Good morning, friends! First time poster, and I felt this question would best be asked here, because #nerdpower
So I love what AMD is doing right now. Always been an AMD fanboy, but hid my shame when it came to the APU series. Wanted to build something big and bad, but couldn’t bring myself to buy Intel.
But Epyc tickles all the right spots for me. I also recently fell in love with Unraid, and after looking at TDP of Epyc and some of the Epyc boards, I want to do something over the top.
Proposed build is this
Epyc 7351P (If I can find one)
64 GB of RAM
Asrock Rack EPYCD8-2T (the one with the 2 nvme slots and 10gb networking)
2 NVME drives
2 video cards (Hopefully at 16x a piece)
1 Samsung 860 1tb (for non graphics intensive VMs)
1 Samsung 860 500 GB (For caching)
Some mechanical drives.
The NAS part and even the hardware passthough part isn’t a concern to me, but my idea to have a fully functional Linux VM running off of 1 nvme drive and AMD card, and a fully functional Windows 10 VM running off of the other nvme and video card. Basically hoping to create a gaming VM (Or something close)
My question lies with the speed. 2.4 Ghz base, 2.9 Turbo for the cpu. I know a lot of gaming rigs need the extra ghz, but is it really necessary? I don’t want to overclock a server cpu if I don’t have to (But I’ve heard you can!)
Or am I just better off building a R7 2700X for the whole gaming thing?
Well, if both GPU’s running on 16x lanes instead of 8x is important to you and you want to be prepared for more NVMe in the future you’ll want a CPU/chipset combo that doesn’t share a meager 4x lane connection (X470/X570). What you’re describing is 40x lanes w/o considering anything else like onboard nics and such. TR or Epyc are probably your only options for AMD. The Zen2 refresh of the Epyc processors is happening sooner than TR. So that likely is your goto depending how fast you need this. Of course you could probably get a good discount on older models too if price is a constraint.
TR would definitely have the clock advantage so that’s also a consideration. /shrug. Personally I’d be inclined towards TR from what you’ve said thus far but it’s up to you. 16x lanes on a GPU isn’t really necessary for games afaik, so you could probably save quite a bit if you went Ryzen 3000 and didn’t need room for growth.
Get rid of the VMware build I was planning, increase the CPU to the 7401P, increase the RAM to 128gb, and use the bare metal VMs for business, plus virtualize and docker all the things, build a R7 3700X with the fastest ram I can, throw a 5700 XT in it, water cool it so I can get 5ghz, buy a big screen tv so I can game and hide from my wife and kids in the basement, profit.
Not a bad idea, but wait for 3rd party benchmarks. We don’t know if you’ll hit 5GHz on Zen 3 without exotic cooling yet. There could be another clock ceiling issue.
Additionally, you don’t need 5GHz to game, but 3GHz isn’t enough. I’d say 3.8 is the lower end and 4.6 is the sweet spot for people who aren’t pushing 120+hz.
Bare metal VMs is like Led Zeppelin. It’s an oxy moron. You’re either on bare metal or you’re in a VM. /pedantics
I hear you on the bare metal VMs, but the 2 VMs I’d actually use passthough on is what I’d consider bare metal, because I’m passing a nvme and video card straight through. If I’m able to get some server VMs and other ideas to virtualize to run without a card (Which I can), that’s fine.
And if I don’t have to oc my new cpu, I’m ok with that too!
Did you plan on doing a separate VMWare build to the unraid build?
I don’t know what your use case for your “business vms” are, so I can’t say for sure what kind of performance you’ll need.
Additionally, will they be seeing activity at the same time, or are you going to be just using them one at a time? (more or less)
Not sure why you’d need VMWare.
Additionally, when TR2 comes out, you might find that they’ve got everything you need in a single package. I’m expecting clocks up there with the R9 3950. I think you’re overestimating what you need by a long shot and EPYC is no different from TR, with the exception of clock speed and memory channels.
I was going to use VMWare as a test enviroment because I work with it, but I also like the use of KVM on Unraid.
Business VMs would be like server grade OS so I don’t need to passthrough anything to the hardware, it can just all be virtualized.
Also working with Docker, so I wanted some headroom there too.
I didn’t think of Threadripper, to be honest, but now it’s a very possible candidate for what I want to do with it. An Epyc box running VMware wouldn’t be a bad idea, just put another SSD or 2 on the Uneaid box and use that as a Datastore.
