10 ms·

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/

• 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.
        • jeffbee 6y ago
          What do you mean by "very old"? This study, which is the only comprehensive public data of which I am aware, says that onset of DRAM errors occurs after 10-18 months. https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/35162.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
          • LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
            I've read such studies with great interest, and i prefer ECC whenever possible, but i think these don't necessarily apply to desktops, at least partially. I think the environment in racks for nodes in whichever formfactor in racks is toxic. Be it EMF interference, power distribution issues, vibrations, and/or temperature. You don't have that in a single system at home, when it is built in a good way, and has stable power. Or at least to a lesser degree.
          • agapon 6y ago
            Very old -- like 10+ years old.
    • 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.