It’s me again! I finally have some disposable cash, or well, I may unless something else goes catastrophically wrong again. But hey!
Last thread I looked at Threadripper motherboards, but now I’ve been eyeing up Epyc ones as prices have gone down on the Milan CPUs. There’s a few I’ve found:
TYAN S8030 GM2NE (Single socket, 8 dimms)
Gigabyte MZ01-CE1 (single socket, 8 dimms)
TTY T1DEEP E-ATX (dual socket, 2x8 dimms)
Tomcat SX S8036GM2NE (single socket, 16 dimms)
The Tomcat is the most interesting because damn 4TB of DDR4 would be awesome, but that would also be enough of an investment to fix my hairline, overhaul my house, go on trips around Europe, and have some cash left over for a takeaway.
But yeah, ideally I’d get a motherboard with a solid VRM because I’ll be doing AVX2 workloads that use all the threads at 100% most of the time, so I need it to not burn and melt. The gigabyte has a higher operating temperature threshold of 40C vs the others which have 35C (even new Supermicro boards want a max ambient temp of 35C). Which might mean it is better built?
The other worry is vendor lock in, afaik the Chinese boards don’t blow the CPU’s fuse but Gigabyte might?
I have the Gigabyte board you mentioned. It’s in the box still with a 7352 in it. Got it a while back and never ended up using it, but if you’re interested in any benchmarks, or you wanna buy/trade some mixture of the two, let me know. I was considering posting my accumulated hoard of x99, x299, x399, this, and my other ASRock Rack Epyc board here for a reasonable price since everyone is getting scalped for this stuff everywhere else atm.
Ooh that looks really cool. If it had at least 1TB of DDR4 I might actually take you up on the offer. What I’m interested in is how the core scaling works out with these Ryzens in Gaea 1 (not Gaea 2 as it’s an unusable mess and Gaea 3 can’t even export anything). I saw build times almsot halve when going from 4c/8t to 8c/8t after setting the affinity in Task manager.
Unfortunately…Quadspinner took down all sales of Gaea 1. So unless you have a license already, there’s only one way to get the software as it’s now abandonware.
Anyhow, if you’re interested, here is my Gaea remake of WoW’s Barrens zone. At 4k making the heightmap in the first graph takes around 6 and a half minutes on a 5800X3D. Assigned to only half the cores & threads it was around 11 or 12 minutes. Building the heightmap & 3 channel splatmap & vertex color map at 8k takes my CPU over an hour!
