All: thanks for the comments and likes. I'm surprised at the interest this amateurish video has generated. Also, I need to clarify something: The Zeus mobo in this video DOES support USB 3.0, just not on the back I/O. There's a USB 3.0 connector on the mobo so I do have two working USB 3.0 ports on my case header. Point of interest: The Zeus X99 build rendered this video in 4 min 26 sec using kdenlive.
When possible post the links for people who want to replicate your build. I actually was about to start an AMD zen4 build for an overseas friend but since she only does WOW classic, Steam, and online classes 8 cores is pretty kick-ass for $50.
Thats more documentation than a recent AM5 Mobo I bought for my little bro. That came with a business card that requires you to scan a QR in order to see the manual :D
I've been building "AliExpress Specials" for the grandkid's buddies as money is tight if you are a teen and for the games they want to run like Fortnite and Hell Let Loose? You really can't beat $350 USD for a full PC with 8c/16t, RX580, 1TB NVME 500w PSU and a nice little white case to put it all in.
I wouldn’t call money tight if you’re able to build gaming PCs for your grandkid’s buddies. Can’t beat the value of these builds though, I definitely agree
@@samwalker7567 Well the grandkids friends are all working part time jobs so don't have a lot of money so when they saw the pretty white AliExpress special I put together for the grandson they were all "Hey do ya think if I came by on payday he would show me what parts to order and help me put it together?" I'm not charging the kids for my time but the look on their faces when they have built their very first PC and hit that power button and everything starts lighting up and coming to life? It always puts a smile on my face 😁
A week ago I bought the same motherboard, processor and 16GB DDR4 bundle. The next day out of curiosity I bought another MACHINIST E5 MR9A V1.0 X99 motherboard. I guess they will arrive soon.
Interesting board, and good video, thanks. Did it control the fan speeds ok? I've seen reviews in the past where many of these cheaper s2011 boards often just run the fans flat out. Likewise, does it suspend to RAM ok? Lastly, the board is not strictly ITX - it's wider and deeper, and actually wider than DTX, so I wonder what case compatibility is like.
This is actually a huananzhi board, not Zsus. In general these are decent boards. The cheaper ones like on this video are only dual channel, there are quad channel ones as well. Also, V3 xeons are better than V4's. You can easily unlock the all-core turbo boost on them for quite a bit of performance. The biggest issue with these lower end ones is that the power delivery is very limited. If you want to boost higher and get better performance, you need better quality board. Yes, these boards in general support both, ECC and non-ECC memory. But since they're xeons, they're limited to 2133Mhz. You'll also want to add small heatsinks to the VRM's. These boards are notorious for having bad quality and overheating VRM. Trust me, you'll get much longer lifespan with extra cooling. If you have any questions I'll gladly answer. I've built multiple rigs and I've spent tens of hours troubleshooting and dealing with issues of these boards.
Thanks for sharing your insights. From my video it's obvious I have zero prior experience with this mobo or the larger family of budget boards from China. I blundered into this from watching a UA-cam video by RandomGaminginHD who showcased his budget X99 build using AliExpress components. It was so cheap I had to try it. I'm glad I did. The rig in this video has actually been promoted to daily driver. Virtual machine performance with VirtualBox is perfectly satisfactory and KVM machines run just like on-the-metal. Virtual desktops are so easy now it's almost boring. I'm used to having to "fix" things and tweak performance variables to try to make them usable. With this board & cpu every OS I have tried just works. Since you offered to help, I do have a question: how are you heat sinking your VRMs? Are you gluing them on? Where do I find tiny heat sinks? Are you using a dedicated fan too? Just curious how you're implementing this. I've never added a custom cooling solution to a mobo before. Also, do you know if fan RPM control actually works on this board? In BIOS I have it set for automatic but to my un-calibrated ear it sounds like they run at full speed all the time. Cheers.
@@fecklesstech929 I'm using either heatpads or just straight up cooling paste and shoving the heatsinks on the VRM, they are so light they'll stick just fine unless you kick your PC around a lot. You can get them anywhere, really. I could even find them locally, but depending on delivery times, either where you got your mobo from or Temu. I will be using dedicated fan for VRM's in the future. I've ordered some but they haven't arrived yet. The RPM controller usually don't work on these boards, but if they do, it's just the CPU one, not the one for case fan(s). I've been using fanhub with physical controller to control the fans. For 'normal' use, the lowest setting is more than enough, for gaming I usually raise it to half way. And the video from the guy you mentioned, I actually had the top comment on that video with thousand+ likes and like hundred replies, but for whatever reason he decided to remove the comment. I guess he didn't like I was helping people ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@miukku111 Lol! I wonder why he deleted your comment? That's too funny. I did about 30 seconds of research on YT and found tutorials explaining how to heatsink the VRMs. I have a thermometer gun so I'm going to check my temperatures before I do anything. If the VRMs (or anything else) seems toasty I will look into upgrading my thermals. My workplace has a collection of old main boards used for show & tell. Nobody will notice if a heatsink or 2 goes missing. Cheers.
@@fecklesstech929 No clue why he deleted it. It was information only and I was answering questions under it. No matter, I'm glad to help people whenever I can. If you have any more questions feel free to ping this comment. Have a good one!
@@fecklesstech929What I will say having owned a Zsus board is that the VRMs are not up to running higher powered chips, and these boards, if used under lots of load, die fast. They are fine with the lower powered 2620 or whatever, but with the 2650 that they ship with, and definitely the 2680/90 and other higher wattage CPUs, they just can't hack it. You've been recommended Machinist, I'll add Huananzhi and specifically the X99-TF and X99-F8 as recommendations. The TF is weird in that it can take both DDR3 and DDR4 memory as it has slots for both - bit of a throwback to the days when boards had both SDRAM and DDR slots. Not a bad idea though as right now DDR3 is dirt cheap but still leaves you with a bit of an upgrade path further down the line when DDR4 drops in price. Both are very solid boards and a huge upgrade from this. Granted, they're triple the price, but buy cheap, buy multiple times is definitely the order of the day. Oh, also, if you're buying the board from AliExpress, you can also get very good X99 coolers at a good price there too. The Iwongou coolers are very inexpensive but get very good temperatures and are not super noisy. If you want a bit more luxury, then Snowman coolers sit with the best of the premium priced air coolers but at a much more attractive price point.
I run that same CPU on a SuperMicro X10DRL-I. It's quite nice. With Proxmox running TrueNAS Scale (with the *arr suite as apps), OPNSense, Home Assistant, PiHole and Pterodactyl with a few mostly idle Minecraft and GMod servers it averages like 6% CPU usage. I think I overbought hardware.
I know! This old server processor is yard sale cheap but I can pile a screen recorder and multiple virtual machines on it at once and I still haven't hit 50%. My TrueNAS build is running on an i3-9100 but I may rebuild it around another old xeon on one of the cheap Chinese mainboards. Maybe a "Machinist" brand next time.
@@fecklesstech929 I bought the mid tower(? It's not huge) server with 4x4tb sas included for about $300 but it had a super slow 6 core v3 (too lazy to look at model) so I upped that to 2650v4 and 128gb ecc ram for stupid cheap.
Hi I bought this exact mobi cpu combo and the exact cooler as you, but I do t know how to install my cooler. The bolts won't fit onto the screw holes that come with the motherboard can you please tell me how you did it?
My cooler came with an adapter kit for CPU socket 2011-V3. I attached the adapter to the edges of the CPU socket first, then I attached the cooler to the adapter.
It has four RAM slots of two different colors, but I don't know if it is single, dual, or quad channel. This main board is so cheap there's no telling. Edit: The spec sheet says it is dual channel.
No USB 3, no PCI Express 4. You buying platform from 10 yo at best. Also if you are new to X99, note that many Xeon coreas are not good for games, you need opposite - 4..6 cores with high clock. Usual Xeons from Ali have 12..16 cores but clock is very low (they are server CPU). Thats why people buy cheap AMD or 1600 CPUs.
Thanks for the pointers. I understand that a $41USD mainboard/cpu bundle comes with many compromises. I'm not a gamer so I don't care about gaming performance. I wanted a high enough core count and enough ram to run speedy virtual machines, and I got what I wanted. This was a low-budget experiment--not a gaming build. Cheers.
All: thanks for the comments and likes. I'm surprised at the interest this amateurish video has generated. Also, I need to clarify something: The Zeus mobo in this video DOES support USB 3.0, just not on the back I/O. There's a USB 3.0 connector on the mobo so I do have two working USB 3.0 ports on my case header. Point of interest: The Zeus X99 build rendered this video in 4 min 26 sec using kdenlive.
When possible post the links for people who want to replicate your build. I actually was about to start an AMD zen4 build for an overseas friend but since she only does WOW classic, Steam, and online classes 8 cores is pretty kick-ass for $50.
Thats more documentation than a recent AM5 Mobo I bought for my little bro. That came with a business card that requires you to scan a QR in order to see the manual :D
Got the same CPU + Motherboard combo but added my own dual channel memory to it. Works great and is faster than my previous CPU.
I've been building "AliExpress Specials" for the grandkid's buddies as money is tight if you are a teen and for the games they want to run like Fortnite and Hell Let Loose? You really can't beat $350 USD for a full PC with 8c/16t, RX580, 1TB NVME 500w PSU and a nice little white case to put it all in.
I wouldn’t call money tight if you’re able to build gaming PCs for your grandkid’s buddies. Can’t beat the value of these builds though, I definitely agree
I have done the same - I built one for the fun of it, sold it to cover my costs, and then have had loads of requests since for more of them!
@@stebo5562 Uhh the kids are paying for the computers, did you not get the "if you are a teen" in the first sentence?
@@samwalker7567 Well the grandkids friends are all working part time jobs so don't have a lot of money so when they saw the pretty white AliExpress special I put together for the grandson they were all "Hey do ya think if I came by on payday he would show me what parts to order and help me put it together?"
I'm not charging the kids for my time but the look on their faces when they have built their very first PC and hit that power button and everything starts lighting up and coming to life? It always puts a smile on my face 😁
@@TheHangarHobbit
oh ok, i missed that
The Ali kits are fine, they make great ghetto NAS and media boxes in particular. Machinst makes a board with 9 sata ports as an example.
For the price it's hard to beat this kit, even if that lack of USB 3.0 and PCIe slots give me the ich 👍
A week ago I bought the same motherboard, processor and 16GB DDR4 bundle. The next day out of curiosity I bought another MACHINIST E5 MR9A V1.0 X99 motherboard. I guess they will arrive soon.
Interesting board, and good video, thanks. Did it control the fan speeds ok? I've seen reviews in the past where many of these cheaper s2011 boards often just run the fans flat out. Likewise, does it suspend to RAM ok? Lastly, the board is not strictly ITX - it's wider and deeper, and actually wider than DTX, so I wonder what case compatibility is like.
This is actually a huananzhi board, not Zsus. In general these are decent boards. The cheaper ones like on this video are only dual channel, there are quad channel ones as well. Also, V3 xeons are better than V4's. You can easily unlock the all-core turbo boost on them for quite a bit of performance. The biggest issue with these lower end ones is that the power delivery is very limited. If you want to boost higher and get better performance, you need better quality board.
Yes, these boards in general support both, ECC and non-ECC memory. But since they're xeons, they're limited to 2133Mhz. You'll also want to add small heatsinks to the VRM's. These boards are notorious for having bad quality and overheating VRM. Trust me, you'll get much longer lifespan with extra cooling.
If you have any questions I'll gladly answer. I've built multiple rigs and I've spent tens of hours troubleshooting and dealing with issues of these boards.
Thanks for sharing your insights. From my video it's obvious I have zero prior experience with this mobo or the larger family of budget boards from China. I blundered into this from watching a UA-cam video by RandomGaminginHD who showcased his budget X99 build using AliExpress components. It was so cheap I had to try it. I'm glad I did. The rig in this video has actually been promoted to daily driver. Virtual machine performance with VirtualBox is perfectly satisfactory and KVM machines run just like on-the-metal. Virtual desktops are so easy now it's almost boring. I'm used to having to "fix" things and tweak performance variables to try to make them usable. With this board & cpu every OS I have tried just works. Since you offered to help, I do have a question: how are you heat sinking your VRMs? Are you gluing them on? Where do I find tiny heat sinks? Are you using a dedicated fan too? Just curious how you're implementing this. I've never added a custom cooling solution to a mobo before. Also, do you know if fan RPM control actually works on this board? In BIOS I have it set for automatic but to my un-calibrated ear it sounds like they run at full speed all the time. Cheers.
@@fecklesstech929 I'm using either heatpads or just straight up cooling paste and shoving the heatsinks on the VRM, they are so light they'll stick just fine unless you kick your PC around a lot. You can get them anywhere, really. I could even find them locally, but depending on delivery times, either where you got your mobo from or Temu. I will be using dedicated fan for VRM's in the future. I've ordered some but they haven't arrived yet.
The RPM controller usually don't work on these boards, but if they do, it's just the CPU one, not the one for case fan(s). I've been using fanhub with physical controller to control the fans. For 'normal' use, the lowest setting is more than enough, for gaming I usually raise it to half way.
And the video from the guy you mentioned, I actually had the top comment on that video with thousand+ likes and like hundred replies, but for whatever reason he decided to remove the comment. I guess he didn't like I was helping people ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@miukku111 Lol! I wonder why he deleted your comment? That's too funny. I did about 30 seconds of research on YT and found tutorials explaining how to heatsink the VRMs. I have a thermometer gun so I'm going to check my temperatures before I do anything. If the VRMs (or anything else) seems toasty I will look into upgrading my thermals. My workplace has a collection of old main boards used for show & tell. Nobody will notice if a heatsink or 2 goes missing. Cheers.
@@fecklesstech929 No clue why he deleted it. It was information only and I was answering questions under it. No matter, I'm glad to help people whenever I can. If you have any more questions feel free to ping this comment. Have a good one!
heres a Machnist kit that is solid 600 watt psu would be a good idea
Zsus is one of the lesser AliExpress X99 motherboard brands, you should try the Machinist branded ones
Thanks for the pointer. I think I will.
@@fecklesstech929What I will say having owned a Zsus board is that the VRMs are not up to running higher powered chips, and these boards, if used under lots of load, die fast. They are fine with the lower powered 2620 or whatever, but with the 2650 that they ship with, and definitely the 2680/90 and other higher wattage CPUs, they just can't hack it.
You've been recommended Machinist, I'll add Huananzhi and specifically the X99-TF and X99-F8 as recommendations. The TF is weird in that it can take both DDR3 and DDR4 memory as it has slots for both - bit of a throwback to the days when boards had both SDRAM and DDR slots. Not a bad idea though as right now DDR3 is dirt cheap but still leaves you with a bit of an upgrade path further down the line when DDR4 drops in price. Both are very solid boards and a huge upgrade from this. Granted, they're triple the price, but buy cheap, buy multiple times is definitely the order of the day.
Oh, also, if you're buying the board from AliExpress, you can also get very good X99 coolers at a good price there too. The Iwongou coolers are very inexpensive but get very good temperatures and are not super noisy. If you want a bit more luxury, then Snowman coolers sit with the best of the premium priced air coolers but at a much more attractive price point.
@@fecklesstech929Huananzhi are also quality they cost a bit more though
I run that same CPU on a SuperMicro X10DRL-I. It's quite nice.
With Proxmox running TrueNAS Scale (with the *arr suite as apps), OPNSense, Home Assistant, PiHole and Pterodactyl with a few mostly idle Minecraft and GMod servers it averages like 6% CPU usage. I think I overbought hardware.
I know! This old server processor is yard sale cheap but I can pile a screen recorder and multiple virtual machines on it at once and I still haven't hit 50%. My TrueNAS build is running on an i3-9100 but I may rebuild it around another old xeon on one of the cheap Chinese mainboards. Maybe a "Machinist" brand next time.
@@fecklesstech929 I bought the mid tower(? It's not huge) server with 4x4tb sas included for about $300 but it had a super slow 6 core v3 (too lazy to look at model) so I upped that to 2650v4 and 128gb ecc ram for stupid cheap.
Hi I bought this exact mobi cpu combo and the exact cooler as you, but I do t know how to install my cooler. The bolts won't fit onto the screw holes that come with the motherboard can you please tell me how you did it?
My cooler came with an adapter kit for CPU socket 2011-V3. I attached the adapter to the edges of the CPU socket first, then I attached the cooler to the adapter.
Is that meant to be quad channel for the ram on the motherboard?
It has four RAM slots of two different colors, but I don't know if it is single, dual, or quad channel. This main board is so cheap there's no telling. Edit: The spec sheet says it is dual channel.
Links please
No USB 3, no PCI Express 4. You buying platform from 10 yo at best.
Also if you are new to X99, note that many Xeon coreas are not good for games, you need opposite - 4..6 cores with high clock. Usual Xeons from Ali have 12..16 cores but clock is very low (they are server CPU). Thats why people buy cheap AMD or 1600 CPUs.
Thanks for the pointers. I understand that a $41USD mainboard/cpu bundle comes with many compromises. I'm not a gamer so I don't care about gaming performance. I wanted a high enough core count and enough ram to run speedy virtual machines, and I got what I wanted. This was a low-budget experiment--not a gaming build. Cheers.
great build