Hi there, since my Mac Pro 5,1 (I was running Pop!_OS on it) is now dead and not really sensible to repair, I am building a new Threadripper build, allowing me to also do some lighter machine learning (mostly Pytorch and Prophet) from the cloud to my local system.
I am planning to start with an AMD 1920X and my RTX 2070, but if budget permits, I want to upgrade to a 2990WX and 2 Ampere based GPUs down the line when they launch, so that’s what I mean by “kind of future proofing”.
My main two options I have kind of nailed it down to, are the Gigabyte X399 Designare EX and the ASRock X399 Taichi.
Does anyone know which would be more suited for my chosen upgrade path?
I can’t seem to find much info on real world performance of either board with 2nd gen Threadripper.
Not to mention that the performance is not that great especially on first gen. They luckily got it together and it’s just insane on newer threadrippers.
A motherboard should not affect performance of a system in any meaningful way. There are some cases where they tune the settings away from the recommendations of the CPU manufacturer (Like Asus multicore enhancement on Intel) but the CPU is what matters on the performance, and the motherboard should just be where you connect things. If it has all of the ports you need, holds the CPU you need, and can run the ram amount that you want, general rule of thumb is the board is fine.
My main concern was with the boards being initially designed for 180W CPUs and 2nd gen Threadripper being 250W for the 24 and 32 core. Right now those are too pricey, but it should soon enough earn the money for its own upgrades…
In Germany the total difference between X570 and Threadripper TR4 are less than 200€, and I can really use those PCI-E lanes (3 NVMs, a 10GB Dual NIC, Thunderbolt Titan Ridge Controller and 2 GPUs and you already used 4 slots plus all M.2s on Threadripper… really, I am still wishing we’d finally get single CPU systems with 8 PCI-E X16 slots…
Official CPU support list is here, and supports 250W cpu’s
as does the other board. Most motherboards are overbuilt as they are meant to overclock, so they got a bios update to support higher watt CPU’s out of the box, which both boards you listed support the newer higher power CPU’s. Intel tends to disable this for greed, but there are no pointless socket changes on AMD platforms, and are overbuilt for this reason.
The Designare has one more x16 slot, wired as 2.0 x4 off the PCH. There’s also a fan on the VRM heatsinks, behind the IO shield. Much of the back side of the board is armored by a steel plate. I’m not sure what this accomplishes other than stiffening the board I guess for holding onto multiple heavy graphics cards?
The Taichi has all its slots spaced for double width cards, except for the x1 slot. It also has a U.2 connector for connecting a data center grade SSD.
That’s basically it. It’s mostly because they can, and people think it’s useful when it’s not really, but it looks nice and quality.
These are also nice to have on board, but as a heads up, m.2, pcie, and u.2 are just connectors, so they can all be adapted. Note the motherboard manual on what disables what though. Not everything can be used at once on boards. I have a motherboard that disables 2 sata ports if I use an m.2 drive in that system.
You discovered what I was originally getting at though. Motherboards are only there to hold your stuff. As long as you are satisfied with what it can hold, there’s not really a bad board unless you are doing massive overclocks or have some other very specific need. That VRM fan is only useful with a massive overclock in general, and even most of my overclocked systems sit on a test bench with no airflow, and are still well in temp spec.
I think they mean have an upgrade path above where they buy in. Let’s be honest and say that a 64 core at the top end is a decent future to have while keeping the same motherboard.
Fair points raised, though there’s still more PCIE on threadripper, even on older platforms. If CPU isn’t your only concern, than threadripper still offers 32 cores at massively dropping prices on that platform, and will have more NVME storage and GPU’s. Assuming you don’t need a ton of GPU’s at 8x mode, and nvme storage, then yeah, the 3900x is better, but they clearly care about the platform, not just the CPU.
Definitely. OP didn’t mention any use case out side “machine learning” and “2 ampere gpus” which will probably have pcie 4, meaning double bandwidth per lane.
x570 actually doubled the available pcie bandwidth while keeping the same number of lanes.
Presuming that the cards are PCIE 4.0 then agreed. We’ll both have to wait for them to let us know what else they want out of the platform both now and for the future to know what else to suggest. Both are great options.
@JMM Do you plan on using a lot of PCIE expansion other than GPUS? This includes U.2, M.2, and of course pcie SSD’s. Do you plan on needing more ram than 4 sticks can support, or plan to need more? Also, would you need more than the 16 cores in the near future? If you need one or more of these things, threadripper should be considered, but if you can safely answer no to all of these, then you may want to not use threadripper for reasons stated by @SgtAwesomesauce
Not to start a flame war but I am in similar predicament (looking for high core count, high PCIe platform). The more I look at it the more x299 (Intel socket 2066) looks compeling. Both x299 and the x399 you are considering are at the end of their lives and hence not very future-proof. The performance and power consumption per core will be higher but most likely the performance as well. You also get AVX-512 instructions set.
Just for your consideration.
Indeed, whilst it is only 32 cores, that should be plenty for the future. This is only my home office machine after-all, running pretty much 24x7 during COVID, but afterwards I may need a lot of grunt from time to time, but then efficiency is not the highest value anymore, so I am fine with Ryzen 9 5900X or whatever is hot then has 64 cores for half the power consumption.
I think X399 is a good enough platform and right now I managed to actually get CPU and Motherboards together for a lot less than 3rd Gen Ryzen AM4 and X570.
Machine Learning is what earns its money (trying smaller stuff, training the big models I obviously use the cluster at work)
I didn’t consider PCI-E for Ampere to be honest, but then again its just a home office machine.
Yup… I already had 3 NVMe drives laying around. And I might throw in a 10G Dual NIC in a month or two. And I have a USB-C PCI-E card I want to keep using because beyond mouse and keyboard I pretty much have no Type-A devices and hate adapters…
Good point. But getting a good deal for a system that’s good enough within my budget was my main goal right now, since my old workstation is toast and I can’t really do too much with only my Laptop. X299 was just way way more expensive.
Also, whilst I really enjoyed the varied points and good input I got, you were all too late, since I needed a new system ASAP, I already ordered an hour after my post
I ended up getting the Designare, mostly because it has the Thunderbolt connector and I remember Wendel getting it to work.
Is the system not the ideal choice? Maybe. Does it make me feel good? Yes.
