I’m currently planning a server upgrade for a system that plays two major roles.
It acts as my primary storage server
It uses it’s spare CPU power to help out projects on IBM World Community Grid
For a primarily CPU bound workload that on an Intel system I didn’t see benefit from higher memory bandwidth (single channel, dual channel, triple, etc.) does anybody know how EPYC Rome is influenced by the Rank & Frequency of the RAM?
For this type of workload would I be better off saving myself some money and going with a kit of R2x4 2133MHz RDIMM or would the workload benefit if I spent a little more and got something like R1x4 2666MHz RDIMM?
Researching this myself I’m seeing conflicting information. Seemingly for some systems (like desktops) single rank dimms would be faster meanwhile I’m also seeing dual rank or quad rank LRDIMMs being faster on server platforms.
So where does AMD EPYC Rome fit into all of this? What RAM would be best for it?
I have 16 sticks of 16gb 2r 3200 ddr4 ecc in my proliant dl325 gen10+, a fairly small amount, I believe the system goes up to 2tb. I didn’t really investigate the engineering or electrical layout. This machine has a pretty easy life, supporting a few dozen users’ virtual desktops running business applications.
The “default” speed for Zen 2 Rome is 3200mhz. Previous generations used slower speeds, I think Zen 1.5 was 2666, and Zen 1 was 2133 or maybe even less?
This is a from-scratch build. I haven’t bought parts yet and I’m currently deciding between two different motherboards.
I’m not so much wondering how RAM speed would influence my workflow as much as I’m looking to understand how the rank will. Based on the spec the 7551 supports up to 2666MHz. Now higher frequency = faster but it seems single vs dual vs quad rank is a mixed bag where no one is best. It depends on the platform. So that is my question currently.
If the case is that frequency and rank really only impact memory specific workloads and not so much CPU jobs that don’t need to swap much data in/out of memory then I’ll save myself the money and buy the less expensive kit.