With my 3960X TRX40 based workstation having seen an ugly end while being transported to a new house, I am after some assistance planning for its replacement (Heatsink was torn off and went bouncing around)
So far I’ve been looking at
Motherboard: Supermicro H13SSL-NT
Memory: 12x 64GB 4800MHz R-Dimms
CPU: 9274F or 9374F
And for now migrating in a 1660ti for the GPU and a number of PCIe4.0 SSD’s as the storage (most on 2 bifrication boards)
My main use case for it is working with image mosaics in the 10’s of terapixels, so loading up say 400,000 images, matching similarities between pairs, quads, etc and then processing on refining those alignment points, blending seams, matching gradients etc,
Rendering is the other major stage, and is a real memory hog, if you want to render a 2TB image, you need to have that amount of memory or page alternative available, while I can budget for 64GB dimms, 128 is such a jump that I’d rather just throw more SSD’s for swap space at the problem when its needed,
On the older machine it was never CPU constrained, but would regularly peg 8x Sabrent PCIe4 2TB ssd’s that where the swap/working space for the program, as well as some strange behaviors that seemed to be hitting some other I/O limits, the GPU is mainly just to run the 3 monitors, not gaming of any sort
This is part of why I’m leaning towards PCIe5 and DDR5 Genoa, not to mention TRX40 being left in the ditch has pushed me away from the threadripper line,
Having read over the other Epyc based workstation threads, it appears most of the hoop jumping to make something like this work well is running windows inside a VM and have some linux flavor with ZFS handling the direct hardware and passing through things like USB controllers etc where needed?
If there are some good guides on this kind of thing I would appreciate it, as I’ve been needing to migrate to something ZFS based for a while, but until something like this happens, its a bit hard to break what works,