Primary Desktop Compute Device is getting old, its a FX4300. i was thinking a used Xeon build, but them i saw some of the prices of Ryzen 1000 and 2000.
I need a new case, I love my Lian Li PC-65 but its at the end of its useful life. i want to reuse as much of my hardware as i can (piece meal upgrades when i can).
the route i think i am going is Linux as the primary OS. i want to be able to boot into windows 10 if i need to but leave it was a VM with GPU pass-though or Looking Glass for Gaming.
I my gut feeling says i need a low end TR or Xeon to have enough IO. The hardware i want to reuse is a PCI-e ConnectX-3, PCI-e Sound blaster, PCI-e Fusion Card, radeon R7800 GPU, two Cdrom drives, spinning rust and SSD’s, 1200watt power supply, 16g of DDR 3.
as far as gaming its been APEX, battlefield 3 so nothing heavy yet.
Any recommendations on a case and hardware? I am in hurry it get all this together the longer i wait the more i can save as hardware gets cheaper
Here is the thing: Whatever system you put together that is able to use DDR3 is most likely too much money for the performance you get out of it. The last Xeon platform with DDR3 support and that much PCIe was Ivy Bridge, the latest DDR3 Xeons on the smaller platform was Haswell.
Ryzen would be more than fine performance wise but you’d have to cut down on PCIe stuff. And that would be my suggestion. The Soundblaster card isn’t doing anything special in linux anyway and dedicating a full PCIe slot to old flash seems silly at this point. I would try to get rid of both and replace the Fusion with current storage options.
I can recommend ASRock boards in general, they play super nice with linux. Personally I have the X470 Taichi Ultimate and it is great but probably a bit much for your wallet. Also you already have your fast LAN adapter. The non Ultimate Taichi is a damn solid board, one that will easily handle the 12 and even the 16 core Ryzen 3000 chips. If you can find a black friday deal on the Taichi, for like 160,- or less, that would be amazing. For a bit less you could go with something like an Asus Prime X470 Pro and it’s probably gonna be fine as well.
RAM: Well … what is the focus? Do you want ECC or performance?
For CPUs: Honestly, anything would be a massive upgrade for you, even a first gen Ryzen 3 1200. So, don’t worry about that too much, you can always get more performance later on. A good starting point would be a 2600, on sale those can be damn cheap.
Edit: Now that I look at it, it’s actually insane how second gen has dropped. The 2600 is under 120,- bucks. That is A LOT of CPU for the money.
the prices are crazy right know, i was thinking Xeon but look at the value of AMD CPUS right know. I am thinking after the launch of TR 3000 its going to drop even more.
For your use case, considering what you have right now, I think the regular desktop Ryzen chips have enough PCIe lanes to support everything with no problems. No real point going for Threadripper unless you know you’ll need room for more expansion in the future.
Also can’t overstate Zen 2’s improvement over Zen/Zen+. Definitely worth the slightly greater spend if you’re going to be keeping the system for a long time, even if you go with a 6 core SKU.
Also another thing to note - considering the price hike of X570 motherboards compared to X470, I imagine that Threadripper 3 boards will be even more expensive than X399 boards. And it’s looking like there won’t be an upgrade route for older gen Threadripper in the same way as there is on AM4.
Any recommendations on a case? it looks like all the descent cases ill have to move my CDrom drive to a external.
I want something that’s going to last a few upgrades like my Lian Li case has.
I don’t need a lot of 3.5 bays since i use external storage for most everything i can. and it needs room for full length video cards that’s were i been running into problems with my current case.
I think that buying into entry level Threadripper in this case,
would not be a bad idea at all.
I mean the 2920X can be found for cheap nowdays.
And the X399 boards are reasonable priced as well.
You will still get more pci-e lanes to work with.
However i do agree on points that others made,
that certain old hardware like the sound card isn´t really going to do much anymore,
especially not in linux since there is simply only generic support for it when lucky.
But if you need some pci-e expand options, then you cannot really go wrong with TR.
But if you want to go with something cheaper but still decent,
then i would likely go with something like a 3600X right now,
and then spend a little bit more on a decent X470 or X570 board,
to upgrade the cpu later on.
Also with recent price cuts on intel cpu´s,
even X299 might be a vallid option to consider as well.
But i have not really checked their price cuts just yet.
This might highly vary per country so keep that in mind.
But the only anoying trick that intel did on this generation,
is the pci-e lane cut to 28 lanes for the core i7 sku´s.
So yeah in that regards Threadripper will be in favour.
I mean yeah there are plenty of options.
It just depends on your budget and future plan´s.