I have an ASROCK-RACK X470D4U and due to lack of PCIE Lanes I am doing fun stuff with M.2 - PCIE breakout boards and other idiotic things to make the HBA and the CX3 boards have something to connect to whilst keeping X16 together for the bifurcated PCIE - NVME board.
EPYC is perhaps the solution. A Cheap 7282 has so many PCIE lanes it’s almost like Christmas.
The EPYC 7282 is cheap to get in my part of the world, but mainboards to put an Epyc 7002 into cost quite a bit more than the CPU itself. I’ve seen Super Micro H11SSL, H12SSL, und ASROCK and TYAN boards going for 350 EU - 600 EU depending if their older (for Epyc 7001 + 7002) or if they’ll accept EPYC 7003 as well (bit of future proofing).
So, I’m mostly in need of PCIE, compute is not that important (would rather have lower watt parts). Is EPYC 7282 a good way to get cheap PCIE lanes, or maybe there are other options?
I had this exact issue, so I built on EPYC Milan. I needed PCIe resources and ECC vastly more than compute, so I built a 7003 series system. If you’re curious as to how that went, my post on it is over here:
Right. Epyc Rome is just fine. The listed 7702 at 200W TDP and 64 Core is way overpowered for me, but the 7282 has the same IO and needs less power. DDR4. PCIE 4.0. What can you say?
Threadripper is just too much of everything including heat and power, and Ryzen doesn’t have the IO. DDR5 ECC Reg DIMM is just dumbly expensive, and the CPUs to go with it as well. I won’t touch Intel anymore, my Xeon days are over.
Epyc 7002, here I come.
Thanks again for all the links folks, it has validated the direction I was going in.