Haswell Xeon is way too outdated in 2022, but there are loads of newer ones. There's a fair inventory of Skylake and Cascade Lake Xeon on ebay, like HP Z4 G4 w/ 32GB and a GPU for ~$750. It's a pretty square deal considering. Since Ice Lake Xeon workstations are so thin on the ground, this is the most recent Xeon you can get second-hand.
The Ryzen story is a joke if you are actually in the market for a workstation, meaning you want ECC that works. The only way to get it is to buy integrated OEM workstations with the TR Pro.
ASRock has universally working implementations. I should not have said "the only way" when I meant "the only reliable way that does not require you to carefully parse thousands of forum comments to figure out which Asus or Gigabyte motherboard does or does not support ECC".
I am in the middle of an Intel Xeon build and I happen to agree.
Searching for a simple answer to question: "does this CPU + chipset + this particular motherboard actually support ECC DRAM" is infuriating.
Thousands of words on the RGB lighting and the overclocking tweaks, silence on ECC support. It's insane.
Went through four rounds of ECC DRAM (that was on the manufacturer's supported config list) on a Gigabyte board, never got it to POST.
I finally gave up on that one. Bought an Asus X99 WS setup, with Xeon and RAM, from a vendor on eBay.
I can fix simple things, but debugging a configuration in this gamer-saturated market is beyond my current skill level. Once I have at least something working end-to-end, I can bootstrap up to a working machine. But the dead stare of failed POST was a tough one.
It's outdated if you need a high-performance workstation. As a regular desktop PC, it runs just fine. Would work quite well as a NAS CPU, with ECC support and downclocked to some lower P-state.
However, I don't think these were ever available for $50 as author suggests. It all really depends on the price point. At $50, I would buy 1 right now, just to have as a backup/guest PC in the living room.
Interestingly enough, just picked up a dual xeon silver HP Z6 for roughly that amount of money, seems like they are rolling off warranty and getting disposed of.
It took me an obscene amount of time to get macos catalina running on it, however. The latest firmware and/or quadro k5000 just make it permahang.
Many retail AM4 motherboards support ECC with retail Ryzen CPUs. At least on Linux it works as expected. ECC UDIMMs can be difficult to find but it shouldn't be necessary to buy a TR Pro for ECC if memory capacity, I/O lanes and the performance of AM4 Ryzen CPUs suffice.
I haven't looked into deeply but I've heard stories from others with Ryzen boxes that ECC features of the RAM are turned off with Ryzen CPUs installed. Supposedly you can see this in Linux w/dmidecode or other tools. I'd appreciate good links if anybody has them.
Ryzen APUs (i.e., Socket AM4 CPUs with with integrated AMD graphics) do _not_ support ECC UDIMM, _unless_ they carry a "Pro" in their name.
Ryzen CPUs without an iGPU _will_ support ECC UDIMM, _unless_ the mainboard specs specifically tell you that it won't support ECC, or simply omit mentioning ECC UDIMM at all.
Fwiw, I've enjoyed proper ECC on an ASRock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming-ITX/ac with a Ryzen 5 3600 for more than two years now (using GNU/Linux; I am not sure how Windows would fare).
The Ryzen story is a joke if you are actually in the market for a workstation, meaning you want ECC that works. The only way to get it is to buy integrated OEM workstations with the TR Pro.