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I'm disappointed in the lack of I/O in consumer chips these days. I've had 3930k 4930k and now 1680v2 Xeon and I have memory channels and PCIe lanes coming out

I'm disappointed in the lack of I/O in consumer chips these days. I've had 3930k 4930k and now 1680v2 Xeon and I have memory channels and PCIe lanes coming out of my ears. Current consumer chips give you maybe 20 lanes.

zamadatix 3y ago
Things actually end up not that different in the I/O department. Yeah, there are only 20 lanes going direct to the CPU but the northbridge has the bandwidth to hang another true 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes off it (before running into contention). At this point you are still an honest 4 lanes short but half the lanes are 4x faster so things like your GPU or high speed NIC don't need to eat 16 lanes each in the first place. The story repeats on memory where, yeah, you don't have 4 memory channels anymore... but the actual memory bandwidth is significantly higher and the total capacity is about the same. I've got a 13900k NAS build with 14 NVMe drives in it and 25G network connectivity. If you do W680 for the motherboard instead of the typical boards you get to keep the ECC too. Saved me thousands compared to getting equivalent I/O and total CPU performance with a server board. Reminded me a lot of when I got a 1650v3 prior really, "oh, it's kind of just consumer stuff but fully loaded", but ran a lot faster (of course). The hardest part is finding a board which breaks out the things out into ports instead of trying to figure out how to cram 2 extra cheap "gaming" nics, wi-fi, 50 USB ports, or other useless things in statically instead.
- ciupicri 3y ago
  What motherboard are you using and were you able to install 128+ GB of RAM running at full speed, e.g. 5600 MT/s?
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    Never said full speed because I'm running 192 GB at 5200 MT/s :p. Just the ASUS Z790 creator, like I said though I'd look into W680 and some ECC instead had I not had a steal of a deal on the memory at the time. 5600 MT/s booted but wouldn't pass memory tests. I've heard others with the same setup needed to go to 4800. That just happens to still be faster than the max memory bandwidth of the quad channel platform that was referenced anyways. Part of it might be that the early 48 GB kits (mine included) were themselves only rated for 5600. I'd be willing to bet mine would work at 5600 with one of these new better rated ~6800 kits helping things a little. I will say my experience with the memory controllers on modern Intel systems has been SIGNIFICANTLY better than my experience with them memory controllers on modern AMD systems. I could barely get my 7950X to do 64 GB at 6000, and that was one of the better experiences have had with the Zen memory controllers, but the Intel builds easily blow past that.

zamadatix 3y ago

Things actually end up not that different in the I/O department. Yeah, there are only 20 lanes going direct to the CPU but the northbridge has the bandwidth to hang another true 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes off it (before running into contention). At this point you are still an honest 4 lanes short but half the lanes are 4x faster so things like your GPU or high speed NIC don't need to eat 16 lanes each in the first place. The story repeats on memory where, yeah, you don't have 4 memory channels anymore... but the actual memory bandwidth is significantly higher and the total capacity is about the same. I've got a 13900k NAS build with 14 NVMe drives in it and 25G network connectivity. If you do W680 for the motherboard instead of the typical boards you get to keep the ECC too. Saved me thousands compared to getting equivalent I/O and total CPU performance with a server board. Reminded me a lot of when I got a 1650v3 prior really, "oh, it's kind of just consumer stuff but fully loaded", but ran a lot faster (of course). The hardest part is finding a board which breaks out the things out into ports instead of trying to figure out how to cram 2 extra cheap "gaming" nics, wi-fi, 50 USB ports, or other useless things in statically instead.

ciupicri 3y ago
What motherboard are you using and were you able to install 128+ GB of RAM running at full speed, e.g. 5600 MT/s?
- zamadatix 3y ago
  Never said full speed because I'm running 192 GB at 5200 MT/s :p. Just the ASUS Z790 creator, like I said though I'd look into W680 and some ECC instead had I not had a steal of a deal on the memory at the time. 5600 MT/s booted but wouldn't pass memory tests. I've heard others with the same setup needed to go to 4800. That just happens to still be faster than the max memory bandwidth of the quad channel platform that was referenced anyways. Part of it might be that the early 48 GB kits (mine included) were themselves only rated for 5600. I'd be willing to bet mine would work at 5600 with one of these new better rated ~6800 kits helping things a little. I will say my experience with the memory controllers on modern Intel systems has been SIGNIFICANTLY better than my experience with them memory controllers on modern AMD systems. I could barely get my 7950X to do 64 GB at 6000, and that was one of the better experiences have had with the Zen memory controllers, but the Intel builds easily blow past that.