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I have this board with 7742s. I like it generally, though most of my affection is due to the CPUs. I wish it had PCI-E 4. I've found it to be unreliable with

by nullc 6y ago

I have this board with 7742s. I like it generally, though most of my affection is due to the CPUs. I wish it had PCI-E 4. I've found it to be unreliable with memory running faster than 2933MHz but that might be the memory I was using. When I did have memory corruption problems running at higher memory speeds I didn't get a single ECC error, which I found surprising and concerning. I also had issues with Kernel 5.4 not booting at all ( https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1783733 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1783733 ) which I worked around by adding edac_report=off (I'm not sure if later kernels don't have this issue, because I've left the setting in, since taking it down and rebooting to test it is a bit of a pain-- as is typical with server boards with lots of cores and ram it takes many minutes to post)

jnwatson 6y ago
"When I did have memory corruption problems running at higher memory speeds I didn't get a single ECC error, which I found surprising and concerning." How is this possible?
- jeffbee 6y ago
  It's possible because many motherboards and even integrated systems fail to setup EDAC properly at boot time.
arminiusreturns 6y ago
Having built a few quad/dual cpu AMD Opteron systems since ~2013 with supermicro boards, I can tell you they are extremely sensitive to RAM brands/models and variations. Sometimes even RAM in the verified supermicro list would have issues. On a side note, it was about then that I foresaw AMD's move towards high core counts and I love what they have been doing both on desktop and in the server space. Honestly though, I think if I were to try to do a newer amd server I might try to push a threadripper if the power profile fit the DC/colo instead of an epyc mostly because of the lanes and the fact that anything I'm doing on a system that powerful is going to have a 40gb+ mellanox and often in combination with GPUs.
- nullc 6y ago
  The single socket epyc boards expose a lot more PCIe than threadripper boards, from what I can tell. $/core-ghz is much better on the TR parts though, if you're paying retail. Epyc chips sometimes show up on secondary markets at much better prices than retail. (e.g. my 7742's I basically paid the same $/core-ghz as the current top end threadripper parts).
  - arminiusreturns 6y ago
    Yeah it's generally a tradeoff of pci lanes to clock speed between the two. I would go for the clock speeds.

by nullc 6y ago

jnwatson 6y ago

"When I did have memory corruption problems running at higher memory speeds I didn't get a single ECC error, which I found surprising and concerning." How is this possible?

jeffbee 6y ago
It's possible because many motherboards and even integrated systems fail to setup EDAC properly at boot time.

arminiusreturns 6y ago

Having built a few quad/dual cpu AMD Opteron systems since ~2013 with supermicro boards, I can tell you they are extremely sensitive to RAM brands/models and variations. Sometimes even RAM in the verified supermicro list would have issues. On a side note, it was about then that I foresaw AMD's move towards high core counts and I love what they have been doing both on desktop and in the server space. Honestly though, I think if I were to try to do a newer amd server I might try to push a threadripper if the power profile fit the DC/colo instead of an epyc mostly because of the lanes and the fact that anything I'm doing on a system that powerful is going to have a 40gb+ mellanox and often in combination with GPUs.

nullc 6y ago
The single socket epyc boards expose a lot more PCIe than threadripper boards, from what I can tell. $/core-ghz is much better on the TR parts though, if you're paying retail. Epyc chips sometimes show up on secondary markets at much better prices than retail. (e.g. my 7742's I basically paid the same $/core-ghz as the current top end threadripper parts).
- arminiusreturns 6y ago
  Yeah it's generally a tradeoff of pci lanes to clock speed between the two. I would go for the clock speeds.