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In my experience the motherboards are a downside when considering a Xeon system - narrow range, expensive, often missing latest features, sub-optimal in an ever

In my experience the motherboards are a downside when considering a Xeon system - narrow range, expensive, often missing latest features, sub-optimal in an everyday desktop machine. OTOH there are dual socket options which threadripper doesn't have. There was an article on building a dual Xeon box using cheap second hand chips recently and I was seriously considering it until I saw the range and cost of dual socket boards.

brudgers 9y ago
I read this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12249317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12249317 and had the same idea last year when I went to build a computer for the boy. It wasn't just that the price of the motherboard was a killer, navigating the subtle differences between similar server sockets and chips is hard. And used motherboards are not cheap and often proprietary. Then there's the fact that for a dual socket motherboard, a single chip is a bit economically inefficient...so a pair of chips starts to make sense. And then a bigger power supply. And still not good support for powerful graphics cards because...well, you know...it's a server motherboard. In the end, I got a bought the boy a used Dell Precision T7500 for less than I would have paid for an equivalent case and power supply. Sure only six Xeon cores and 12 threads. But a system with RAM, a windows license, a small hard disk and 12GB of RAM was half the price of the cheapest Threadripper...including shipping.
- Boothroid 9y ago
  But again that will lack the latest features that you will be getting with a Threadripper system, but I guess that might not matter to you. Bargains to be had I agree.
  - brudgers 9y ago
    With similar budgets, half a dozen used Precision hexacore Xeon boxes is within the realm of possibility. That's more cores and threads and memory bandwidth to throw at workloads that significantly benefit from multi-threading. Of course the premise is that most of the benefits from multi-threading come from software rather than hardware. From a systems perspective, there is a more robust pipeline of replacement parts for the used boxes relative to the latest retail Threadripper motherboards. More boxes means it is possible to stay up with a hardware failure (which is to say that scaling out instead of scaling up means a partial hardware failures versus total hardware failures). There's no free lunch of course. All those 1100w power supplies are going to equate to higher operating costs. And if first cost is no object then four or five Threadripper boxes will outperform the older hardware. Likewise if having the latest and greatest is part of the problem being solved. YMMV.

brudgers 9y ago

I read this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12249317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12249317 and had the same idea last year when I went to build a computer for the boy. It wasn't just that the price of the motherboard was a killer, navigating the subtle differences between similar server sockets and chips is hard. And used motherboards are not cheap and often proprietary. Then there's the fact that for a dual socket motherboard, a single chip is a bit economically inefficient...so a pair of chips starts to make sense. And then a bigger power supply. And still not good support for powerful graphics cards because...well, you know...it's a server motherboard. In the end, I got a bought the boy a used Dell Precision T7500 for less than I would have paid for an equivalent case and power supply. Sure only six Xeon cores and 12 threads. But a system with RAM, a windows license, a small hard disk and 12GB of RAM was half the price of the cheapest Threadripper...including shipping.

Boothroid 9y ago
But again that will lack the latest features that you will be getting with a Threadripper system, but I guess that might not matter to you. Bargains to be had I agree.
- brudgers 9y ago
  With similar budgets, half a dozen used Precision hexacore Xeon boxes is within the realm of possibility. That's more cores and threads and memory bandwidth to throw at workloads that significantly benefit from multi-threading. Of course the premise is that most of the benefits from multi-threading come from software rather than hardware. From a systems perspective, there is a more robust pipeline of replacement parts for the used boxes relative to the latest retail Threadripper motherboards. More boxes means it is possible to stay up with a hardware failure (which is to say that scaling out instead of scaling up means a partial hardware failures versus total hardware failures). There's no free lunch of course. All those 1100w power supplies are going to equate to higher operating costs. And if first cost is no object then four or five Threadripper boxes will outperform the older hardware. Likewise if having the latest and greatest is part of the problem being solved. YMMV.