ports I would point you to the HEDT platforms like the Threadripper + X399 setup. If you don't have enough onboard sata ports there is absolutely nothing stopping you from adding one or more add-on cards with oodles more. And you won't break the bank to get them. My board has 8 sata ports plus three pci3 4x 3.0 M.2 ports that can support raid-0.
 
The AMD X399 chipset drives them. It doesn't use a 3rd-party controller to add ports. The chipset supports up to 12 ports directly, but the ASRock only put 8 onboard. I guess they figured with 3x M.2 ports that it was enough. I suspect most of the X399 boards have a similar number of them.

Since I am living in the AMD HEDT world I am not sure how many pcie lanes and sata ports are provided in Intel's solutions. But I suspect that there are a similar number of pcie lanes and sata ports available.
 
No. The consumer desktop supports up to 6 sata; and the c246 up to 8 (via the intel chipset). Some boards have more sata ports via third party chipset. Asrock used to have a board that included an lsi controller but I don' think they make that solution any longer.
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The x399 supports only thread ripper cpu ? Those are a bit overkill for my target usage. I'd be happy with the equivalent of an intel i5 - but i have to have either 10 sata ports or 8 sata ports non-shared with 1 m.2.
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Oh well. Hum. I guess I could stick the boot disk on the ams chip if i have to but I think the x399 might result in an excessively expensive system.

cyberguyz said:
The AMD X399 chipset drives them. It doesn't use a 3rd-party controller to add ports. The chipset supports up to 12 ports directly, but the ASRock only put 8 onboard. I guess they figured with 3x M.2 ports that it was enough. I suspect most of the X399 boards have a similar number of them.

Since I am living in the AMD HEDT world I am not sure how many pcie lanes and sata ports are provided in Intel's solutions. But I suspect that there are a similar number of pcie lanes and sata ports available.
Click to expand...
 
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Just to give you a heads up the c246 is not a desktop chip. You need a xeon cpu, and possibly ecc memory to to use it. It sits in the server/workstation gray area between desktop and HEDT systems. You might find it ends up being more costly in the end than a lower end threadripper system like a 1900x (which would give you all the expansion room I mentioned - only with an 8-core/16-thread CPU).The motherboard is more expensive (They usually pack a lot of stuff on them), but the bottom end chip is cheaper than price of a decent xeon and you can use plain-ol' ddr4 memory without getting into more expensive ecc stuff.

But you are right that desktop chipsets, both AMD's and Intel's, pretty much top out at 6 without adding onboard controllers for a couple more. I am assuming you are looking to one or more raid arrays requiring all the sata ports rather than doing a big file server or something. You can probably get away with the Z390 for that by adding in a SATA raid card (you don't have to configure them as raid if you don't want to - they just support it) from guys like Promise and Highpoint. Newegg & Amazon has tons of them. Also there may be motherboards with an on-controller onboard to give you a couple more sata ports. Just remember with the mainstream desktops you will have to choose between one or more features if you use them. There is simply a lack of pcie lanes available to go around.

Hope this helps.
 
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Xeon is cheap; the one I checked out was just around $200. I don't need another feature; this machine is not a gaming machine. Just 1/2 decent sound and 9 sata ports (or 8 sata ports and m.2). The x399 is not a bad solution but price wise with the cpu it looks to be a few hundred more with no real benefit. If the x399 would support the less expensive amd cpu that would be a decent solution for myself. Maybe when the x499 comes out the x399 will drop in price. I'd like to get something at the end of Nov but the time is not critical.


cyberguyz said:
Just to give you a heads up the c246 is not a desktop chip. You need a xeon cpu, and possibly ecc memory to to use it. It sits in the server/workstation gray area between desktop and HEDT systems. You might find it ends up being more costly in the end than a lower end threadripper system like a 1900x (which would give you all the expansion room I mentioned - only with an 8-core/16-thread CPU).The motherboard is more expensive (They usually pack a lot of stuff on them), but the bottom end chip is cheaper than price of a decent xeon and you can use plain-ol' ddr4 memory without getting into more expensive ecc stuff.

But you are right that desktop chipsets, both AMD's and Intel's, pretty much top out at 6 without adding onboard controllers for a couple more. I am assuming you are looking to one or more raid arrays requiring all the sata ports rather than doing a big file server or something. You can probably get away with the Z390 for that by adding in a SATA raid card (you don't have to configure them as raid if you don't want to - they just support it) from guys like Promise and Highpoint. Newegg & Amazon has tons of them. Also there may be motherboards with an on-controller onboard to give you a couple more sata ports. Just remember with the mainstream desktops you will have to choose between one or more features if you use them. There is simply a lack of pcie lanes available to go around.

Hope this helps.
Click to expand...
 

Old post I know but the c246 can run more than xeon cpus............​

Processor / System Bus​

1 x Socket LGA1151
Intel® Xeon® processor E-2100 family
The 8th/9th generation Intel® Core™ i3/Pentium®/Celeron® Processor
Intel® Core™ i9/i7/i5/i3 processors
Intel® Xeon® E Processors
E-2100/E-2200
*Refer to support page for more information
*Please refer to overview for details

Core Logic​

Intel® C246 Chipset
 
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