I’ve got a 3090 just sitting here. The TR delay rumor really got me bummed out. Thinking of just finishing the build now with ASUS Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE and 3975WX.
I’m not in a super hurry, but I’m slow-walking some projects I’d like to start and I likely don’t want to wait another 6-9 months (which, I think, is the implication of when TR5 will land) as there’s some opportunity cost for me professionally at that point (not studying/hacking on things that may become professionally worthwhile to know in 2022).
Based on what you all know, what are your thoughts? Any word or sense of TR landing? Is it just base TR5k or the pro as well? Any rumors on socket compatibility?
This computer is in that grey area of professional to discretionary purchase to start exploring potential places I haven’t gone historically (and have a machine to play games in my rare free time), so while a poorly timed purchased won’t ruin me, if I bought at the wrong time, I’d like live with it for 3 or so years.
Your guess is as good as ours. Wendell probably heard something, but he can’t comment on it publicly or people will get in trouble.
Could be TRX40, could be a new socket/chipset requirement. These HEDT systems tend to have smaller compatibility overlap than the desktop counterparts.
I will say this. The presumed architecture between TR3k and TR5k are very similar, so I would not be the least bit surprised if they launch it and it’s on TRX40. That said, given the chip shortage, I wouldn’t be surprised if they throw their hands up and say “TR3k is good enough if you need HEDT, If you need Zen 3, buy an EPYC” then simply not release it. That would be the profit power-move.
You gave no indication of what you intend to do except “study/hack on things” so we can’t say for sure about this.
Frankly, the 3975WX is a great CPU, and I doubt anyone who actually needs all the cores/lanes/bandwidth will feel that they’ve gone wrong with purchasing it.
If I were you, I’d be getting as much out of that 3090 while it’s still current gen, because GPUs tend to phase out of modernity much faster than CPUs, in all things.
I built a 1950x system a few years ago and that was after it had been out for a year already, and the only reason I got rid of it is because it kept tripping my breakers. it was (and still is, depending on your workload) a wonderful CPU.
I needed some life experience and perspective. This is my first “big build” computer so I was looking for some experience/perspective from folks who have done this already.
Professionally, I do a lot of web dev, dev ops and data engineering. Some of the legit work use cases are creating POCs and benchmarks for potential data projects (prospecting and research) without the AWS bill. While this isn’t purely a justifiable business purchase, I legitimately think a machine like this would allow a credible POC and demos at non-trivial scale to demonstrate viability without the (often non-trivial) AWS bill.
Personally, I’d like to move into the neural net space and understand what’s going on over there. I did data science back when it was mostly ML algos on SKlearn and R (econometrics on a fixed income desk), but have fallen out of date with the modern stuff.
I’d also like to do some gaming and, to be honest, I’d like a bit of headroom and I’m willing to pay a bit of a premium for definitely always having enough.
I suspect they’ll be a decent bit of DevOps stuff (mock a client environment in VMs, mock a kube cluster, etc) so there’s that as well.
I’m not trying to talk you out of it. I’m just trying to see if you’re going to be banging against the limit of the system (in which case, wait) or if you’re going to be comfortably utilizing it.
Based on your use case, I think you’ll be happy with either system. It seems to me that the thing you’ll be more worried about is memory capacity and storage performance. Those things aren’t likely to change much between TR3k and TR5k.
kube clusters, mock envs and other similar workloads are absolutely going to hammer your SSD a lot. The GPU workloads are not likely to be constrained by the CPU, so I think you’ll be perfectly happy with a TR3k system.
At the end of the day, you’ll always be “6-9 months” from the next release, and if you need/want to build a system, it’s always best to just build it unless the release is actually happening in 2-3 weeks. At least, that’s my 2c.
Frankly, I think you could definitely get away with a 5950x and 128GB of ram for this system, but a threadripper would absolutely handle it better, so I won’t give that recommendation.
Which features of the TR5k do you think would make a difference to the applications you are mostly running? I can’t imagine the bump in IPC from Zen2 to Zen3 would be too noticeable unless you’re running single-threaded workloads, in which case the 5950x would be better suited IMO.
If you’re intending to load-up all those 32 cores all day long with high memory workloads, you can get a Zen 3 EPYC 75F3 today, which has double the L3 cache of the 3975WX.
Zen3s uplift, is more on the CCX/L3 groupings being larger span of cores. So less CCX hopping, whenever larger multi-threaded loads get thrown at the chip.
A shame. I want to buy one and waited quite a bit. Guess I have to figure out some new approach for my desktop workstation. I might just get a 3D 5950x with some expensive board next year or just wait how Alderlake performs, but I’m not in the mood to pay early adopter tax on new boards and DDR5 memory. Got my storage covered in the meantime , so I won’t need as many lanes anyway.
I’m a potential buyer for Zen3D+ TR and would love to see more options for TRX40, but sadly I think that AMD postponed TR until Zen4. I’m willing to believe that AMD got somewhat spooked by both Intel and Apple and that forced them to change their roadmap.
Agree. I was talking about Desktop CPU considerations. Threadripper is another league.
But I won’t buy 2 year old CPUs for full price. If I commit 2.500 € for a CPU alone, I want bleeding edge. And I’m not in a hurry. I probably get a cheap transitional desktop and see what’s up in one year. Need a GPU too and 2022 seems like a good spot to buy one as well. Time will tell.
*starts sweating*
Maybe you just had too big a PSU? If you also had a GPU attached to it, maybe it drew too much power? Who knows. I would have downclocked it or tried limiting its maximum turbo, to tame the beast. Unfortunately, that will be impossible for me for a while, because I intend to run it headless for quite a while.
I do want to grab a RX 550 or 560 if I can find it for <$130 and <$200 respectively. I was wondering if I should buy a mining GPU, but I’m kinda scared and also I know miners made a lot of money and they now want to sell their GPUs for the same price they bought, making them a profit with 0 investment other than electricity, which I really don’t want to encourage, so it’s also kind of a principled decision. I don’t care about crypto mining and I understand supply and demand, but I also value my own sanity, knowing that I didn’t pay more than full price for a very used GPU.
Just to close the loop on this: I gave up and just ordered a 5950x the max amount of RAM and threw the 3090 in there. I’ve been messing around with some reinforcement learning projects and having a blast. My biggest concern was needing two GPUs some AMD card for Ubuntu to actually display and the 3090 purely for research and not having enough PCIE bandwidth.
After asking on some AI forums, the consensus was, there is some penalty running a model on a GPU also rendering a screen, but for non-industrial use cases, it really doesn’t matter.
So far it’s worked well and haven’t had any issues. Still bummed and wondering what AMD is planning to do with threadripper going forward but for now this has met my needs well enough.
Am in a similar situation: Eagerly awaited Threadripper 5000 back in early 2021 and nothing really new since then.
Went for multiple small AM4 systems instead, and while I’m pushing them to their limits regarding PCIe lanes, the great single-core performance is worth it for me.
Just goes to show that AMD behaves exactly the same as Intel if there’s no competition
Only releasing a single AM4 SKU with 3D V-Cache after last year’s big surprise announcement is just icing on the cake.
