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Multi-CPU Support, ECC, Registered RAM & More

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Post

philip May 1, 2015

Recently we rolled out a number of new feature and compatibility updates to the site.

By popular demand, we now support multi-CPU Xeon systems. With supporting motherboards and processors, you can now add multiple CPUs to your build. (Note: Opteron support isn't available yet, but it is on our roadmap.) Similarly, we've added support for registered RAM, and significantly upgraded the number of listings of ECC RAM. As with unbuffered RAM, registered and ECC RAM compatibility checking is available.

Also on the compatibility front, when evaluating power supply compatibility with video cards we now factor in the number of PCI Express power connectors. Previously if the wattage supply was sufficient but there were insufficient power connectors on the power supply, we'd recommend using a molex-to-PCIe adapter. Lately though it seems less and less video cards are shipping with those adapters, so we decided to make the compatibility stricter. Starting today, you'll see incompatibility alerts if the power supply has an insufficient number of 6, 6+2, or 8-pin PCI express power connectors for the video card(s) in your part list.

We hope you find these updates useful, and please let us know if you have any feedback or suggestions! (We also have some great stuff in the works coming soon, so stay tuned!)

Comments Sorted by:

LynxBuilder 14 points 41 months ago

YES. Thank you so much PCPartPicker Team!!!

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TheAmorphousStalker 1 Build 7 points 41 months ago

Thumbs up for this update! Been waiting for that multi-CPU support for practically decades!

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Niyawa 5 points 41 months ago

Thanks for the update, it must've been a lot of work behind putting all that data in a concise database.

I just have one question, has any of the staff considered the possibility of letting the users push requests to help with things like fixing outdated information or even adding new/different versions of products that might only be available in certain retailers?

A fine example would be, there's this kit of DDR4 RAM from Crucial that the website lists with Newegg and Adorama but not with Amazon, even though it's available there as well. The only way to get in touch about those things would be sending a message through the Contact & Imprint link or a direct email to one of the staff, but a more friendly user report interface like "Add another supported retailer" might be a more swift and elegant solution.

I have other ideas of the kind but I'd like to know if the staff has any on the roadmap already or if there's anything else I should be aware before putting any expectations on it.

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manirelli staff 8 Builds 1 point 41 months ago

The best and quickest method is a post over in the part additions/corrections forum.

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Niyawa 3 points 41 months ago

Oh, I see. That's one way I wasn't aware of, thanks.

Still, not everyone will want to create an account just for the purpose of helping and correcting the database. A button that would allow for quicker and more intuitive reports like the one above with the Amazon example sounds like a better implementation. If spam is an issue, a captcha for non-registered users seems like a good measure.

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Thefan630 1 Build 1 point 41 months ago

But but... if you register you can show off your build and pretty Ribbon cables :>

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rkinney 3 points 41 months ago

I was putting together a dual cpu rig, however when I got to the mother board there were none available. When will that become available?

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philip staff submitter 10 Builds 4 points 41 months ago

We're lagging a bit behind on entering in multi-CPU motherboards, but those are on the way soon. Motherboard data entry, particularly for multi-CPU variations, is really labor intensive to capture all the quirks, compatibility variations, etc.

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CynicalUnicorn 3 points 41 months ago

Have you considered crowd-sourcing us for some of the data entry? I'd be more than happy to correct anything inconsistent with the twelve tabs I opened for a new motherboard or power supply whenever I look at options for an upgrade.

Something else I'd like to see is a PCIe cofiguration, but that falls under "labor intensive." For example, an mATX board might have an x16 @ x16 slot, an x1 slot, a legacy PCI slot, and an x16 @ x4 slot. And you'd need to do that for every single board... :/ (Crowd-sourcing the userbase would help a bit for that project.)

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piemancoder 2 points 41 months ago

Me too, I agree (about wanting to help crowd source and the 12 tabs :))

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rootwyrm 1 point 40 months ago

Well, as I mentioned in the past, shoot me any questions about quirks and such and I'll be happy to provide. Manual entry begets manual entry I suppose. Someday I'll modernize it... something I've been saying since the Supermicro P6DNF.

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Memo1010 1 Build 1 point 41 months ago

now

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piemancoder 1 point 41 months ago

I saw an Asus x79 one earlier

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rkinney 1 point 41 months ago

Yeh, they have some dual cup motherboards available however they don't yet have 2011-v3 socket dual cpu motherboards.

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piemancoder 1 point 41 months ago

On the Asus site, there is a button that let's you see all of the motherboards, there is at least one 2011-3 one

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mshafi1001 1 Build 3 points 41 months ago

I only asking this question out curiosity. What big other plans you guys have for the site. Are you guys thinking of expanding out of just PCs, like for example "drone partpicker" or etc. Thanks you guys are the best, PCpartpicker team are the true pioneers of this age. Keep up the work!!

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philip staff submitter 10 Builds 3 points 41 months ago

We do have future plans - both small stuff and crazy ambitious stuff, but we're keeping everything under wraps for now. No plans on a drone part picker, though I did see that someone announced something similar today on Reddit. However, it's safe to expect a steady stream of feature rollouts every month. And we have something fairly large we're working diligently on right now - ETA probably a couple months, maybe less.

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190n 2 Builds 2 points 41 months ago

What about laptop parts?

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mshafi1001 1 Build 1 point 41 months ago

Honestly, I only thought of the "dronepartpicker" because that's the first thing that came to mind. The content you produce on youtube at the moment, is it going to expand on HOW TO tutorials on other computer related stuff, like how to custom water cool or how to set you own media server ...etc . Thx the responding :-) cant wait for the future updates.

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Memo1010 1 Build 2 points 41 months ago

wait........there still are NOT any dual socket MOBOs

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philip staff submitter 10 Builds 3 points 41 months ago

Yes there are, they are just limited right now. We will be expanding the selection soon.

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Memo1010 1 Build 1 point 41 months ago

yeah...i just though there would be dual LGA 2011-3...which i cant actually find anywere so im assuming they dont make it

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criphision 3 Builds 1 point 41 months ago

Actually, I know Asus has a couple of them (one of which Barnacules Nerdgasm used in his recent PC) but I only found one on the PCPartPicker database

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Memo1010 1 Build 1 point 41 months ago

i cant find any MOBOs on pcpartpicker that have two LGA2011-3 slots. In a build useing a CPU with that for example the 18 core 2.5ghz Xeon there is a option to add a second...however there are no MOBOs that come up afterward...

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criphision 3 Builds 1 point 41 months ago

Same thing happened to me too. I just turned off the compatibility filter and chose LGA 2011-3 x2 from the socket list (it was greyed out) and one showed up

http://pcpartpicker.com/part/asus-motherboard-z10pad8

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Continue this thread
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gogo809 3 Builds 2 points 41 months ago

I'm going to second (third? forth?) the notion for crowd sourced changes to parts info. You might have to develop your own module that makes sense. But maybe allow users to enter corrections for certain things (for instance: this MOBO is incompatible with the CPU I have selected). Then, the correction has to be verified by the userbase several times over before it is automatically updated. (Or one of the staff can instantly accept/verify it).

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JamesJB 1 Build 2 points 41 months ago

Awesome site.

Could you add a slider or something under motherboards where it will show if the motherboard can take more than 1 CPU?

I do not know much about motherboards that take 2 or more CPU's so I don't know the names or what to look for to determine what motherboards take more than 1 CPU.

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Memo1010 1 Build 1 point 41 months ago

just the other day i was thinking you should add MOBOs that support 2 cpus.

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mauriciomdea 1 Build 1 point 41 months ago

Very nice indeed, congrats!

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karneychen 1 point 41 months ago

YAY MY PCIE POST GOT THROUGH THANK YOU SO MUCH

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Revosok 1 point 41 months ago

I'm sorry but I don't know what multi cpu motherboards are. Can someone please explain?

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Memo1010 1 Build 1 point 41 months ago

its a motherboard which can have to CPUs at once

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Revosok 1 point 41 months ago

Well...that much is clear but I have no clue how one would work, and what the purpose of one would be.

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piemancoder 1 point 41 months ago

Basically, my understanding is that they are primarily server and workstation boards That are able to have two separate cpus, each with it's own ram, and they work together as one cpu and set of ram. So if I had two 12 core Xeons, and a kit of 64 gb of ram for each of them, Windows would read it as 24 cores available and 128 gb of ram available. However I am definitely NOT an expert on this, so if I am wrong, can someone please correct me?

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CynicalUnicorn 0 points 41 months ago

Nope, you're right. The OS should add all the cores and the RAM together, since they can all communicate at the hardware level. Intel uses their QPI, or quick-path interconnect, bus to transfer data between CPUs.

Things that need a lot of cores - like servers processing requests from thousands of users or render farms compiling data - tend to use them. Alternatively, things that need lots of bandwidth use them too, since multiple memory controllers add their throughputs together.

There are some quirks with some of the software us end-users use however. Some games will break in dual-socket systems for example, and I think you need a copy of Windows Server too.

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Godzlegend1 1 point 41 months ago

Yes Philip! My Budget guide v2 was gonna be a failure without the added PCI-E change! Thanks so much!

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Mikemk 1 point 41 months ago

I found a bug with the power connectors. Build: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/gkcYBm https://pcpartpicker.com/part/evga-power-supply-220t21600x1 and https://pcpartpicker.com/part/evga-power-supply-220p21600x1 both have the same amount. https://pcpartpicker.com/part/evga-power-supply-220t21600x1 says that there's not enough connectors (correct), while https://pcpartpicker.com/part/evga-power-supply-220p21600x1 says nothing

Also, why don't we add a 8-pin to dual 6-pin splitter category?

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manirelli staff 8 Builds 2 points 41 months ago

It looks like that one was input as 8pin and not 6+2. I have updated the unit and compatibility should be fixed in the next hour or so.

We don't list cables at the current time. Should we change that we would be sure to include pcie adapters.

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Eschaton 6 Builds 1 point 41 months ago

wow, thanks. sometimes it's really nice to consider dual cpu rigs.

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brelovix 1 point 41 months ago

Awesome! Always love seeing new additions like this to the site. Always getting better =D

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SincereMage 1 point 41 months ago

Does the new compatibility update take video card cables into consideration or does it just tell you straight up that you don't have enough cables with your psu

Thanks for any answers!

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brownandsticky 1 Build 1 point 41 months ago

Brilliant news from PCPartPicker about the already extensive build compatibility filters now allowing ECC and multi-CPU parameters to be selected.

A real boon to those of us looking to build home-servers and virtualisation hosts.

+1 for the teaser about an upcoming new category or part last month; NAS for shared storage. Again that's another one for home server builders.

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obsideo 7 Builds 1 point 41 months ago

Yes, they are very useful. Thank you.

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Ninjaman12 1 point 41 months ago

nice

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ShadowGaming93 1 point 41 months ago

can microphones and maybe other things like a software (Advast, adobe photoshop, komplete 10, fl studio 12, and a LOT more) be added. Also a real android/ios app would be AWESOME

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D33P_R07 1 Build 1 point 40 months ago

Yes, this is so very much appreciated

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ped90 2 Builds 1 point 40 months ago

I can select 2 CPUs but only one cooler? Jus' sayin'...

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philip staff submitter 10 Builds 1 point 40 months ago

No, you can add multiple coolers too.

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ped90 2 Builds 1 point 40 months ago

Thanks for fixing. Have to do it one by one though. No option for more than 1 when adding to basket?

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pepoxx 1 point 40 months ago

thank you! but i'll like to see back the filter option that hides the parts without price and that you add that sweet x99 itx motherboard from asrock!

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Artimaeus 1 point 40 months ago

Thank you! Also, have you ever thought of making a program to virtually build computers using 3d renders of the parts? I know this would be a huge undertaking that I can only almost comprehend, but I think people would love it enough to be willing to donate money (kickstarter) maybe, buy it, or even better (in my opinion) subscribe to that service. Please consider this.

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Mikeportnoyz 1 point 40 months ago

Thank you for the good work. This site is amazing.

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backoffmanImascientist 1 point 40 months ago

Thank you for this, and everything about this site. It's simply without equal and is invaluable to the builder community!

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Brandaglington 1 point 40 months ago

you should consider adding multi-CPU support for Haswell-E chips as well, since your filters allow you to search for and select an LGA2011 v3 x2 board but not the 2 CPUs to fill it.

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MightyHammer 1 point 40 months ago

will we ever see External DVDs ?

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DIS-IS-CRAZY 1 point 39 months ago

been waiting to find out if the psu i have picked will support the graphics card that i also picked. cheers

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MaximusPrime27th 1 point 39 months ago

Hmm, what I'd like to see implemented is a way to have 2(or more) system builds be compared side by side. Ooo, and a way to have more than 1 system build in a parts list. For example, I'm trying to build 3 systems that would all be on the same water-cooling loop but I can't have all the parts for each system in one place. But thanks for the update, now I can drool over 36 core, 72 thread , dual CPU beasts.

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SLADE_xL 1 Build 1 point 15 months ago

Now we just need dual CPU cooler support to go with the multi-CPUs

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Willie_Cool 1 point 14 months ago

I am unable to add 2 Intel - Xeon E5-1650 V3 cpus to my multi cpu workstation build. This forum says its fixed but its not.

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philip staff submitter 10 Builds 1 point 14 months ago

It is correct. The 1650 does not support multiple CPU configurations: https://ark.intel.com/products/82765/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-1650-v3-15M-Cache-3_50-GHz (Look under "Max CPU Configuration")

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