I need a new workstation as my venerable off lease Dell t5810 with a E5-2698v3 and 64GB ECC ram at 2133 MT/s is showing its age.
I currently run dual graphics cards (GTX 1080Ti for the Windows VM and AMD RX470 for the linux host). I do it like this because I hate windows and I only use the VM for a dedicated CAD program that needs the graphics power offered by the VFIO solution.
My question is what CPU should I pick? I do not think i need more than 12 cores for the VFIO setup. I am a little bit of an AMD fan especially as I like getting on a platform and milking it as long as possible, but could be convinced otherwise. I think anything modern will be a huge improvement, but I would love to hear others thoughts.
I will be transferring the GPUs over as they do not seem to be a bottle neck currently. I will need 64GB or ram as I have had the Windows VM max out 24GB when copying large sections of drafting.
I would not go with AM5 because of the ram situation right now limits you to 64GB
AM4 is EOL but cheap and still pretty performant, you can go up to 128GB, if you don’t mind that balance of pros/cons, I’d go with 5900x or 5800x3D
Or wait until second gen AM5 comes out, the new CPUs ALL have a little GPU built in so no need to have 2 dedicated GPUs for VM
Investing in AMD HEDT is a bad idea as it sometimes has even worse socket support than even Intel, RIP TRX40 owners
Do we think that the AM5 ram situation will improve with new CPUs or is it a chipset issue that would require a new MB when an uprade in ram needed to happen? I have not need more than 64GB of ram yet, and the windows VM only gets turned on when needed.
Not entirely sure, memory controller is on the CPU but when I did testing for the early adopters video I couldn’t get ram faster than like 2933/3000 on b350 with a 5800x3d so
Need a Threadripper, EPYC Rome, or Xeon SP to be an upgrade and have enough PCIe lanes and memory channels to be an actual upgrade.
I see deals with an EPYC 7532 (32 core), motherboard, and 256GB RAM for about that budget. 8 RAM channels means even the slowest DDR4 has more bandwidth than the fastest DDR5 on AM5.
Unfortunately my required software is not designed well enough to make us of the threads I have. While I hate giving up PCIE lanes, I am afraid once I get enough cores to run a Windows VM well while keeping enough horsepower for daily tasks + some photo editing, anything else on this machine will be a waste.
the RAM issue on AM5 will improve shortly.
These are the first Mircon based DIMMS, I think in 2-3 months there will also be Samsung and SK-Hynics 48\64GB DIMMs with 6000Mt/s to buy