I’m thinking of a build around the Asus z790 ProArt board, which has 10GbE, 2.5GbE, two thunderbolt ports, and what looks like 3-slot spacing between the first two PCIe slots that can be x8/x8.
I’m wondering if thunderbolt is worth it and is likely to work as a networking bridge in linux, or whether I am better off finding another x8/x8 board with wider PCIe slot spacing that could potentially fit 2xRTX4090 or a 3.5+ slot card next to a NIC.
If I’m reasonably confident the thunderbolt ports will work for data and networking I’ll go for this Asus board.
But will it?
Build idea
Because I’m too new to post links:
https://
pcpartpicker
.com/list/cH3GBj
Part
Component
Price
CPU
Intel Core i7-13700K 3.4 GHz 16-Core Processor
$409.00
CPU Cooler
Thermalright Peerless Assassin 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler
$45.90
Motherboard
Asus ProArt Z790-CREATOR WIFI ATX LGA1700 Motherboard
Oh, it’s good to hear that these work well! I was considering one for my mac, but I don’t yet have much other 10g stuff to plug in to it. I think if I needed a connection more than 2m away this would be a great option.
Are you using fiber or DAC cables with SFP or the RJ45 version?
if you plan on tb with prox, forget it… just boot win10 and used your pc. Prox will pass 1 time and then reboot is needed as the end device will not be detected anymore. TB is not for passing and getting converter to 10g is quite waste or ressource. You can put a 25g for proper speed.
*for those 2m cable. i got plenty and they died. Just keep this in mind as even the Corning one i had to replace a lot.
Based on the video Wendel just did, I think the linux drivers I want to use are probably not worth it compared to just getting the QNAP device and running a DAC or fiber. I have some time before I build anything.
4090 on a Linux build is kinda dumb, Nvidia has less features than on Windows and what features they do have lag behind the Windows features by quite a lot, I mean it works but it’s not great. Also the 4090 is too powerful and will get bottlenecked even by a 13900k or 7950X.
Unless you feel you need the RT, native CUDA and/or DLSS, which is kind of hit and miss on Linux as things stand, I’d recommend going down to a 7900 XTX - same amount of VRAM, 25% less performance in AI benchmarks. If you are only doing some basic learning in AI though, it is good enough. Save the extra money for a 13900k or 7950X instead, it will be a much better experience overall, but yes… Your training AI will take 4-6 hours longer to train, from 16 hours to 24 hours or so. Is that a problem for your use case though?
Then again GPUs can easily be swapped, a 13900k for a 15900k, not so much.
Will you, as a hobbyist, need more than 16 GB of VRAM though? I do not know, I am not involved in the AI field at all. Is this a hard requirement to run AI models?
Best would be to just pay the extra $200 for a 13900k instead of trying to cheap out here. 13900k + 4090 is an awesome combo on Windows, on Linux and for everything but AI, the 13900k + 7900 XTX is an even better combo.
So, the four options that present themselves:
CPU
GPU
VRAM
CPU Str
GPU Str
Cost
Intel Core 13900k
Nvidia RTX 4090
24GB
Very Strong
Super Strong
$2150
Intel Core 13900k
Nvidia RTX 3090
24GB
Very Strong
Very Strong
$2000
Intel Core 13700k
Nvidia RTX 4090
24GB
Strong
Super Strong
$1950
Intel Core 13900k
Nvidia RTX 4080
16GB
Very Strong
Very Strong
$1650
Intel Core 13900k
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX
24GB
Very Strong
Very Strong
$1550
AMD is definitely not a bad choice in AI; but it has not yet caught up to Nvidia and it still needs to mature a little bit more before the software is as smooth. As always I can only lay out the options as I see them, your PC, your money, your decision.
Just to clarify, I don’t game and may not use a monitor on this machine. I just wanted to get into the price/performance sweet spot of the 4090 for experimenting with AI.
I just got the sense that the 13900k used a lot of power and spat out a bunch of heat, and I figured I wouldn’t really be running it at peak often, so I could just step down there.
