Howdy folks, Been out of the loop for a while on the PC scene, recently got myself a new PC but now I've hit a bottlekneck which I didn't foresee (really should of checked before hand). Currently running an ASUS X570 Plus board with Ryzen 9 5900x, I have a Hyper M2 card with 4 GEN4 NVME drives in which with my 3070 GPU maxes out my PCIE lanes. I'm looking at an EPYC 7313 CPU with 128 lanes which will alos allow me to throw another Hyper M.2 in for some more fast storage (4k&8k Video editing) but struggling to find a Motherboard for it as its an SP3 socket apparently. Does anyone have a similar system or could recomend a Motherboard for the CPU & where I could get it. Cheers in adavance .
I’m entirely out of the PC scene, so take this with a big ‘ol bucket of salt, but I think if workstation is what you’re after, you should be looking at a TR-Pro and not Epyc (?) The former being effectively a workstation Epyc, with boards that are more workstation friendly. It’s 75% likely I’m entirely wrong though.
I agree with Mister_Tad, you'd be better off going for Threadripper rather than Epyc as the boards are more readily available (and in more useful layouts and sizes!). You'll be taking a step back in terms of outright CPU performance per core but a step up in terms of number of cores.
TR-Pro is quite a chunk though it may be the only option though as that is a TR4 socket, its the PCIE lanes I'm after of which the Epyc and TR have 128 lanes each, computers have gone alot more complicated lol, My current work workstations has the Intel Xeon W-2155 which has 48 lanes which is saturated by the Quadras and 1 Hyper card but is also hella expensive lol I was trying to avoid splashing out another £6K + on a PC lol .
Do you need all the bandwidths? or just fast enough slots for the M2 drives? I use a 4 slot M2 adaptor that multiplexs 16 down to 8 lanes on my x570, so my NAS has more M2 than you can shake a stick at, of course I can never get full bandwidth and if I access every drive it'd choke but its a cheap solution if you just need to connect them to a system. I use it for video files too and it is still damn fast when choked, certainly I hit limitations on the SSD caches as I'm a cheapskate before any other issues when going a few 100Gb from 'slow' on this adaptor to faster native storage. adaptor is like ~140 Of course my old thread ripper was superior but still, the NAS is low power. Storage - NAS Updates, self build/pre-built, who, what? | Page 2 | bit-tech.net Forums AMD will shortly release an update TR chip 7xxx I would wait for that if the workstation stuff is what you reaally need. For SP3 you will need to look at a server reseller for suitable mobo, asrockrack do some sp3 setups and will sell you a decent board, my x570 is from those guys it has been solid, rubbish bios but once you are up and running you never go I there again and was only in there to do some unnecessary overclocking, you know, because..... ASRock Rack > Products Lenovo are probably the place to go for pre-configured AMD workstations.
TR/TR Pro is probably what you want. What you can afford is probably something along the lines of the 7313P [single socket model, you're unlikely to be going 2p any time soon] and something along the lines of an ASRock ROMED8-2T [though as you've noticed, good luck getting one in a timely manner] plus as more ECC DDR4 as you wallet can stomach etc. It's that or offload the storage into a separate box... 5700G or something with an IGP, put the m.2 adaptor card in the PEG slot, etc. Might work out cheaper and you might stand a chance of getting it this century unlike Epyc/TR stuff. EDIT: no at my best and my concentration has taken a hit so if you need/want a more coherent and detailed answer... sorry...
Most of those server boards don't need a GPU due to IPMI, so you can run any CPU in an offload box and with dual 10Gb NICs it's pretty decent speeds getting stuff too and from it. I do have an APU in mine and frustratingly you can't use the GPU as a compute resource.
Are you running a GPU in the secondary slot with the expansion card in the top primary slot? Fast enough for the drives really getting the full bandwidth would be a bonus but not a necesety, read and writes are still going to be beyond any SATA drive. I like the NAS I have one its just slow I think if I go down that rabit hole it might get worse lol, I'm sort of hopeing this system will be a swiss army knife in the end but we'll see lol. There are some packages on ebay at the moment with a board, cpu and some ram but I'm a bit dubias as to what they are so sort of stayed away from them, it does seem there is alot of boards out of stock this chip shortage is taking the micky now, Looking at a seperate system as a fast NAS would be an option and probably cost the same as upgrading but with the benefit of a 2nd system as well. The end goal would to still be able to game on the machine and pop my 3070 in it as well which is why I was sort of trying to keep it all in 1 system I might be asking a little too much at this point though. Thank you so far for everyones help this has been awesome
The only way you'll get full bandwidth for everything is in a proper board like the rome one linked or tr pro Lane configuration on x570 is very much dependent on the board you bought, typical config is x16x0x4, most will do x8x8x4 if you use the second slot, some like the Asus WS board will use chipset lanes to do x8x8x8 Once you go into x8, you can only access two NVMe in a Hyper M2 card, with that adaptor I have, you would get the full bandwidth of a PCI3.0x8 (significantly less than PCIe4x8) slot but be able to access 4 x4 lane drives, the drives show up as 4 independent drives which you can use as you choose, I just made a large stripe for size, x8 is good enough for up to 8Gigabytes/64Gbit a sec on that interface, seems plenty fast enough for me, obviously not a patch on gen 4, in my NAS I don't have a GPU I have slots x8/x8 plus 2 M2 on board and an array of 8x SATA SSDs, as I only have 20Gb NIC (2x10Gb), I can only get stuff on/off NAS at that speed, so that is my limiter for storage rather than PCI express storage, at one stage when I had TR as I had loads of drives I did run them all max speed for silly bandwidth because I could but the extra speed never really improved edits, there were diminishing returns that's when, I realized I could just have a storage box with a quick enough link that I don't have to wait ages for things. Completely possible with an EPYC board but the CPU wouldn't be that fast, it'd be a good 1.3-1.5Ghz down on the gaming CPU. That is the benefit TR Pro typically has over EPYC, not server focused so has high clocks in both base and boost. So I guess the question is where do you want to compromise.
Highpoint have their raid controllers in gen 4 these days, this is another option, often despite being x16 they will run in any slot config you have as they run a plx/mux chip like the cheapo qnap I have, it'd be best to confirm with them first though, but if it did you could run both your GPU and the card on PCIe gen 4.0 x8 mode for considerable performance, they have one card that'll run 8x M2 M.2 - Gen4 | HighPoint-tech.com
Completely forgot about a highpoint raid card, that would only show up as a single drive as I'm assuming the card takes care of all the raid itself so that could be the solution for the time being , will have a look on that link and order one, will let you know how it goes . I see some tasty looking TR on the horizon for AMD which would also meant he old wones should go down in price slightly, I'm currently researching into a workstaiton esq gaming rig, there are quite a few AIO coolers on the market for the TR4 socket saves the faff of watercooling it, this is starting to go down the territory of a mega side project again also its going to be more productive than my Dell 5820 I'm using at work lol.
Like the QNAP I run it'll show drives depending on how you configure it. They are not cheap mind, an EPIC/TR board and Hyper M2 type cards like you have would be cheaper and faster until you run out of PCI slots.
I have Spec'd the system now and its all in the basket lol, I know the new CPUs are round the corner so will likely push the prices down on old ones so might wait a month or so but still its tempting lol.
There is actually bugger all info regarding Zen 4 Threadripper currently, with everything focused on the regular desktop chips, so it may well be quite a long time until new Threadripper chips make an appearance, not even to mention that if Zen 4 TR ends up DDR5 exclusive then the total cost including RAM could be quite substantial.
If Zen 3 was any indicator... Zen4 will be unobtanium, either bc it's a paper or launch or bc it's been hoovered up en masse by those with large racks and large sacks of cash. Which means the older Zen 3 will still be sought after, and thus not drop appreciably in price. Hell certain flavours of Zen 3 is still basically impossible to get your hands on. [and if you can get the chips you can't get the boards etc.]
Hard to tell... On one hand the situation might be better because mining is dead (so AMD can cut back on GPU orders and use the fab space for CPU production), plus unlike last year there is no major drought in Taiwan forcing production cuts at TSMC fabs. On the other hand, it might be even worse this time round, remember that Nvidia is gonna make their entire new GPU lineup at TSMC and Intel has started making stuff at TSMC as well, so competition for fab capacity is increasing thus restricting AMDs ability to pump out more chips. And while the continued Rona Lockdowns in China won't really affect the production of CPUs too much, they will impact other aspects like the production of PCBs, capacitors, coolers, product packaging etc for the new AM5 boards.
I was thinking more in terms of demand, rather than supply... For a solid while pretty much any working Zen 3 chiplet that rolled off the line went straight into an Epyc and out the door to whichever cloud provider or whatever was willing to stump for them. As a result Desktop Zen 3 was unobtanium for a solid chunk of time and Zen 3 Threadripper Pro came waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay later a lot were hoping/expecting [and in non-pro didn't come at all]. I kinda expect early Zen 4 to be the same - all the big guns will want as much Zen 4 Epycy goodness as AMD can muster and Desktop Zen 4 will get the cast-offs with more substantial supply later down the line.
