I am looking into options for my 24/7 overclocked AMD server and welcome any suggestions or comments. The motherboard needs to be able to fit within the 1RU height and would need some form of remote management.
The ASRock Rack X570D4U-2L2T has both 10Gbe and IPMI but I am not sure on its overclocking or memory timings capability. The Pro-WS-X570-ACE is another possible option, based on a quick look has better VRMs than the X570D4U-2L2T but the remote management is shockingly bad from reviews here. I could look at installing a AS Rock Rack Paul (IPMI PCIe card) but not sure how well that well manage power resetting of the system.
Overclocking in a 1U space? I feel like you’ll have a hard time with that no matter which mobo you pick. And 24/7 overclock? What would a 24/7 overclock benefit you over letting it use built-in things like PBO?
I hate to be that guy that answers “How do I do X?” with “Just don’t do X”, but I really think this is a bad decision…
Why would you want to run an overclocked server?
That is the first question that raises to me.
Those are two things that generally not work very well together,
because you want your sever to be stable and reliable.
Overclocking in general isn’t really helping with that.
The said Asrock Rack X570 board is not made for overclocking obviously.
But that counts for pretty much all server related boards.
The Asus WS X570 pro ACE does has a great vrm.
And in regards to that good enough for overclocking.
But don’t expect too much in regards to memory overclocking,
although that counts for Ryzen in general.
Still yeah i don’t know what your particular use case scenario of the system will be.
But if it has to be a reliable and stable server.
Then overclocking in general isn’t really the smartest thing to do.
You won’t win much (servers are more frequently disk or network IO limited for performance) and servers even under the best of conditions have a nasty habit of picking times like 2am on a Sunday morning to shit the bed even when not abused with out-of-spec operation.
If its a personal one, and its your only server (i.e., it’s a hobby box and you aren’t relying on it for anything serious), you do you i guess.
But as someone who has a fleet of a few hundred physical servers, you want servers (in general) to be as basic, conservatively tuned, etc. as possible.
If you’re in that situation or aiming to be an admin of any sort of serious environment… just don’t.
The cooler is external to the 1RU space, just a requirement for the motherboard height.
I would be aiming for something similar to PBO, but this well depend on the motherboard BIOS support, etc. For memory I am aiming for first world latency between 8.75 and 9ns. Pcpartpicker has a good list of examples (G.Skill Trident Z Royal 64 GB, Crucial Ballistix 64 GB, G.Skill Ripjaws V 64 GB, etc)
Game servers such as Minecraft, Source, etc really benefit from higher clock speeds.
From my understanding so far, they have released a number of BIOS updates for better overclocking but the motherboard components limit the overclocking benefits to some degree. Would be great to know test results from someone that has this motherboard already.
For memory ideally i would be aiming for 1:1 ratio between infinity fabric and memory clock. AMD slide deck for Zen 3 references “Performance sweet spot DRR4-3733”.
Think of it as an all core turbo lock similar to what the Dell servers have.
The workload is very much limited by the CPU per core performance, nearly no disk IO and small amount of network IO compared to say a normal web server. For example, most large Minecraft communities will run overclocked servers due to limitations of the game engine.
I think ddr4 3600 with the best timings you can find Cas Latency 16 or less. I never saw anything lower than 16 for a 64GB kit of GSkill neo or rgb - maybe there is now . This would check the boxes above.
