I'm looking at a Sapphire Rapids workstation today- NEED Advice!

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SO, I found a gem- the ubiquitous listing on my local selling platform for “Dell PC” after doing some investigation, I have figured out that the device is a Dell Precision 5860 Tower workstation with a w7-2475x, 64GB ECC ddr5, 2TB of storage (type unknown) and a Nvidia A4000! A very capable machine that would be replacing my Xeon E2236 as my main Services/virtualization sandbox server.

The problem is that this is not a small investment, I have only been playing with grown up toys for about 2 years and their isn’t a lot of information on this compute platform. I don’t know what gremlins I should be looking for and more broadly- the Unknown unknowns.

Would love to hear from anyone with this or a similar device. With 20 Cores, it could potentially replace both my debian server (Xeon E2236/Intel B50/Intel A310/ 128GB ddr4 UDIMM) and my TrueNAS instance (Xeon E2144G, 64GB DDR4ECC, 9300-16i) as it has the I/O, cores, and memory bandwidth to manage both workloads. I understand the power bill will suffer, but I live 5 miles from a major new data center, the power bill is gonna suffer either way.

The price is crazy good, like, the lowest four figure real integer good.

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Ultimately I would compare the performance of that box against building a new 4565p build. if you need 64 lanes, go for it. but that cpu is only 4 memory channels and 64 lanes. you can make 128/192/256g builds on the epyc thats faster zen5: Intel Xeon w7-2475X vs AMD EPYC 4565P [cpubenchmark.net] by PassMark Software

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Are you close to exceeding your current resource capacity? No point upgrading if it won’t actually be used. You’ve got some pretty decent hardware already.

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This is where I am ending up too. While it is a good deal, I think it’s easy to talk myself into the shiny new thing under the guise of future proofing way beyond my actual needs.