18 ms·

Best CPUs for Workstations

163 points by pulse7 6y ago

onli 6y ago
Real high end options only. Apart from the 1920X, that is a steal right now, but the board it needs is not cheap, it's a legacy platform, and Threadripper 1 did not work well for some workloads. I'd not ignore Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9. If you can work with 128GB ram (and especially if you just want a regular strong system with the usual 16GB) 3700X, 3900X and 3950X are really strong processor and apart from the last one a lot cheaper. Most developers don't even need to go that high, not even on a workstation, one based on the Ryzen 5 3600 would not be weak.
ckastner 6y ago
Those are great options, but the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X sells for less than $450 now. Sure, it has half as many cores as the 3960X Threadripper listed, but 12C/24T is still a lot. Also, it's much easier to cool -- 105W TDP vs 280W on the Threadrippers.
- kaspar030 6y ago
  Also, the Ryzen 9 3950X. It has a bit more punch than the 3900X, for ~200$ more. I built one, a Noctua NH-D15 can cool it at 16*4ghz at 700RPM, so basically almost inaudible even at full load. No ECC, though.
  - littlestymaar 6y ago
    > No ECC, though. Is ECC useful for a workstation? I thought it was useful for shared servers (VM hosts) to protect against rowhammer & co, but does is have other uses?
    - vardump 6y ago
      Yeah, ECC makes the system much more reliable. It drives those weird unexplained glitches away.
    - lazyjones 6y ago
      http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html Without ECC, modern systems (>= a few GB RAM) will have bits flipping pretty much daily. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109401
      - jleahy 6y ago
        It's not quite fair to just extrapolate numbers for 256MB of RAM up to a modern system. If this was true you'd be seeing OS crashes daily (if you run hundreds of servers with no ECC you will see mysterious crashes every day, but for one server it might be once a year). Ultimately these flips are caused by charged particles hitting the memory module (a so called 'single event upset' or SEU), and the number of charged particles hitting the modules has not increased with density (although the modules are more sensitive to SEU, it's a smaller effect).
        vbezhenar 6y ago
        To encounter a crash, bit flip has to happen on a very small subset of available memory. It's much more likely to just corrupt file cache.
        jleahy 6y ago
        Well it depends what you're doing, if your memory is full of hash tables and linked lists then you'll likely get a crash (say a web backend). If you're a fileserver and it's all cache then you won't.
      - agapon 6y ago
        This does not seem to be true in practice. I use ECC on my systems and they are configured to log any ECC error. And I see ECC erros almost never. Mostly ECC errors start appearing on very old systems when something in hardware becomes bad because of the age (even if just oxidized contacts). I am not sure if I've ever seen a truly random ECC error.
        6y ago
    - 83457 6y ago
      It prevents corruption from bit flips caused by cosmic rays and other sources. More important for scientific/business purposes and at higher altitudes where there is less atmosphere to block cosmic rays.
    - tpetry 6y ago
      It‘s usefull for everyone but bit errors happen far far seldom than people do expect. But you should have it just in case. You dont want e.g. a corrupt database file just because the low probability of a bitceroor happened and you have been in bad lick it was on a very critical operation.
      - vardump 6y ago
        > ...bit errors happen far far seldom than people do expect. Until they happen more often that expected. It's something that varies based on building, temperature, etc. environmental factors. And of course on your luck with memory module lottery.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      According to this paper, 8% of DIMMs and 32% of machines suffered from at least one correctable error per year. Without ECC, that's an undetected and uncorrected error. The average machine in the study had over 22,000 corrected errors per year. The paper observes that "memory errors are not rare events". If you're running without ECC, you are quite likely to have some undetected corruption, which could range from a single erroneous bit over the lifetime of the machine all the way up to constant unexplained crashes and file or filesystem corruption. There are plenty of use cases where it doesn't matter but for workstation use you presumably care about the results. https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/35162.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - Borealid 6y ago
    I have a Ryzen 9 3900X. Officially it doesn't support ECC memory. In practice unregistered ECC DIMMs work fine, and ECC functions properly (single-bit correction, dual-bit detection). I assume the 3950X is the same way. The hardware is there, the official blessing is not.
    - andy_ppp 6y ago
      They seem to cast doubt on if the bios and software all work together and are really performing the ECC checks even in cases where support might be possible they say things can stop it from working and fixing memory bits. I've no reason to doubt them and this is probably the reason for the lack of official support. Anyone know of a way to validate if it's working correctly?
      - loeg 6y ago
        You can overclock your RAM until you start getting single-bit errors detected.
    - CarVac 6y ago
      How do you verify that ECC is actually functioning without just trusting what the hardware tells you though?
      - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
        By opening the case and holding your smartphone near and nearer into it, while having it search for networks. Until it crashes, and then checking the logs, if any :) edit: I mean near the DIMMs. Don't try this if you are afraid, or need your hardware. This is a test i'm doing with every build, or any system i have to fix. And it crashes every system, though not at the same places and in the same ways. So far it didn't damage anything permanently, but no guaranties it won't.
        swinglock 6y ago
        Are you serious? How very interesting. Really would like to hear from someone with experience in inducing errors that can say what the risks for permanent damage would be, save for data loss in case of flushing corrupted data to disk for course.
  - wolfhumble 6y ago
    Apart from price, was there a reason you did not go for ECC? Thx!
    - paulmd 6y ago
      One other reason is that ECC is not binned for super high clocks like gaming RAM (even though there is nothing technically preventing it from doing so - it is one extra chip per stick, that's basically it). The fastest you can get is like 2666, where you can readily get gaming RAM in the 3600 range and premium bins go to 4400+. Ryzen has always been very "sensitive" to low-clocked RAM and shows some pretty good scaling as you increase frequency and tighten timings and the ECC UDIMMs on the market are just not binned to do that.
      - vbezhenar 6y ago
        2666 is not the fastest ECC memory. Here's 3200 for example: https://www.newegg.com/crucial-32gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82E16820156214 https://www.newegg.com/crucial-32gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82...
        zrm 6y ago
        That's registered memory, not supported by Ryzen/Threadripper. Find unregistered ECC DDR4 3200. Or convince AMD to stop artificially not supporting registered memory on Ryzen/Threadripper -- the early Athlons supported both.
        paulmd 6y ago
        I still am impressed though, didn't know about that one. Kinda trash CAS latency but I guess that might be because it's registered (I've never seen registered that fast so I guess I don't really have a good perspective on what "good CAS latency" would be for a registered memory). I wonder if those would run on my Haswell-E xeons. They support RDIMMs, and they are unlocked so nominally they should support higher RAM clocks too (although I've never tried it with RDIMMs, only UDIMMs). More recently, the W-3175X (Threadripper's real competitor) supports RDIMM as well. So Threadripper actually offers less features than the competition here. I really would like to see the Threadripper series merged with the 7002P series though. Right now there is no option that gives you both Threadripper-level clocks and large quantities of RAM, the frequency-optimized parts are still a large compromise in performance and aren't widely supported. There is no part that gets you to 4 GHZ on 64 cores with 512+ GB of RAM, despite all of these capabilities existing in their respective segments. When you are shipping a 64C HEDT processor there is really no longer any meaningful distinction between that and a server processor. And 256GB simply is not enough RAM for a 64C processor. AMD could still upcharge on the multi-socket models, but they are drawing lines between product segments that no longer make sense now that they have pushed core counts so high. Basically, give us a modern successor to the Intel X5670 series. It's the top of the line, you're paying $4000 for a workstation processor, you should get the whole processor and not have a bunch of disabled features. The really funny thing is, it's not even a money thing, Epyc isn't even priced significantly higher. 7702P is $4150 at Provantage (HPE p/n P16660-B21) vs $3990 for the 3990X. The 7402P (HPE p/n P16664-B21) is actually $250 cheaper than the 3960X. AMD is no longer using the "traditional" model where workstation is cheaper than server. Workstation is now just as expensive as server. So it's not like giving you Epyc capabilities would mean AMD foregoing any money. AMD is just drawing arbitrary lines between these product segments because they can.
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    > for ~200$ more. huh, where ? from what I see here the 3900X is listed at 450€ and the 3950X at 900€ on average in the mainstream websites...
- moonbas3 6y ago
  They are looking at HEDT parts, they have more pcie lanes, more memory support etc. This isn't about your average joe's `gaming-workstation`.
  - lliamander 6y ago
    Technically Ryzen 9 CPUs aren't HEDT, but between their high core counts, the amount of PCIE bandwidth on X570 (with PCIE 4), and the ability to (unofficially) use ECC RAM, the boundary between mainstream and HEDT is awfully blurry.
    - TheGoddessInari 6y ago
      Currently the super sharp line has to do with PCIe lanes and support for 8 DIMMs. If you've gotten locked into needing that, you have no other options aside from not using hardware that you can currently slot. AMD entirely eliminated the lower end HEDT parts and raised prices for TR3. Intel has a nasty shortage, too. Compare that to x99, which had an entry level msrp of just $350, but often went for exact same price as 7700k, significantly under $300. HEDT is in a bad value proposition right now, but if you're stuck needing it for various reasons, your options are limited, hence price increases.
      - lliamander 6y ago
        > Currently the super sharp line has to do with PCIe lanes and support for 8 DIMMs. That's exactly the area where I argue there is some fuzziness. For PCIE lanes, it's true that AMD only has 24 lanes (4 of which dedicated for the chipset) but it has the equivalent of 48 PCIE gen3 lanes in terms of raw bandwidth. Now, it's still not as flexible as having that many actual PCIE gen3 lanes, but high-end x570 motherboards do support some level of bifurcation. You also need compatible devices, but we already compatible storage. There are a couple GPUs out now, but given the upcoming launches of RDNA2 and Ampere GPUs, I expect there will be plenty more compatible GPUs. X570 is somewhat limited now, but as more gen4 devices are released that chipset will only become more versatile. For RAM, there you have another fuzzy spot. I mean sure, HEDT usually has 4 channels, but what does that mean in terms of memory capacity and bandwidth? Only within the last year or so have 32GB UDIMMs been available (iirc) so HEDT was limited to 128GB until very recently. And if you really need more, you can use an Optane storage device as a swap partition (It's been done before, it's fine). As for bandwidth, 2 channels is a bit of a limitation, but Ryzen does support faster memory, which can help bridge the gap a little bit to quad channel Intel parts running at lower RAM speeds. I'm not saying that Ryzen + X570 is HEDT, but it's so darn close that I can understand why AMD chose not to produce low-end TR 3000 parts. Between Ryzen 9, TR 2000, Epyc 7002P, and limited use of TSMCs fabs, I think the move they made was smart. > HEDT is in a bad value proposition right now, but if you're stuck needing it for various reasons, your options are limited, hence price increases. I don't think it's a bad value prop overall. We have a $4000 CPU that's beating out two $10,000 CPUs (dual Xeon Platinums), which is a phenomenal improvement in value. I think we are in this weird space where, when trying to buy the system capabilities you need (in terms of cores, clock speeds, memory capacity, and expansion slots) you sometimes have to pay a bit extra for capabilities that you don't need. That's unfortunate and I hope next gen fixes that. However, it doesn't seem like AMD or Intel will have new HEDT parts for at least a year.
- jcadam 6y ago
  Just built myself a home dev server based around a R9 3900X. Paired it with 64G of RAM, a 1TB NVMe and an RTX 2060, running CentOS 8. Whole build cost me a little under $1400. It sits, headless, in the corner of my office crunching away. I ssh in from my XPS 13 running Fedora and use X forwarding to do work on it. It's so much faster than trying to do everything on an ultrabook. Not to mention quite a bit cheaper than a high-end laptop.
  - benologist 6y ago
    Visual Studio Code has a seamless SSH extension for working like this too - https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh
    - mixmastamyk 6y ago
      Any editor can use sshfs.
      - jedimastert 6y ago
        It's a little more tightly coupled than just a file system; it's essentially a fully headless mode.
        mixmastamyk 6y ago
        Tightly coupled is often not desirable.
        pkaye 6y ago
        the VSCode SSH extension runs the editing process remotely so it doesn't need to transfer the entire file.
        mixmastamyk 6y ago
        That could be helpful, text files are often tiny though.
- heelix 6y ago
  I'm in a similar boat. I planned to swap out my 1950x with the 39xxx series threadrippers and got bit by the socket change. The older i7 3930k was swapped out with a 3900x while we sorted the new hardware... and I'll be damned, but that AM4 CPU, paired with 4x16G sticks of RAM and an M2 drive has been a wonderful Linux workstation for development.
- AnthonBerg 6y ago
  The motherboard is also MUCH cheaper.
  - vonmoltke 6y ago
    Eh, depends on what you want out of a motherboard. I just bought a Threadripper platform yesterday (though this discussion is making me regret it), and the board I bought is the same price as the board I would have bought for the 3900X build I was considering ($500).
    - distances 6y ago
      Just curious, why would you pay $500 for AM4 board? Some specific hardware not found in cheaper models?
      - vonmoltke 6y ago
        If I was going to go the AM4 route, I wanted a board that supported the full 128GB of RAM the processor does and has an X570 chipset. I also wanted a board that has at least 5 PCIe slots (of any type) and 6 SATA ports. While there are a number of boards in the $200 - $300 range that satisfy these requirements, I can't find anywhere that actually has them[1]. If my home workstation hadn't just died I would just wait until the pandemic-related supply issues abate. [1] Well, has them for a reasonable price. Newegg as third-party sellers offering a few of them for 60%+ markups, but I feel better paying $500 for a $500 board than I do paying $275 for a $160 board.
        AnthonBerg 6y ago
        Yes!, a higher-end motherboard can certainly be worth paying for. Conversely, I paid $150 an Asus X470-F that checks mostly the same boxes except it only takes 64GB RAM and doesn't have PCIe 4.0. I put a 3900x in it. It's pretty great. - But it was bought before the pandemic so idk if it's still available. If only 12-16 cores with 64GB of RAM are enough to be useful, then the Ryzen 9 gets A LOT of work done for an unprecedented low price. But if the work being done can make use of 128GB quad-channel RAM and 24-32-64 cores, then the $350 extra for a Threadripper motherboard is nothing. Doesn't take many billable hours to pay for it :)
- loeg 6y ago
  More significantly, half the memory controllers.
maallooc 6y ago
I won't go for AMD CPUs for workstations. They are unstable. QA is bad, gets weird errors in programs (probably programs' fault but I don't care) and if the machine fails to function in any way it becomes my fault for choosing it. That's why my company buys an Intel workstation every time. Yeah. Downvote as much as you like fanboys. Can't dilute the truth.
- baq 6y ago
  there's this gem in the article > The downside to going Intel here is finding a CPU for sale.
  - maallooc 6y ago
    The truth is if you get an OEM workstation like sane people does you really don't have problems supplying them.
- ornornor 6y ago
  > QA is bad, gets weird errors in programs (probably programs' fault but I don't care) Haha what?
  - maallooc 6y ago
    AMD's QA is bad. My friend runs a company that churns about >400 computers per month with AS guarantee mostly for office use. The ratio of initial failure confirmed by manufacturers was 15:1 and the ratio of failing within 2 years (cpu and motherboard failure) was 4:1. Those numbers does not reflect the fact that Intel systems sold more than AMD systems. People dealing with professional softwares also have problems that are magically solved when they use Intel. Have no statistics on that tho.
    - rooam-dev 6y ago
      How would a CPU fail? Also, did AMD manufacture all failed mobos? In which case who needs to do the QA Just to be clear, I am not defending defective and/or unreliable products, just want to make sure the fingers are pointed into the right direction.
qubex 6y ago
I’m really quite dismayed by the purely x86/x64-centric viewpoint. No mention of POWER9, for example (my own personal favourite), which I’m running on my workstation (https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/ https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/) There’s several other ISAs out there (ARM, obviously, but desktop-, let alone workstation-class chips are hard at least for now a dicy proposition). EDIT: Surprised by all the downvotes. Is mentioning anything outside the domain of x86 considered controversial nowadays?!
- consp 6y ago
  POWER9 is a niche within a niche. I guess they ignored it for that reason.
  - qubex 6y ago
    Yes, and if everybody continues to ignore it because it’s a niche within a niche, it’s doomed to stay that way and probably become extinct.
    - nicoburns 6y ago
      > it’s doomed to stay that way and probably become extinct Well yes, it probably is. That's another reason why everyone is ignoring it.
      - qubex 6y ago
        Actually POWER won’t die, because it has IBM behind it and the POWER architecture forms the backbone of their highly profitable mainframe and high-end server business. What I was referring to as possibly dying was POWER on the desktop generally, and Raptor/Talos specifically.
        praseodym 6y ago
        IBM Z mainframes don’t use the POWER architecture, but have their own z/Architecture instruction set and CPUs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/Architecture
erkken 6y ago
I have a very cpu intensive application in Rust, that is able to use all cores given to it. I am thinking about going for the Epyc 7502p with 32 cores but having a hard time knowing if the Threadripper counterpart with 32 cores would be better given its higher frequency. Guess it is very hard to answer but which one would you go for? Will the threadripper perform much better?
- littlestymaar 6y ago
  Was the “in Rust” part mandatory? ;) On HN I still don't know if it's an easy way to get upvotes, or the best way to get down-voted hell.
  - beastman82 6y ago
    The former
  - Koshkin 6y ago
    In Rust We Trust.
  - qchris 6y ago
    I sort of figure that got put in there for context, because Rust code so commonly gets multi-threaded in a serious way because of the borrow checker and drop-in parallel libraries. It makes it a little bit more clear that, yes, this person probably will benefit a lot from having those extra cores/threads, rather than focusing on processors where they could improve performance more with better memory or clock speed options instead.
- vardump 6y ago
  Depends on how memory intensive workload you have. AFAIK, Epyc supports 8 memory channels, while Threadripper supports only 4. So TR has effectively only 50% memory bandwidth available.
  - erkken 6y ago
    It's not memory intensive at all - just CPU bound
theon144 6y ago
Whoa, it seems that AMD has really blown it out of the water here. Good to finally see competition!
gigatexal 6y ago
It’s not well known but the desktop CPUs support ECC
- betaby 6y ago
  Support is very MB dependent though
  - muro 6y ago
    Unfortunately, it's pretty much impossible to have a validation by someone trustworthy that it actually works. If you really want ECC, going with a workstation from Dell/HP/Lenovo/Apple seems still the better choice. Shame, would love to upgrade to one of these.
    - gigatexal 6y ago
      You just need the right motherboard. ASRock Rack X470D4U
rational_indian 6y ago
I have a Ryzen 2700X. Is Ryzen 9 3900X going to be a good upgrade for me?
- onli 6y ago
  Depends on what you do. You'd gain 4 cores and 8 threads and also the single core performance is higher. If have some direct benchmark comparisons under https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/apps/cpu/compare?ids%5B%5D=AMD+Ryzen+9+3900X&ids%5B%5D=AMD+Ryzen+7+2700X https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/apps/cpu/compare?ids%5.... The blender benchmarks do not show a big difference, but things like 7zip and AES-Encoding do, so it really depends on the workload.
  - zrm 6y ago
    That Blender result is nonsense, they screwed up the test somehow. This is a better comparison: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2125?vs=2519 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2125?vs=2519 The 3900X has 50% more cores and Blender is embarrassingly parallel, so it's more than 50% faster, as expected. That's the real question for whether it's worth it. For single threads the 3900X will be 10-20% faster. For well-threaded applications it's >60% faster. Keep in mind that the 2700X still has a resale value of over $200, so if you're selling one and buying the other it's not a very expensive upgrade. But the value proposition is a lot better if you can use the extra cores. (Of course, if you can't and you just want the single-thread performance improvement, there's always the 3700X.)
    - onli 6y ago
      It's a presentation issue. The benchmark data agrees with you, the transformation from "lower is better" to "higher is better" makes the result misleading. That needs a better solution, showing that the difference is actually quite high.
      - zrm 6y ago
        It's not a presentation issue, the pc-kombo.com site is just a garbage. In one of the Blender graphs it has the 3900X as "10839" and the 2700X as "10732" (very close together), but it links to the Anandtech results where the actual numbers are 161 and 268, not close together at all and completely different numbers. In another graph it links to a "source" where the 2700X isn't even on the page. Their graphs are completely fictional, probably as a result of bad data scraping code since it looks like they're just pulling results (inaccurately) from other sites.
pdimitar 6y ago
Apologies for a tangential side-topic: I wasted 6h of research trying to find a small machine with R1606G (or any of the V1000's) with dual 10GbE NICs, and failed. :( Even Sapphire who promised such a machine retracted their pages and now only their dual 1GbE NIC offering are being sold[0]. The dual 10GbE NIC variants only exist in two PDFs[1][2] now. I went through AMD's official list[3] of embedded offerings based on the latest R1000/V1000 platforms but exactly zero of the options have the promised dual 10GbE NICs. Can somebody point me in the right direction? I need a strong and power-efficient embedded NAS with 1 or 2 10GbE NICs that covers several other homelab/server needs and I feel the R1606G is the best compromise in terms of money, power, wattage expense, form factor and required cooling (ideally I'd keep that thing in my bedroom or living room and want to never hear its fans but hey, it can sit in a closet as well). I am willing to look elsewhere, it's just that the latest R1000/V1000 offerings seem to be so good! [0] https://www.sapphiretech.com/en/commercial/ipc-fp5v-1ge https://www.sapphiretech.com/en/commercial/ipc-fp5v-1ge [1] https://www.sapphiretech.com/-/media/sites/sapphire/product/embedded/ipc_5p5v_1gbe/sapphireipcfp5vembeddedminiitxplatformdatasheetembeddedworld18f.ashx?v=afd503b2ff8444d8ac1449b4fe70c080 https://www.sapphiretech.com/-/media/sites/sapphire/product/... [2] https://www.sapphiretech.com/-/media/sites/sapphire/product/embedded/ipc_fp5v/sapphire_ipc_fp5r_embedded_mini_itx_platform_datasheet_27mar19.ashx https://www.sapphiretech.com/-/media/sites/sapphire/product/... [3] https://www.amd.com/en/products/embedded-minipc-solutions https://www.amd.com/en/products/embedded-minipc-solutions
- justinclift 6y ago
  Would it be feasible to get a motherboard with a PCIe v8 slot and throw in a cheap low power 10/40/etc GbE card? eg [0] [0] https://www.ebay.com/itm/Mellanox-ConnectX-3-QDR-QSFP-InfiniBand-CX354A-MCX354A-QCAT/164130634238 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Mellanox-ConnectX-3-QDR-QSFP-Infini...
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    I don't know. It probably is but I never assembled an embedded machine and I hear there's a lot I could do wrong and just let the hardware fry.
soygul 6y ago
It's always a good idea to look at the performance/$ charts before jumping in on workstation CPU wagon: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html AMD Ryzen 5 3600 currently rocks 103 CPU-Mark/$ whereas Threadripper 3960X has 40 CPU-Mark/$. You get a lot of power out of Threadrippers but you loose a lot of value.
- htfy96 6y ago
  A major drawback of CPU benchmark is that it doesn't include second-hand CPU prices. Actually many older series of Xeon CPUs can have better score/$ ratio. For example: E5 2695V4 is sold at $199 on AliExpress with ~20000 benchmark score on cpubenchmark (excluding the last anomaly data point), which suggests ~100 CPU-Mark/$
  - soygul 6y ago
    Hm that is actually good point. But newer CPUs will pay off with their energy efficiency in comparison to older generations.
    - htfy96 6y ago
      That makes sense for a single-socket workstation. A main advantage of old Xeons over R5 3600 is dual socket.
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  That delta might be a lot smaller for workloads that need the higher memory bandwidth of the threadripper motherboards.
bluedino 6y ago
This is great. But can I order a pre-built workstation from Dell or HP? Accounting won't cut a PO to NewEgg for parts.
- stagger87 6y ago
  Yes you can.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  There's HP EliteDesk 705 G5, but its specs are not amazing. Ryzen 9 PRO without ECC memory and without workstation GPU.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  You can and should. It's crazy to try to integrate your own workstation, for the reasons the article states but then ignores: ECC doesn't actually work on any of the random Ryzen motherboards, and Intel is sending all of their parts to OEMs instead of retailers. An HP Z4 workstation comes with ECC memory, actually boots, and all the other stuff you want from a _work_station.
  - muro 6y ago
    I have a HP Z440 at home - E5-1680v3 (8 cores, 16 hyperthreaded), reasonably fast for everything I do. I replaced the GPU (some random Quadro) with a RTX-2070. Now, 6 months later, I get random beeps on boot (6 beeps = GPU error). I wish I stayed with the workstation as it was. The faster GPU was not worth the trouble. Overall, I am a convert to workstations with ECC. Worth it the peace of mind that I won't corrupt my files and that it won't randomly crash. Had my share of those over years.
- N1H1L 6y ago
  System76 now has AMD support too
madMilo 6y ago
Just bought a pair of used Intel E5-2673v4 (20C/40T) for $450 each, an E-ATX ASUS motherboard for 99EUR, and 256GB DDR4 for $700. A little older (~2017), but the whole system at a lower price than a 3970X, for similar performance on my embarrassingly parallel workloads, at similar TDP.
- rubyn00bie 6y ago
  There is no way those even come close to a single 3970x or even the 3960x. This latest generation of AMD processors made all the old “good deals” pretty much crap. Not saying your machine isn’t nice, but the CPUs were probably not worth it. Each of the 30000 series Threadrippers will be about 50% faster in single core benchmarks than the 2673v4 and have better multi-core results.
liuliu 6y ago
Updated to 3970x a few days ago. The performance has been good (llvm compiles around 5 minutes!) and it is stable (previous 2920x has soft lockups and have to workaround with idle=halt: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196683 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196683). Ubuntu 20.04 installed without much issue (other than NVIDIA driver, that's a different story). It is still rough though, mostly around the mobo. The Gigabyte Aorus Xtreme mobo doesn't work out of the gate: https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/comments/enatk1/gigabyte_trx40_designare_mobo_4gpu_d4_error/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/comments/enatk1/gigabyte_t..., https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/ankjfx/intel_10g_nic_driver_issues/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/ankjfx/inte... Ubuntu 18.04 also has an issue with the dated kernel on 3970x: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Boot-Threadripper-Zen2MCE https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Bo... that can be workaround by mce=off. Due to combination of that and NVIDIA driver, I did 20.04, and it has been stable so far.
- afandian 6y ago
  I want a desktop linux machine that "just works" (is that so unreasonable?). Is it genrally safe to buy a Ryzen? I've seen so many mixed messages.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - gameswithgo 6y ago
    Every linux distro I have tried works fine with my Ryzen 3900X. Ubuntu 18/19/20. Maybe threadripper had some extra issues early but its likely fine now. The only Ryzen/Linux issue I've heard of is on launch week of Zen2 some distros of Linux were broken by an AMD bug which was fixed pretty quick. In fact performance is better for many cored Ryzens than windows usually.
  - liuliu 6y ago
    If you stick with 1 or 2 GPUs and common mainstream motherboards, more recent Linux distro (Ubuntu 20.04). You will be fine. The most problem I had is due to the "high-end" motherboard.
amelius 6y ago
So there is no reasonably simple way to tell if a specific ECC implementation actually works?
- greggyb 6y ago
  Simple, yes. Without purchasing hardware and testing, no.
known 6y ago
I prefer to pick from https://www.amazon.com/bestsellers https://www.amazon.com/bestsellers
ngcc_hk 6y ago
Need a Zfs with 8 disk nas and on searching for a ECC based Server. Got It reverse as got the disk, the 10g Ethernet card and Sata card. 1900 seems too old. Is 3900 good for this?
- zrm 6y ago
  The 3900 seems like massive overkill for that. You might want to look at something like the 3400G or 3200G, since who wants to buy a separate GPU for a NAS anyway.
  - ngcc_hk 6y ago
    Thanks. I did have quite a few spare Gpu around.

163 points by pulse7 6y ago

onli 6y ago

Real high end options only. Apart from the 1920X, that is a steal right now, but the board it needs is not cheap, it's a legacy platform, and Threadripper 1 did not work well for some workloads. I'd not ignore Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9. If you can work with 128GB ram (and especially if you just want a regular strong system with the usual 16GB) 3700X, 3900X and 3950X are really strong processor and apart from the last one a lot cheaper. Most developers don't even need to go that high, not even on a workstation, one based on the Ryzen 5 3600 would not be weak.

ckastner 6y ago

Those are great options, but the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X sells for less than $450 now. Sure, it has half as many cores as the 3960X Threadripper listed, but 12C/24T is still a lot. Also, it's much easier to cool -- 105W TDP vs 280W on the Threadrippers.

kaspar030 6y ago
Also, the Ryzen 9 3950X. It has a bit more punch than the 3900X, for ~200$ more. I built one, a Noctua NH-D15 can cool it at 16*4ghz at 700RPM, so basically almost inaudible even at full load. No ECC, though.
- littlestymaar 6y ago
  > No ECC, though. Is ECC useful for a workstation? I thought it was useful for shared servers (VM hosts) to protect against rowhammer & co, but does is have other uses?
  - vardump 6y ago
    Yeah, ECC makes the system much more reliable. It drives those weird unexplained glitches away.
  - lazyjones 6y ago
    http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html Without ECC, modern systems (>= a few GB RAM) will have bits flipping pretty much daily. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109401
    - jleahy 6y ago
      It's not quite fair to just extrapolate numbers for 256MB of RAM up to a modern system. If this was true you'd be seeing OS crashes daily (if you run hundreds of servers with no ECC you will see mysterious crashes every day, but for one server it might be once a year). Ultimately these flips are caused by charged particles hitting the memory module (a so called 'single event upset' or SEU), and the number of charged particles hitting the modules has not increased with density (although the modules are more sensitive to SEU, it's a smaller effect).
      - vbezhenar 6y ago
        To encounter a crash, bit flip has to happen on a very small subset of available memory. It's much more likely to just corrupt file cache.
        jleahy 6y ago
        Well it depends what you're doing, if your memory is full of hash tables and linked lists then you'll likely get a crash (say a web backend). If you're a fileserver and it's all cache then you won't.
    - agapon 6y ago
      This does not seem to be true in practice. I use ECC on my systems and they are configured to log any ECC error. And I see ECC erros almost never. Mostly ECC errors start appearing on very old systems when something in hardware becomes bad because of the age (even if just oxidized contacts). I am not sure if I've ever seen a truly random ECC error.
      - 6y ago
  - 83457 6y ago
    It prevents corruption from bit flips caused by cosmic rays and other sources. More important for scientific/business purposes and at higher altitudes where there is less atmosphere to block cosmic rays.
  - tpetry 6y ago
    It‘s usefull for everyone but bit errors happen far far seldom than people do expect. But you should have it just in case. You dont want e.g. a corrupt database file just because the low probability of a bitceroor happened and you have been in bad lick it was on a very critical operation.
    - vardump 6y ago
      > ...bit errors happen far far seldom than people do expect. Until they happen more often that expected. It's something that varies based on building, temperature, etc. environmental factors. And of course on your luck with memory module lottery.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    According to this paper, 8% of DIMMs and 32% of machines suffered from at least one correctable error per year. Without ECC, that's an undetected and uncorrected error. The average machine in the study had over 22,000 corrected errors per year. The paper observes that "memory errors are not rare events". If you're running without ECC, you are quite likely to have some undetected corruption, which could range from a single erroneous bit over the lifetime of the machine all the way up to constant unexplained crashes and file or filesystem corruption. There are plenty of use cases where it doesn't matter but for workstation use you presumably care about the results. https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/35162.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- Borealid 6y ago
  I have a Ryzen 9 3900X. Officially it doesn't support ECC memory. In practice unregistered ECC DIMMs work fine, and ECC functions properly (single-bit correction, dual-bit detection). I assume the 3950X is the same way. The hardware is there, the official blessing is not.
  - andy_ppp 6y ago
    They seem to cast doubt on if the bios and software all work together and are really performing the ECC checks even in cases where support might be possible they say things can stop it from working and fixing memory bits. I've no reason to doubt them and this is probably the reason for the lack of official support. Anyone know of a way to validate if it's working correctly?
    - loeg 6y ago
      You can overclock your RAM until you start getting single-bit errors detected.
  - CarVac 6y ago
    How do you verify that ECC is actually functioning without just trusting what the hardware tells you though?
    - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
      By opening the case and holding your smartphone near and nearer into it, while having it search for networks. Until it crashes, and then checking the logs, if any :) edit: I mean near the DIMMs. Don't try this if you are afraid, or need your hardware. This is a test i'm doing with every build, or any system i have to fix. And it crashes every system, though not at the same places and in the same ways. So far it didn't damage anything permanently, but no guaranties it won't.
      - swinglock 6y ago
        Are you serious? How very interesting. Really would like to hear from someone with experience in inducing errors that can say what the risks for permanent damage would be, save for data loss in case of flushing corrupted data to disk for course.
- wolfhumble 6y ago
  Apart from price, was there a reason you did not go for ECC? Thx!
  - paulmd 6y ago
    One other reason is that ECC is not binned for super high clocks like gaming RAM (even though there is nothing technically preventing it from doing so - it is one extra chip per stick, that's basically it). The fastest you can get is like 2666, where you can readily get gaming RAM in the 3600 range and premium bins go to 4400+. Ryzen has always been very "sensitive" to low-clocked RAM and shows some pretty good scaling as you increase frequency and tighten timings and the ECC UDIMMs on the market are just not binned to do that.
    - vbezhenar 6y ago
      2666 is not the fastest ECC memory. Here's 3200 for example: https://www.newegg.com/crucial-32gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82E16820156214 https://www.newegg.com/crucial-32gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82...
      - zrm 6y ago
        That's registered memory, not supported by Ryzen/Threadripper. Find unregistered ECC DDR4 3200. Or convince AMD to stop artificially not supporting registered memory on Ryzen/Threadripper -- the early Athlons supported both.
        paulmd 6y ago
        I still am impressed though, didn't know about that one. Kinda trash CAS latency but I guess that might be because it's registered (I've never seen registered that fast so I guess I don't really have a good perspective on what "good CAS latency" would be for a registered memory). I wonder if those would run on my Haswell-E xeons. They support RDIMMs, and they are unlocked so nominally they should support higher RAM clocks too (although I've never tried it with RDIMMs, only UDIMMs). More recently, the W-3175X (Threadripper's real competitor) supports RDIMM as well. So Threadripper actually offers less features than the competition here. I really would like to see the Threadripper series merged with the 7002P series though. Right now there is no option that gives you both Threadripper-level clocks and large quantities of RAM, the frequency-optimized parts are still a large compromise in performance and aren't widely supported. There is no part that gets you to 4 GHZ on 64 cores with 512+ GB of RAM, despite all of these capabilities existing in their respective segments. When you are shipping a 64C HEDT processor there is really no longer any meaningful distinction between that and a server processor. And 256GB simply is not enough RAM for a 64C processor. AMD could still upcharge on the multi-socket models, but they are drawing lines between product segments that no longer make sense now that they have pushed core counts so high. Basically, give us a modern successor to the Intel X5670 series. It's the top of the line, you're paying $4000 for a workstation processor, you should get the whole processor and not have a bunch of disabled features. The really funny thing is, it's not even a money thing, Epyc isn't even priced significantly higher. 7702P is $4150 at Provantage (HPE p/n P16660-B21) vs $3990 for the 3990X. The 7402P (HPE p/n P16664-B21) is actually $250 cheaper than the 3960X. AMD is no longer using the "traditional" model where workstation is cheaper than server. Workstation is now just as expensive as server. So it's not like giving you Epyc capabilities would mean AMD foregoing any money. AMD is just drawing arbitrary lines between these product segments because they can.
- jcelerier 6y ago
  > for ~200$ more. huh, where ? from what I see here the 3900X is listed at 450€ and the 3950X at 900€ on average in the mainstream websites...
moonbas3 6y ago
They are looking at HEDT parts, they have more pcie lanes, more memory support etc. This isn't about your average joe's `gaming-workstation`.
- lliamander 6y ago
  Technically Ryzen 9 CPUs aren't HEDT, but between their high core counts, the amount of PCIE bandwidth on X570 (with PCIE 4), and the ability to (unofficially) use ECC RAM, the boundary between mainstream and HEDT is awfully blurry.
  - TheGoddessInari 6y ago
    Currently the super sharp line has to do with PCIe lanes and support for 8 DIMMs. If you've gotten locked into needing that, you have no other options aside from not using hardware that you can currently slot. AMD entirely eliminated the lower end HEDT parts and raised prices for TR3. Intel has a nasty shortage, too. Compare that to x99, which had an entry level msrp of just $350, but often went for exact same price as 7700k, significantly under $300. HEDT is in a bad value proposition right now, but if you're stuck needing it for various reasons, your options are limited, hence price increases.
    - lliamander 6y ago
      > Currently the super sharp line has to do with PCIe lanes and support for 8 DIMMs. That's exactly the area where I argue there is some fuzziness. For PCIE lanes, it's true that AMD only has 24 lanes (4 of which dedicated for the chipset) but it has the equivalent of 48 PCIE gen3 lanes in terms of raw bandwidth. Now, it's still not as flexible as having that many actual PCIE gen3 lanes, but high-end x570 motherboards do support some level of bifurcation. You also need compatible devices, but we already compatible storage. There are a couple GPUs out now, but given the upcoming launches of RDNA2 and Ampere GPUs, I expect there will be plenty more compatible GPUs. X570 is somewhat limited now, but as more gen4 devices are released that chipset will only become more versatile. For RAM, there you have another fuzzy spot. I mean sure, HEDT usually has 4 channels, but what does that mean in terms of memory capacity and bandwidth? Only within the last year or so have 32GB UDIMMs been available (iirc) so HEDT was limited to 128GB until very recently. And if you really need more, you can use an Optane storage device as a swap partition (It's been done before, it's fine). As for bandwidth, 2 channels is a bit of a limitation, but Ryzen does support faster memory, which can help bridge the gap a little bit to quad channel Intel parts running at lower RAM speeds. I'm not saying that Ryzen + X570 is HEDT, but it's so darn close that I can understand why AMD chose not to produce low-end TR 3000 parts. Between Ryzen 9, TR 2000, Epyc 7002P, and limited use of TSMCs fabs, I think the move they made was smart. > HEDT is in a bad value proposition right now, but if you're stuck needing it for various reasons, your options are limited, hence price increases. I don't think it's a bad value prop overall. We have a $4000 CPU that's beating out two $10,000 CPUs (dual Xeon Platinums), which is a phenomenal improvement in value. I think we are in this weird space where, when trying to buy the system capabilities you need (in terms of cores, clock speeds, memory capacity, and expansion slots) you sometimes have to pay a bit extra for capabilities that you don't need. That's unfortunate and I hope next gen fixes that. However, it doesn't seem like AMD or Intel will have new HEDT parts for at least a year.
jcadam 6y ago
Just built myself a home dev server based around a R9 3900X. Paired it with 64G of RAM, a 1TB NVMe and an RTX 2060, running CentOS 8. Whole build cost me a little under $1400. It sits, headless, in the corner of my office crunching away. I ssh in from my XPS 13 running Fedora and use X forwarding to do work on it. It's so much faster than trying to do everything on an ultrabook. Not to mention quite a bit cheaper than a high-end laptop.
- benologist 6y ago
  Visual Studio Code has a seamless SSH extension for working like this too - https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    Any editor can use sshfs.
    - jedimastert 6y ago
      It's a little more tightly coupled than just a file system; it's essentially a fully headless mode.
      - mixmastamyk 6y ago
        Tightly coupled is often not desirable.
        pkaye 6y ago
        the VSCode SSH extension runs the editing process remotely so it doesn't need to transfer the entire file.
        mixmastamyk 6y ago
        That could be helpful, text files are often tiny though.
heelix 6y ago
I'm in a similar boat. I planned to swap out my 1950x with the 39xxx series threadrippers and got bit by the socket change. The older i7 3930k was swapped out with a 3900x while we sorted the new hardware... and I'll be damned, but that AM4 CPU, paired with 4x16G sticks of RAM and an M2 drive has been a wonderful Linux workstation for development.
AnthonBerg 6y ago
The motherboard is also MUCH cheaper.
- vonmoltke 6y ago
  Eh, depends on what you want out of a motherboard. I just bought a Threadripper platform yesterday (though this discussion is making me regret it), and the board I bought is the same price as the board I would have bought for the 3900X build I was considering ($500).
  - distances 6y ago
    Just curious, why would you pay $500 for AM4 board? Some specific hardware not found in cheaper models?
    - vonmoltke 6y ago
      If I was going to go the AM4 route, I wanted a board that supported the full 128GB of RAM the processor does and has an X570 chipset. I also wanted a board that has at least 5 PCIe slots (of any type) and 6 SATA ports. While there are a number of boards in the $200 - $300 range that satisfy these requirements, I can't find anywhere that actually has them[1]. If my home workstation hadn't just died I would just wait until the pandemic-related supply issues abate. [1] Well, has them for a reasonable price. Newegg as third-party sellers offering a few of them for 60%+ markups, but I feel better paying $500 for a $500 board than I do paying $275 for a $160 board.
      - AnthonBerg 6y ago
        Yes!, a higher-end motherboard can certainly be worth paying for. Conversely, I paid $150 an Asus X470-F that checks mostly the same boxes except it only takes 64GB RAM and doesn't have PCIe 4.0. I put a 3900x in it. It's pretty great. - But it was bought before the pandemic so idk if it's still available. If only 12-16 cores with 64GB of RAM are enough to be useful, then the Ryzen 9 gets A LOT of work done for an unprecedented low price. But if the work being done can make use of 128GB quad-channel RAM and 24-32-64 cores, then the $350 extra for a Threadripper motherboard is nothing. Doesn't take many billable hours to pay for it :)
loeg 6y ago
More significantly, half the memory controllers.

maallooc 6y ago

I won't go for AMD CPUs for workstations. They are unstable. QA is bad, gets weird errors in programs (probably programs' fault but I don't care) and if the machine fails to function in any way it becomes my fault for choosing it. That's why my company buys an Intel workstation every time. Yeah. Downvote as much as you like fanboys. Can't dilute the truth.

baq 6y ago
there's this gem in the article > The downside to going Intel here is finding a CPU for sale.
- maallooc 6y ago
  The truth is if you get an OEM workstation like sane people does you really don't have problems supplying them.
ornornor 6y ago
> QA is bad, gets weird errors in programs (probably programs' fault but I don't care) Haha what?
- maallooc 6y ago
  AMD's QA is bad. My friend runs a company that churns about >400 computers per month with AS guarantee mostly for office use. The ratio of initial failure confirmed by manufacturers was 15:1 and the ratio of failing within 2 years (cpu and motherboard failure) was 4:1. Those numbers does not reflect the fact that Intel systems sold more than AMD systems. People dealing with professional softwares also have problems that are magically solved when they use Intel. Have no statistics on that tho.
  - rooam-dev 6y ago
    How would a CPU fail? Also, did AMD manufacture all failed mobos? In which case who needs to do the QA Just to be clear, I am not defending defective and/or unreliable products, just want to make sure the fingers are pointed into the right direction.

qubex 6y ago

I’m really quite dismayed by the purely x86/x64-centric viewpoint. No mention of POWER9, for example (my own personal favourite), which I’m running on my workstation (https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/ https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/) There’s several other ISAs out there (ARM, obviously, but desktop-, let alone workstation-class chips are hard at least for now a dicy proposition). EDIT: Surprised by all the downvotes. Is mentioning anything outside the domain of x86 considered controversial nowadays?!

consp 6y ago
POWER9 is a niche within a niche. I guess they ignored it for that reason.
- qubex 6y ago
  Yes, and if everybody continues to ignore it because it’s a niche within a niche, it’s doomed to stay that way and probably become extinct.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    > it’s doomed to stay that way and probably become extinct Well yes, it probably is. That's another reason why everyone is ignoring it.
    - qubex 6y ago
      Actually POWER won’t die, because it has IBM behind it and the POWER architecture forms the backbone of their highly profitable mainframe and high-end server business. What I was referring to as possibly dying was POWER on the desktop generally, and Raptor/Talos specifically.
      - praseodym 6y ago
        IBM Z mainframes don’t use the POWER architecture, but have their own z/Architecture instruction set and CPUs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/Architecture

erkken 6y ago

I have a very cpu intensive application in Rust, that is able to use all cores given to it. I am thinking about going for the Epyc 7502p with 32 cores but having a hard time knowing if the Threadripper counterpart with 32 cores would be better given its higher frequency. Guess it is very hard to answer but which one would you go for? Will the threadripper perform much better?

littlestymaar 6y ago
Was the “in Rust” part mandatory? ;) On HN I still don't know if it's an easy way to get upvotes, or the best way to get down-voted hell.
- beastman82 6y ago
  The former
- Koshkin 6y ago
  In Rust We Trust.
- qchris 6y ago
  I sort of figure that got put in there for context, because Rust code so commonly gets multi-threaded in a serious way because of the borrow checker and drop-in parallel libraries. It makes it a little bit more clear that, yes, this person probably will benefit a lot from having those extra cores/threads, rather than focusing on processors where they could improve performance more with better memory or clock speed options instead.
vardump 6y ago
Depends on how memory intensive workload you have. AFAIK, Epyc supports 8 memory channels, while Threadripper supports only 4. So TR has effectively only 50% memory bandwidth available.
- erkken 6y ago
  It's not memory intensive at all - just CPU bound

theon144 6y ago

Whoa, it seems that AMD has really blown it out of the water here. Good to finally see competition!

gigatexal 6y ago

It’s not well known but the desktop CPUs support ECC

betaby 6y ago
Support is very MB dependent though
- muro 6y ago
  Unfortunately, it's pretty much impossible to have a validation by someone trustworthy that it actually works. If you really want ECC, going with a workstation from Dell/HP/Lenovo/Apple seems still the better choice. Shame, would love to upgrade to one of these.
  - gigatexal 6y ago
    You just need the right motherboard. ASRock Rack X470D4U

rational_indian 6y ago

I have a Ryzen 2700X. Is Ryzen 9 3900X going to be a good upgrade for me?

onli 6y ago
Depends on what you do. You'd gain 4 cores and 8 threads and also the single core performance is higher. If have some direct benchmark comparisons under https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/apps/cpu/compare?ids%5B%5D=AMD+Ryzen+9+3900X&ids%5B%5D=AMD+Ryzen+7+2700X https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/apps/cpu/compare?ids%5.... The blender benchmarks do not show a big difference, but things like 7zip and AES-Encoding do, so it really depends on the workload.
- zrm 6y ago
  That Blender result is nonsense, they screwed up the test somehow. This is a better comparison: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2125?vs=2519 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2125?vs=2519 The 3900X has 50% more cores and Blender is embarrassingly parallel, so it's more than 50% faster, as expected. That's the real question for whether it's worth it. For single threads the 3900X will be 10-20% faster. For well-threaded applications it's >60% faster. Keep in mind that the 2700X still has a resale value of over $200, so if you're selling one and buying the other it's not a very expensive upgrade. But the value proposition is a lot better if you can use the extra cores. (Of course, if you can't and you just want the single-thread performance improvement, there's always the 3700X.)
  - onli 6y ago
    It's a presentation issue. The benchmark data agrees with you, the transformation from "lower is better" to "higher is better" makes the result misleading. That needs a better solution, showing that the difference is actually quite high.
    - zrm 6y ago
      It's not a presentation issue, the pc-kombo.com site is just a garbage. In one of the Blender graphs it has the 3900X as "10839" and the 2700X as "10732" (very close together), but it links to the Anandtech results where the actual numbers are 161 and 268, not close together at all and completely different numbers. In another graph it links to a "source" where the 2700X isn't even on the page. Their graphs are completely fictional, probably as a result of bad data scraping code since it looks like they're just pulling results (inaccurately) from other sites.

pdimitar 6y ago

Apologies for a tangential side-topic: I wasted 6h of research trying to find a small machine with R1606G (or any of the V1000's) with dual 10GbE NICs, and failed. :( Even Sapphire who promised such a machine retracted their pages and now only their dual 1GbE NIC offering are being sold[0]. The dual 10GbE NIC variants only exist in two PDFs[1][2] now. I went through AMD's official list[3] of embedded offerings based on the latest R1000/V1000 platforms but exactly zero of the options have the promised dual 10GbE NICs. Can somebody point me in the right direction? I need a strong and power-efficient embedded NAS with 1 or 2 10GbE NICs that covers several other homelab/server needs and I feel the R1606G is the best compromise in terms of money, power, wattage expense, form factor and required cooling (ideally I'd keep that thing in my bedroom or living room and want to never hear its fans but hey, it can sit in a closet as well). I am willing to look elsewhere, it's just that the latest R1000/V1000 offerings seem to be so good! [0] https://www.sapphiretech.com/en/commercial/ipc-fp5v-1ge https://www.sapphiretech.com/en/commercial/ipc-fp5v-1ge [1] https://www.sapphiretech.com/-/media/sites/sapphire/product/embedded/ipc_5p5v_1gbe/sapphireipcfp5vembeddedminiitxplatformdatasheetembeddedworld18f.ashx?v=afd503b2ff8444d8ac1449b4fe70c080 https://www.sapphiretech.com/-/media/sites/sapphire/product/... [2] https://www.sapphiretech.com/-/media/sites/sapphire/product/embedded/ipc_fp5v/sapphire_ipc_fp5r_embedded_mini_itx_platform_datasheet_27mar19.ashx https://www.sapphiretech.com/-/media/sites/sapphire/product/... [3] https://www.amd.com/en/products/embedded-minipc-solutions https://www.amd.com/en/products/embedded-minipc-solutions

justinclift 6y ago
Would it be feasible to get a motherboard with a PCIe v8 slot and throw in a cheap low power 10/40/etc GbE card? eg [0] [0] https://www.ebay.com/itm/Mellanox-ConnectX-3-QDR-QSFP-InfiniBand-CX354A-MCX354A-QCAT/164130634238 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Mellanox-ConnectX-3-QDR-QSFP-Infini...
- pdimitar 6y ago
  I don't know. It probably is but I never assembled an embedded machine and I hear there's a lot I could do wrong and just let the hardware fry.

soygul 6y ago

It's always a good idea to look at the performance/$ charts before jumping in on workstation CPU wagon: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html AMD Ryzen 5 3600 currently rocks 103 CPU-Mark/$ whereas Threadripper 3960X has 40 CPU-Mark/$. You get a lot of power out of Threadrippers but you loose a lot of value.

htfy96 6y ago
A major drawback of CPU benchmark is that it doesn't include second-hand CPU prices. Actually many older series of Xeon CPUs can have better score/$ ratio. For example: E5 2695V4 is sold at $199 on AliExpress with ~20000 benchmark score on cpubenchmark (excluding the last anomaly data point), which suggests ~100 CPU-Mark/$
- soygul 6y ago
  Hm that is actually good point. But newer CPUs will pay off with their energy efficiency in comparison to older generations.
  - htfy96 6y ago
    That makes sense for a single-socket workstation. A main advantage of old Xeons over R5 3600 is dual socket.
gameswithgo 6y ago
That delta might be a lot smaller for workloads that need the higher memory bandwidth of the threadripper motherboards.

bluedino 6y ago

This is great. But can I order a pre-built workstation from Dell or HP? Accounting won't cut a PO to NewEgg for parts.

stagger87 6y ago
Yes you can.
vbezhenar 6y ago
There's HP EliteDesk 705 G5, but its specs are not amazing. Ryzen 9 PRO without ECC memory and without workstation GPU.
jeffbee 6y ago
You can and should. It's crazy to try to integrate your own workstation, for the reasons the article states but then ignores: ECC doesn't actually work on any of the random Ryzen motherboards, and Intel is sending all of their parts to OEMs instead of retailers. An HP Z4 workstation comes with ECC memory, actually boots, and all the other stuff you want from a _work_station.
- muro 6y ago
  I have a HP Z440 at home - E5-1680v3 (8 cores, 16 hyperthreaded), reasonably fast for everything I do. I replaced the GPU (some random Quadro) with a RTX-2070. Now, 6 months later, I get random beeps on boot (6 beeps = GPU error). I wish I stayed with the workstation as it was. The faster GPU was not worth the trouble. Overall, I am a convert to workstations with ECC. Worth it the peace of mind that I won't corrupt my files and that it won't randomly crash. Had my share of those over years.
N1H1L 6y ago
System76 now has AMD support too

madMilo 6y ago

Just bought a pair of used Intel E5-2673v4 (20C/40T) for $450 each, an E-ATX ASUS motherboard for 99EUR, and 256GB DDR4 for $700. A little older (~2017), but the whole system at a lower price than a 3970X, for similar performance on my embarrassingly parallel workloads, at similar TDP.

rubyn00bie 6y ago
There is no way those even come close to a single 3970x or even the 3960x. This latest generation of AMD processors made all the old “good deals” pretty much crap. Not saying your machine isn’t nice, but the CPUs were probably not worth it. Each of the 30000 series Threadrippers will be about 50% faster in single core benchmarks than the 2673v4 and have better multi-core results.

liuliu 6y ago

Updated to 3970x a few days ago. The performance has been good (llvm compiles around 5 minutes!) and it is stable (previous 2920x has soft lockups and have to workaround with idle=halt: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196683 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196683). Ubuntu 20.04 installed without much issue (other than NVIDIA driver, that's a different story). It is still rough though, mostly around the mobo. The Gigabyte Aorus Xtreme mobo doesn't work out of the gate: https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/comments/enatk1/gigabyte_trx40_designare_mobo_4gpu_d4_error/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/comments/enatk1/gigabyte_t..., https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/ankjfx/intel_10g_nic_driver_issues/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/ankjfx/inte... Ubuntu 18.04 also has an issue with the dated kernel on 3970x: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Boot-Threadripper-Zen2MCE https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Bo... that can be workaround by mce=off. Due to combination of that and NVIDIA driver, I did 20.04, and it has been stable so far.

afandian 6y ago
I want a desktop linux machine that "just works" (is that so unreasonable?). Is it genrally safe to buy a Ryzen? I've seen so many mixed messages.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  Every linux distro I have tried works fine with my Ryzen 3900X. Ubuntu 18/19/20. Maybe threadripper had some extra issues early but its likely fine now. The only Ryzen/Linux issue I've heard of is on launch week of Zen2 some distros of Linux were broken by an AMD bug which was fixed pretty quick. In fact performance is better for many cored Ryzens than windows usually.
- liuliu 6y ago
  If you stick with 1 or 2 GPUs and common mainstream motherboards, more recent Linux distro (Ubuntu 20.04). You will be fine. The most problem I had is due to the "high-end" motherboard.

amelius 6y ago

So there is no reasonably simple way to tell if a specific ECC implementation actually works?

greggyb 6y ago
Simple, yes. Without purchasing hardware and testing, no.

known 6y ago

I prefer to pick from https://www.amazon.com/bestsellers https://www.amazon.com/bestsellers

ngcc_hk 6y ago

Need a Zfs with 8 disk nas and on searching for a ECC based Server. Got It reverse as got the disk, the 10g Ethernet card and Sata card. 1900 seems too old. Is 3900 good for this?

zrm 6y ago
The 3900 seems like massive overkill for that. You might want to look at something like the 3400G or 3200G, since who wants to buy a separate GPU for a NAS anyway.
- ngcc_hk 6y ago
  Thanks. I did have quite a few spare Gpu around.