Due to a seemingly too-good-to-be-true deal and severe FOMO I ended up purchasing some Xeon 9480’s.
Now I need a motherboard to run them in and I am having a hard time deciding between the Asus Z13PE-D16 and the Supermicro X13DEG-QT.
The Asus board has features called “Core Optimizer” and “Engine Boost” which kind of sound like overclocking which might get me more performance… but the ASUS board also only has 3 UPI links where as the Supermicro board has 4 links.
The majority of what I do is mostly memory bound so I’m thinking the 4 UPI links would get me more performance than running beyond TDP with the Asus “Engine Boost”.
Also if I go the Supermicro route I’m stuck with air cooling whereas I could get water cooling for the Asus board.
Are there any better air coolers for LGA4677 than the 4UM?
I’m just trying to weigh my pros and cons here and see if anyone has advice or even knows of other motherboards that support sapphire rapids hbm cpus.
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I ended up getting the Asus board:
Going the Asus route will end up being about 2k cheaper than doing the Supermicro barebones option and I want to keep this build as cheap as practical since it wasn’t planned.
Moment of truth will be monday when I will have the cpus in hand. If these turn out legit, I will have gotten an entire functioning dual 9480 system for less than the cost of a single 32-core threadripper pro cpu alone.
Another interesting thing I noticed is that no lga4677 cooler comes with the right cpu carrier for the cpu, you must buy them separately.
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you can diy it without the carrier just be careful removing the cpu as if the paste releases it drops the cpu back into the socket. is all it is.
3d printable is also an option. Its just a clip that holds the cpu to the heatsink.
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So it turned out the CPUs were legit, they came in a tray and were the real deal.
The Asus motherboard arrived with bios version 0301 which claimed it didn’t support the max CPUs but it actually did… makes me wonder how many other motherboards support these CPUs but don’t declare it.
Getting these CPUs to perform well is proving difficult, between OS scheduler problems because of high thread counts (even on Linux) and disabling enough cores to bring turbo frequency up high, getting good performance is not trivial.
I’m going to try Clear Linux next to see if it has some kind of magic kernel tuning to it.
Also I’m running without any DDR5 installed, I wonder if my memory performance would improve if I install DDR5 so that the CPU can pull information from HBM and DDR5 at the same time, or if all DDR5 data needs to cache into HBM first.
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