So my Haswell 4770k is showing its age. I ran out of PCIe lanes I believe. I recently dropped in a Samsung 970 EVO with a Gen 3 x4 adapter card. The SSD is running at ~1000Mb/s R/W instead of the 3500/1700 it is rated at. It is also running as a Gen 2 x4 if placed in the Gen 2 slot and Gen 3 x2 if placed in a Gen 3 x8 slot. I also have a Soundblaster X-Fi Titanium card that now does not output sound with the 970 plugged in. It seems that my 1080 is eating all PCIe lanes available.
As such, I think it is time to upgrade to Threadripper.
Recommend a board
Recommend a chip
Recommend RAM 16GB or higher
The 4770k kit will be shifted to my media server to replace the existing FM1 8350K build.
I use Newegg exclusively for parts so please keep them on Newegg. I use Amazon for some of the low cost parts since I only have a Newegg store card.
I am not brand loyal on Motherboards. I just want a quality board that is good for IOMMU and supports Linux well. So far I have been lucky to not have to replace motherboards on the setups I have built. My current CPU/RAM/Mobo is from 2012.
Oh and if possible, I guess a LOTES socket would be nice since from what I understand, a LOTES socket is the least likely to be jacked up when installing?
If you plan to oc the pbo is worth $200 imho. 1st gen ryzen was a bit squirrelly with overclocks past about 4ghz. If you don’t plan to oc, the 2950x will make up the performance difference on single thread stuff but is very similar performance multithread.
I very well might in the future. I dont really see myself overclocking any time soon. I eyed Ryzen until I noted that it has the same number of PCIe lanes as my Haswell.
Im a Star Citizen and Escape From Tarkov player. As soon as I can, Im switching back to AMD
Also, @FurryJackman, I already have a case that does just fine. I paid $160 for it and have yet to find anyone who wants to buy it from me so I will continue to use it.
Star Citizen will benefit greatly from a RTX card and Threadripper. That game uses FP64 for positioning, so that’s either going to be CPU or GPU compute intensive.
The current Vega GPUs have terrible FP64 performance, the last AMD GPU that had full speed FP64 was Hawaii, but even those had been kinda gimped in the desktop models (290X/390X have 1/8 (or maybe 1/16) speed FP64, Hawaii based FirePro-s have 1/2 speed).
Thankfully this will likely not matter, as I would imagine that all FP64 based positioning is done CPU side.
As for the HW, I would recommend the 2950X (or a 1950X if you can get one for cheap) and 4*8GB of 3200 MHz RAM. No experience regarding x399 boards, but the Asrock Taichi is cheap and it looks solid for 16 core CPUs.
If you want 10 Gbps Ethernet, you might be better of with some other board though. The Asus Zenith Extreme is of course very nice, but also very expensive.
Well it mainly depends on the said feutures that are important to you.
Basically all those three boards named above are fine.
VRM wise the Msi board basically is the strongest of the three.
Allthough its basically just a 5+3 phase doubled to 10+3 by using IR3599 phase doublers,
and there for it have to deal with more input and output ripple current,
compaired to true 8 phase solutions like the Asrock Taichi or Gigabyte Designare EX.
But that shouldn’t really matter that much.
The Msi board still has the stronger vrm of the three boards listed.
And the Gigabyte being the weakest for what its worth in your particular setup goals.
For the rest i cannot really tell how the Msi X399 gaming pro carbon AC does with iommu pci-e passtrough,
since i personally have not really played arround with that stuff yet.
But maybe @wendell did allready test that out.
Like i mentioned all those three boards are basically fine for a 1950X or 2590X cpu.
Its mainlly a matter of compairing connectivity features and find the righr balance for you.