Yesterday my AMD EPYC Milan 7443P arrived with 24 cores and 48 threads full of potential. I’ve been trying to get my hands on an AMD chip since November 2020, failing to get hold of a 5950x and later a P620 with a Threadripper.
Note: failing refers to me refusing to wait for more than 60 days for any PC related order.
In retrospect I’m glad I waited the 7443P looks like a monster on paper.
Onto the questions
The difference between the S8030 and EPYCD8-2T is about £100 for the variant with 2x 10GB cards is Tyan really worth it or ASRock is fine?
Any recommendation for ECC PC-3200 64GB sticks that work 100% with these 2 mobos?
What power supply do you suggest? I would like to be able to run 2 3090s on this in the future.
I have only the SSD, GPU and CPU with right now.
The part list is:
AMD EPYC 7443P (arrived)
Tyan S8030 (blessed by Wendel) or ASRock EPYCD8-2T
Crucial MTA36ASF8G72LZ-3G2B1 (or any 64GB PC-3200 stick that works and can be bought)
Nvidia 1080 (because I happen to have that around)
Regarding the choice of power supply, there is really one metric you need to consider : efficiency. First, calculate how much power your components need. Second, find a power supply that delivers at least 40% more power than that. Then look at its efficiency curve.
You want the PSU that has the best efficiency at the power draw you’ll actually be using. Higher efficiency means :
Less heat generation
Longer power supply life
Saving money on your electricity bill (though not much)
As an example, here’s the efficiency curve for an 850 W Corsair PSU :
It’s at (or near) peak efficiency between 40 and 70 % loading, which means it would be a very good choice for a computer drawing 340 to 595 W. If your computer uses more than 600 W, keep in mind that the losses grow geometrically : not only you waste a higher percentage of the power you draw, but that power itself is a higher number, so that’s double-damage.
Also, keep in mind that ACPI in modern computers is incredibly effective. I’ve used an EPYC / RTX 3090 workstation for a while, and when you’re just running office apps and browsing the web, the entire PC draws just 55 W at the wall. So you have to ask yourself : how much are you actually running your computer at maximum power ?
There’s a big thread on EPYC workstations that you might find very interesting if you haven’t read it already :
It doesn’t address power supplies much, but it has lots of information you can use if this is your first EPYC workstation.
@sherma.52 I went with S8030 in the end ecprof.com, I didn’t get to read your messages the H12 series look good as well.
@Nefastor I could do a pass-through of the 4 Drives I have, for my home office + 3 laptop backups I would imagine it should work just fine. I don’t run anything too heavy on the NAS anyways. Admittedly my NAS box is the backup for everything digital in the house not sure I want to merge that with my workstation.
I plan on doing more work with Kubernetes than anything else, that doesn’t require VMs. Some database testing, sparse matrices on GraphBLAS, microservices and Kafka. Eventually when I muster the courage I’ll sink £1700 in a 3090.
This is after all a workstation more than a server to me.
I think I’ll try a few options and see what works best.
I would like a MacOS VM for building iOS apps.
I’d like to play Control at some point but I suspect that works fine in Linux so I don’t think I’ll bother with a Windows VM.
