Hi all,
Following from my testing with Threadripper having built 2x 1950X rigs, and receiving a second X399 Zenith Extreme board from Amazon, just yesterday, I pulled the trigger on ordering an X299 Intel rig with an Intel Core i9-7920X Processor BX80673I97920X and ASUS ROG STRIX X299-E GAMING LGA2066 mainboard.
I’m quite pleased with the Threadripper 1950X / Zenith Extreme build — as a workstation I don’t mind ‘tinkering’ where needed. However, for something I typically need to rely on, I want to be able to have months of uptime without the constant need of babysitting and tinkering.
When trying to install XenServer on the first TR build, I ran into an error, which had more to do with the annoying use of a ‘Killer NIC’ by Gigabyte than anything else, but I saw this as an indication of potential painpoints to come.
Also, the issues surrounding GPU passthough etc on the TR platform needs more time to sort out - time beyond the expiration of Amazon’s return policies. Given the Gigabyte board is from September, granted I’ll have to sell this off, but I can still return 1x 1950X and the second Zenith Extreme board for a complete refund.
So my combo will be the “newer” 1950X/X399 Zenith Extreme build (as a workstation) and this 7920X/ROG Strix x299 for “Server” duties. Chances are, I’ll settle on a type-1 (bare metal) hypervisor and any future upgrades would most likely include an Intel 10G SFP card.
Another requirement that I plan to address in 2018 is a ZFS replication box, and even though this doesn’t have ECC RAM, I may consider just yoloing it, until I can burn some funds for a Xeon box at that time. It would be interesting to run FreeBSD/FreeNAS in a VM and PCI-pass through to an LSI card that I have (which has an ‘IT’ mode, that supposedly plays nicely with FreeNAS).
If anyone’s interested in grabbing either the first 1950X I got, or the Gigabyte X399 Aorus Gaming 7, please give me a shout. Once I’ve taken proper snaps, I’ll list these in the for-sale section in the coming week(s).
Cheers M.
