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Comment by gdjdhdheb | Hacker News Reader

You sure you got DDR3 .. I have 2 e5 v4 rigs at home and both have ddr4 ... Unless I am wrong and 2011-3 supports ddr3 and ddr4

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I won't speak for cafkafk, but I have two E5 (v3/v4) systems one on DDR4 and one on DDR3. This generation of CPU all support DDR4, but a few skus do support DDR3 also. ChatGPT told me they were niche products to meet specific customer needs.

I just picked up the DDR3 board, an Aliexpress "XD3" so I could reuse some DDR3 ram on a better CPU. Quad channel 1866MT/s is not bad!

The first two generations supported DDR3 only. Haswell and Broadwell (v4) brought DDR4 support.

right, and they talk about "v4" which is DDR4.

There were several V4 Xeon models that supported DDR3 AND DDR4 simultaneously. If you had a motherboard with an X79 chipset it would (sometimes) work properly.

I am not aware of any commercial vendor shipping v3/v4 boards with DDR3. I have a couple hundred Supermicro systems that are stuck on v2 CPUs with DDR3...

Get a 2696 v4 or 2686 v4 and a X79 motherboard and you should be able to use DDR3.

I have a dual e5 v3 that had ddr 4 as well. Been going strong for ten years and still overpowered for what I use it for.

You're right - the article says 'CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2620 v4 @ 2.10 GHz' but also says DDR3. And the specs page for that CPU (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/92986/i...) clearly says the 2620 v4 is DDR4.

E5 CPUs have their supported RAM right on the Intel ARK pages, but short version:

E5-xxxxx v1 and v2 are all DDR3

E5-xxxxx v3 and v4 are all DDR4

Not sure why Intel didn't just cut new model numbers instead of keeping them all as "e5"

More concrete example for E5-2660 (great processor) showing v1 and v2 support DDR3, while v3 and v4, DDR4 (again, different motherboards)

DDR3 v1: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/64584/i...

DDR3 v2: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/75272/i...

DDR4 v3: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/81706/i...

DDR4 v4: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/91772/i...

This also means that you need to know the processor your motherboard supports (or, easier, probably RAM) before putting in an order to upgrade the processor. (These processors are incredibly cheap, less than $10 for something that might have cost literally thousands ten years ago, so worthwhile to spend a few minutes and pick out your favorite based on cores, watts, Ghz, etc.)

(Another commenter says that there are some motherboards that accept v3/v4 but also can run slower DDR3 RAM. That's new to me and quite cool - DDR3 is extremely cheap, even now. I did find these motherboards on aliexpress, too: https://www.aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-XD3-motherboard.html?s... and one clearly says v3/v4 cpu's with DDR3 RAM. That could be very useful although memory speeds are slower since CPU performance can be boosted with v3/v4.)

v1: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/series/...

v2: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/series/...

v3: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/series/...

v4: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/series/...

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