Hi all. I’m building a workstation rig for 3D/AI, I need several GPU render pipelines and large fast storage. So far all I have is the motherboard (Asus Pro WS W-790E Sage SE). Looking for a sanity check before I drop too much more $. I’m not particularly interested in overclocking but I am looking at 5600 ram so nice to leave the door open on that.
CPU:
I’m looking at these used Xeon W5-3423 chips for $420-$500 on eBay – these are significantly less $ and more common than W5-3425X chips. I’m not finding a lot of information on these chips but I do know that it should be plenty powerful enough for my needs (even though it’s slower but oddly identical to the 3425, and both 270W). My assumption is these were OEM chips in servers that were upgraded soon after being put into service so that’s why they’re readily available used.
RAM:
I’m honestly still a bit confused about dual-rank vs single rank ram on this octa-channel board. If I get dual rank 4x 48GB it will operate at at 8 channels? Will this be the best path to upgrade later, with 4 more dual rank identical modules later, or should I be looking for single rank chips now? Or does it even matter…? I’m looking at 4 of these Hynix 48GB DDR5 PC5-5600B 2RX8 RDIMMs
Boot disk:
2x Gen5 M.2s in a default btrfs, with backups and also snapshots. If I add more M.2 cards later will it even matter? For instance if I get a 4x bifurcation card (like the Asus Hyper x4) : 12,000MBps X 6 = 72,000MBps(!?) , or i/ops beyond my comprehension… — That sounds impressive, but I can’t imagine this will do anything in real world uses in a single-user workstation context right? Perhaps it might make more sense to just get cheaper gen4 cards or Gen4 U.2 drives if I’m planning to upgrade to more space later?
Storage will be bcachefs with 3 xU.2 1.6TB Gen4 drives (raid1 + spare) for cache drive and 5x 14TB spinners (raid 10 + spare) with cold storage backups. Lots of good recommendations elsewhere in this forum so I think I’m set here.
I can sum this up in fewer sentences.
CPU:
Buying a $420 W5-3423 chip on eBay is a bit risky but likely these are pulls from servers that have been upgraded?
RAM: I can put 4x 48GB chips like this and get full performance, and also be able to upgrade with 4 more later without issue?
Boot Disk:
Will leveraging RAID0 beyond 2 or 3 Gen5 M.2 disks actually do anything in real world uses for a single user workstation? (my use will be primarily loading AI models)
I’m not sure if you’ve explored this, but if your looking for a cheap CPU many ES/QS CPUs will work on the ASUS board (not so much the asrock board though).
If you only fill 4 of the memory channels your going to get roughly have the memory performance. The unbalanced memory configuration is handled pretty well though compared to the other platform which can do some very strange things if not all memory channels are populated.
For almost all tasks I (and most people) do, the lower latency and more low queue depth IOPS that optane provides will always outperform NAND, even if it is 1-2 PCIe generations ahead of the optane.
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Ok awesome – yeah I didn’t quite understand “QS” and looks like that’s exactly what I was looking at – that explains the price and availability. Yeah I think I’ll just go with the cheapest 16GB sticks for now then. Anyone have 8 to sell? lol
You’re a very smart person, so I’m gonna have to decode this a bit. In general, you’d recommend, for instance, 4x Gen4 U.2 over 4x Gen5 M.2 for various reasons (as documented in many other threads here, assuming I have the space, power, cooling)? And is there any particular reason to mention Optane? I’ve been eying a few Micron, Kioxia and even a Huawai model (decided against that as It likely won’t have any warranty), the Intel models on paper seemed slower. Perhaps it’s not a big difference at this point, but wondering if I’m missing something special about the Intel disks (besides VROC which don’t have interest in using).
Perhaps my simplest initial build can be 4 identical mixed-use u.2 drives, 2x for boot, and 2x for bcachefs cache disks for large storage – and then later when I want to upgrade I can use all 4 disks wherever I want.
EDIT: This cleared up a bit about latency vs IOPS and why Optane. I think any U.2 in the general-use class (1.6TB, 3.2TB) is comparable, correct? https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/ss8awp/ssds_understanding_iops_vs_latency_in_random/