Yeah, I noticed in the early part of this thread
Anyway, the 4500 is part of AMDs effort to cash as much silicon as they can while demand is high, the R3 4100 and R5 4500 are essentially 4000 series APUs with their GPU parts disabled. See the Wiki page. I think these are only available as tray-units, so an additional cooler is required anyway. I have the Cooler Master A30 in mind, pretty small and fits within the socket footprint, so sufficient clearance to the RAM slot next to it, I reckon. Given the server resides in an āancientā Antec 3U server enclosure with several 120mm case fans, airflow (=cooling) will probably suffice, especially as I donāt intend to run the system 24/7 (thatās where the IPMI comes in handy) or for heavy workloads (where the EPYC based 3151 SoC shines).
As for DDR4, thatās going nowhere any time fast. DDR5 is still in the āearly adoptionā phase, meaning prices are high, availability not the best and current performance levels leave the early adopters with sub-par memory once manufacturers optimize their DDR5 fabrication processes to reach the higher clock speeds specified for DDR5. Also, AMD has yet to release their DDR5 platform, so expect a surge in pricing then. I suspect DDR4 will remain available for current price levels for at least another 12-18 months. In fact, once DDR5 takes off, I expect a price drop for DDR4 as vendors clear out their inventory/stocks. But what do i know, I only bought my first PC over 2 decades ago for my 28th b-day (yeah, showing my age here
) I might be able to stretch my budget this month and get 2x 16GB instead. My desktop is running 2x 8GB ATM, I may swap these out for the 16GB sticks. Again, not really needed for the workload, but still nice to have.
Iām aware of the limitations the NVMe links on the board have, but it leaves SATA ports free for storage disks. I plan on an 1TB NVMe drive, with 128GB for the OS, 786MB for cache (for the RAID6) and the remainder for wear-leveling. I know strictly speaking I wonāt need that, but itāll improve the lifespan of the device I reckon. PSU will be another ancient Antec device, but it should be server grade anyway (it had 5yrs warranty, long expired though). Besides, Antec Europe HQ is in the next city, so getting some isnāt too difficult