What great future awaits us! I don’t need to spend money on a Threadripper or EPYC. I just get that board and get the same or more x16 slots and save a couple of thousand bucks. Because I’m smart.
And if someone asks how my new 100Gbit NIC performs…It’s super fast because x16 and Hyper PCIe 5.0, baby!!!
But for real…cut the board in half and that’s what consumer boards are today.
life hack: find out where your local school district / college / county office building / city office building, puts there end of life equipment up for auction. it might be like purple wave, or some local auctioneer. you can pick up anything from a 48U rack with wheels to a legit full size 4 post rack for a couple bucks. usually no one buys them and they go to a metal recycler.
racks are great but you will want some sort of dedicated space. it is nearly impossible to make racks quiet.
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I suspect that the 4 port backplane is what render boxes are using on the air xl.
Be forewarned per that site, these adapters require a motherboard that understands bifurcation, ie a server motherboard.
In euros, we don’t have the same price. the motherboard, you talked of ASUS Pro WS W790E-ACE ? it’s 950€ only for the board
You have to subtract the VAT from non-US prices to get a comparison. US prices are without taxes. So 950€ is 799$ +/- exchange rate.
That’s why US prices seem to be lower all the time. But often are higher if you include taxes on both sides.
Even though they are all w790 chipset motherboards, and compatible with both W-3400 and W-2400 chips, the motherboard can be configured without the capabilities that the W-2400 is not able to access, making it cheaper.
Motherboards tailored for W-2400 CPUs usually have 8 dimm slots, and cost around $700. They often have 3-4 x16 PCIe slots plus some other features. like 2.5g, and 8 sata ports.
Motherboards tailored for W-3400 CPUs usually have 16 dimm slots, and cost around $1100. They also have more fully enabled PCIe slots.
ie:
For the asus motherboards, to understand what is going on, you really need to see the block diagram for each motherboard which can be found in the manual under support documents.
$700 motherboard with $350 to $700 W-2400 CPU
$1100 motherboard with $350 to $700 W-2400 CPU
$1100 motherboard with $1200 W-3400 CPU
The block diagram for the Z790:
Then if you get a case like the fractal define 7 xl
The non xl case also lets you use 2 vertical slots.
Yes but compare to my budget, I can’t buy anything else after that, no ? 950€for the motherboard, 900€ Cpu and … that all I am on the top of my budget 
without ram, dd, server case, rackmount. Or I am missing something ?
I’m not sure about W-2400, but for W-3400 do keep in mind that it idles at relatively high power (~50W) even with w5-3435x, for the CPU alone.
As a reference, my w9-3495x (with 4x NVMe, 1x 7900XTX, 1x 4090) with few VMs running, idles around ~75W for the CPU and ~275W from the wall. Single core load is ~150W CPU, ~360W wall. The lower end should do a little bit better, though.
Yeah, I think measuring wall is very important. Because you only pay what the wall is drawing. So PSU/VRMs are a factor too, in fact the PSU efficiency at a given power draw can make a big difference , especially in a 24/7 server. Non-linear efficiency curve doesn’t make this easier to compare. And then there are difference in 115V or 230V differing between countries.
I always check at the wall and this is what I communicate when talking about my stuff.
For instance get the low end 2400 cpu and the low end motherboard.
The low end motherboards are under $700 US, and the low end CPU is near $400 US. The CPU should be fast enough for everything you were planning to use it for, but if it is insufficient in a couple of years, higher end used CPUs should be available cheaply.
They still have about 3 times the connectivity of any of the z790 motherboards and cases.
You get 10g AND multiple nvme AND 4 channels of ram AND a gpu AND a storage controller.
With the z790 you get 1.5 of those.
I’m definitely interested; mainly for the large number of pci-e slots and channels, reasonable cpu pricing, and relatively low power consumption. I’d plan, most likely, on getting a16-core version.
CPUs seem readily available in retail channels, but I can’t find motherboards anywhere… I posted a dedicated topic related to that earlier today…
