I’m stuck trying to figure out a best option to move up my compute performance from my ‘ancient’ 56 cores I have of 2x Broadwell E5-2695v3 Xeons… I have a couple of requirements ‘wishlist’.
Low-ish power budget of ~500W as the system is going to be powered by Supermicro 2x900W Quiet power supplies (redundant not parallel). Power is shared with my living room (condo I have no real choice) with the 2 power supplies connected to separate 15A Circuits.
PCIe support for a 3080 GPU (for AI tinkering ontop of existing)
PCIe support for an LSI 9003 SAS HBA
Support for 10Gbe (Onboard or PCIe)
128GB of Ram MIN (would prefer 256GB)
Current System (current at wall average power draw ~220w to 315w w/ all drives active):
Chassis: Supermicro CSE-846 (Ex-Datto Node)
Motherboard: GIGABYTE MD70-HB0-XX
CPU: Intel® Xeon® CPU E5-2695 v3 @ 2.30GHz
Memory: 512 GiB ECC DDR4 2666Mhz
Storage: 100TB Unraid Pool via SATA over onboard SAS Controller to backplane
Hardware I keep waffling between…
“EBay QS CPU special” Epyc [Supermicro H13SSL-N+AMD Genoa EPYC 9334 QS 2.7-3.9 GHz 32cores CPU combination]
An RTX 3080 is not what I would call low power budget.
That said, the most power efficient consumer CPU at the moment is the Ryzen 9 7900, with average system draw of roughly 40-50W, and max system draw at 90W - without a GPU. The RTX 3080 with it’s 300W max power draw is not doing this any favors of course
Also, do consider investing in 20TB HDDs for your storage requirements, 6x20TB in a ZFS pool is a lot more power efficient than 12x10TB. Or 15x8TB. Or 27x4TB.
In my opinion, there is currently almost zero good reason to buy an older server platform over an AM5 server motherboard, for a home/hobby server. Consumer hardware is just that good now. If you are a business however, that changes things.
Pending some solid understanding of workload requirements here are some thoughts:
Consumer hardware (AM4/5, etc.) don’t offer enough PCIe lanes to run a discrete GPU plus a SAS card for a storage pool. It can, if you’re willing to compromise, but the next bottleneck is the dual channel memory architecture and its capacity limit. Otoh, these are typically the most affordable hw options.
Additionally (and perversely) consumer CPUs offer insane compute power (top single core performance across all platforms) which will be capped by the above mentioned IO limits - depending on workload. E.g. my AM4 5900X 12-core reaches about same y-cruncher times as dual Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 (memory bandwidth bound CPU workload). Gaming is fine, light office work is fine, but many other workloads may be memory bandwidth or IO bandwidth limited.
Assuming you determined that your workload requires more IO than consumer hw offers, you may find yourself disappointed looking at single core performance of EYPC 7xx2 CPUs. I think they represent a meaningful step up from a dual Broadwell system from a power consumption (and assuming the right CPU choice) a total performance point of view.
I’m aware of the “EBay QS CPU specials”. They’re quite tentalizing as they promise top performance in modern server hardware for last-gen used prices. Otoh, these are oversees only options, with support being logistically difficult at best, broken promises as a worst result. What compromise comes with using a QS CPU (I understand they all have some limitations depending on the version)? If my research is not totally off, they’re the most expensive of your options, right (factoring in the 12 memory sticks to not leave all that wonderful memory bandwidth on the board)?
When saying 500W… You’re referring to, errything outside the GPU, correct?
Likely you’d be landing, another server/WS style platform, with that much PCIe req.
LSi 9003 is x8 // GPU is x16 // 10Gbit NIC min is x4 [ per RJ45] // M.2 is x4 (ea)
Example from Intel [Gen4 Xeon – Supermicro X13SEI-TF]
And still have, a lil’ more peripheral support, if wish to build on
One limitation I have noticed is that many of the Epyc 9334 QS CPUs have a boost clock of 3.5GHz instead of 3.9GHz. Some adverts on eBay make this clear, others do not. It is also possible that you would get an engineering sample (ES) version as well - a lot of the adverts showing CPU-z or similar seem to show this, although typically for a 9654 rather than a 9334.
