Gaming on Epyc (7773X specifically, if possible)

Hi all,

I’ve been using an X99 system for a while now, and it’s getting quite old and crusty. I’m very much still an HEDt user even now, and while my current plan is a WRX90 build, the 7773X CPUs are very, very cheap on ebay (tugm4470 even claims to have brand new chips for sale).

Thanks to AMD and Intel being quite greedy this gen for HEDT, the 7773X looks rather interesting to me and my 60Hz setup (I’m far more interested in moving to 8K60 than 5K120 or faster).

Which brings us to my question: for those of you with Rome/Milan setups, how do they fare in gaming? Doing some looking around on YT, it seems not too terrible, but I’d like some more opinions.

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EPYC is not build for gaming. If gaming AND HEDT is a requirement, check Threadripper instead.

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It does quite well most of the time. The larger cache can help as some Epyc CPUs have fairly low clock speeds. Also, RAM speed and channel config is very important on Epyc.

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Obviously I am well aware that Epyc is not “built for gaming”, but that was not what I’m asking.

What I’m asking is what people who already have similar boxes what happens when they install and run games on it anyways, because as it stands I can build a 7773X machine for less money than it would cost me to buy just a 7975WX CPU. In doing so, the Epyc machine gets me double the cores and 6 times the cache at the cost of a hit in clockspeeds. The massive cache should go a long way to mitigating the lack of clockspeed, but the question is by how much (and in turn decide if that matters at 60Hz)?

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You got numbers? If I do go 7773X I’d be doing 8×16GiB 3200 RDIMMs in 8ch mode, obviously (in large part because I already have the RDIMMs needed for that lying around).

mine is a 7351p and yours would be 2 generations newer so it would not be a great set of data.

if gaming and single threaded is your PRIMARY use case, you cwould go with something like a 75f3. but there is really no reason why a 7773X would be bad at gaming.

the ThreadRipper 7975WX has a higher clock speed. so as long as you keep in mind what your absolute goal is either TR or Epyc can do anything you want them too.

Yea, 7351p’s memory/IO layout is too different to draw any data that would be relevant to a 7773X :expressionless:

I used a watercooled 7742 then a 7713P in my all-in-one workstation+gaming machine and it was frankly a bad experience.

Under Windows Server 2022, there were frequent hitches during gaming with the 7742. On the 7713p, this still happened (slightly) less frequently. The only way I found to mitigate this was to reboot and disable 7 of the 8 CCDs in the BIOS, thereby keeping everything local to a single CCD.

Otherwise, it seems processes are moved between CCDs enough to cause issues. In any case, after about a year I got tired of the platform’s shortcomings, parted it out, and moved on to a new system.

Interesting. Surely that would be just as bad with the higher-core-count TRs as well then, thanks to using the same central IOd no (7975WX would be 4 CCXs, to a 7773X’s 8 CCX)?

Affinity-wrangling should also be quite automatable these days.

Sure, although games with anti-cheat do not respond well (or at all) to that.

Both the 7742 and 7713P I used were 8CCD models. You may experience fewer issues with a 4CCD model, though be sure not to accidentally buy one with gimped memory bandwidth.

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Aye, but I can live with taskmgr-wrangling for the like maybe 1 competitive game I play. From what I can see so far, it looks like core migration is the only real issue but that’s a problem TR would have as well I reckon, based on the similar cache and memory layout.

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What games do you want to play?

I am happy to play some games on Nintendo Switch with 4 of 1GHz ARM cores.

Epycs are underclocked and hard locked on their frequencies. Not one core on 7773X will speed up above 3.5GHz. The TDP is hard limited, the temperature at 100% load will be below 80 degrees with simple air cooling.

Hi end desktop CPUs from both AMD and Intel at ~$500 MSRP will provide over 5GHz core out of the box, and performance will scale up with power of cooling system, up to liquid cooling.

CPUs for gaming can use specifically overclocked DDR5 memory without ECC, which can be 2 times faster than RDDR4-3200.

For AAA and competitive games it’s best to have a dedicated gaming PC.

For casual gaming anything could work.

There are reports on the forum of running Cyberpunk on Epyc 7443 with a gaming GPU btw, but its single core is slightly faster at 4GHz.

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Definitely more of the casual side with a decent bit of AAA, but almost certainly not above 60Hz for the foreseeable future (I intend to go up to 8K before I look into speeding things up).

I do occasionally play the odd competitive game, but not to the point of actually caring about my competitiveness.

Re. memory: sure, DDR4-3200 isn’t that fast, but with 8 channels rather than 2, I get a lot of bandwidth. The latency aspect should in turn be strongly mitigated by the massive 3D V-cache. The 3D V-cache should also mitigate the lack of GHz to a decent degree

Ultimately though, my question isn’t so much can it game (because obviously it can, being quite modern x86), but rather how much pain and suffering am I in with a 7773X targeting 60fps compared to doing the same with a TRPro 7955WX chip.

By the looks of it, it seems like not that much extra pain at all, which then brings me to deciding between platforms based more of QoL than performance. For example, I have a few TB3/TB4/USB4 peripherals now, and that is a much more meaningful feature difference than going from 70fps to 120fps.

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I know I’m late to the conversation, but something to keep in mind for the 7773X is that it’s an X3D CPU. If the games you play can take advantage of the extra cache in any given CCD, the loss in clockspeed vs a desktop or workstation CPU won’t be as bad. Just look at how well the 4.1GHz 5700X3D does in comparison to CPUs with much higher clockspeeds. On the other hand, if the game doesn’t take advantage of the cache, performance will scale downwards with clockspeed and other contributing factors. Also, if data needs to leave a CCD because your scheduler spread the game across multiple CCDs for some reason, you will have the same latency and framedrop issues that anyone else with a multi-CCD AMD CPU would have. Hope that helps.

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You can game all day long on Epyc 7773X

Youi can beat any benchmark

You can have great satisfaction

You can even dual 7773x and get twice the fun

check out benchmarks at

#2 from the top is on dual Epyc 7773x

If you want even more performance use MS Server 2022 Data Center instead of Win10 or 11

Here is the dual 7773x my wife uses, and yes she games as well

the spec:

2x 4090 RTX Founders Edition
2x AMD 7773x Epyc (128/256 cores), Gigabyte MZ72-HB0 Dual socket motherboard
1 TB RAM DDR4 ECC LRDIMMs 2050W+ digital power supply
(Data drive) Raid 0 Micron 9300 Max (15.4TB each / 77TB array - overprovisioned to 64TB)
(OS Drive) Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus (8TB). 2x Back up drives Micron 5300 8TB each
Asus PA32UCG-K monitor, MS Data Center 2022 & Ubuntu, Air cooled, cool temps, relatively small case

Games completed at max visuals at 4 k with ra tracing and Path tracing in the past 3 months on that PC

Cybepunk 2077
Chernobylite
Hellblade 2
Alan Wake 2
teardown
Talos Principle 2

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If you are interested, I can send you the Resizable BAR version of the MZ72-HBO bios, that can really help apps and gaming on dual 7773x.

I have another beta bios that has the RAM drive feature as well

I use my personal PCS (dual 9684x and dual 7773x) for CNN and RCNN, so that’s their primary mission. In my enthusiasm to help you I skipped this part:

…while gaming on dual 7773x (or dual 9684x) makes the ultimate gaming machine - DO NOT give up hard cash to build these machines JUST FOR GAMING !

the amount of money, effort, architecting, and configuration is not worth it just to be in a gaming club

with respect

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