Hi, we have one app on our company servers that is heavily single core and it runs like crap on Xeons with low clocks so we’re sick and tired of this and want to build 7950x based 3U server - probably with PBO and OC since it’s gonna sit in server room and we can just strap 15k rpm fans to AIO…
That said we’re looking for some basic server features like ability to POST without dGPU (BIOS usable over RS232 would be nice) and maybe some management interface or at least BMC headers so we can buy separate management card. Do you guys know if there are any options available right now that would suit our requirements?
I´m kinda questioning myself what would a 7950X actually add in this occasion?
There are no server targeted am5 boards on the market currently that i´m aware off.
But wouldn´t intel in this situation being interesting as well?
I mean something like the 13700K has pretty strong single threaded performance,
for a fraction of the price.
Yeah I kinda noticed all those motherboards are kind of terrible… Are there any server oriented platforms for 13900K though?
Price of this setup is completely irrelevant. It’s company machine. We have budget and we’re gonna spend this budget anyways so we need absolute top of the line and AMD tends to have better support for workstation/server workloads from personal experience (we have not verified if this situation changed but las time we checked Intel had worse support for pci-e bifurcation, SR-IOV, ECC etc. on consumer platforms). We’ll be probably getting FireCuda 530 4TB NVME just because it’s faster and has more SLC cache than 1tb and 2tb even though actually we need only around 200gb of storage. This machine will be breaking so many compliance rules that we need to have really, really solid arguments and we need to be 100% sure it’s gonna provide better results than our current servers - and if not - we need to be sure we couldn’t do any better anyways.
Also we need to factor in funny enterprise costs like - fact that it’ll be put in 3U chassis so we’re loosing rack density probably results in bigger financial loss than cost of this whole machine lol. 4U height is unacceptable. Please note that this machine will be put in rack amongst servers for 50k usd MSRP and we rebelled against getting another dual Xeon/Epyc blade chassis because Epycs and Xeons (even Threadrippers PRO 5000) have significantly lower single core performance (affecting our app) while multi core perf of 7950x is pretty close to that of 24 core TR 5965WX and many dual socket Xeon/Epyc servers so we expect it to behave better in our workloads than those servers for 50k usd. It’s a bit of “side project”.
I would agree that the 7950X indeed is basically a great cpu,
with both good single and great multi threaded performance.
So if budget isn´t really relevant then it could be a good option.
However yeah in regards to motherboard selections it´s kinda awkward on X670E.
I believe that wendell recently mentioned in a review that ECC did work on the Asrock X670E taichi.
But it didn´t seem to work on the Asus board he had for review.
So yeah ECC support can be a hit or miss depending on the brand and type of board.
You could reach out to ASRock Rack, they appear to have some B650 boards coming. (And none of your requirements given so far seem to need X670…)
ASRock Rack’s stuff is all AST2500/2600 with VGA, a MegaRAC IPMI interface, and a dedicated 1GbE management port, often with NCSI to another on-board NIC if you’d rather run VLANs instead. Many have RS232 but I can’t speak to the BIOS interaction capabilities there.
On the intel side, it looks like they’ve got W680 boards, might be worth a look too.
Well yeah main stream platforms like Ryzen are of course,
targeted towards gamers and enthusiasts.
So it’s obvious that features like ECC support won’t be,
on the motherboard manufacturers priority list.
Because 99.9% of the people won’t need it anyways.
So in regards to AM5 boards it can be a hit or miss really.
I have not really heard anything about that yet.
But that would be pretty awesome.
Throwing in my two cents here since I have attempted to build just such a server with a consumer CPU. I have an ASUS CROSS HAIR X670E EXTREME with an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and 128 GiB DDR5 ECC UDIMMs.
There is no ECC support (at the moment).
Booting with the system out of the box was impossible. I had to flash a new (at that time) beta BIOS update to even get any I/O working.
The system I built seems to be very picky about BIOS settings, or else I get Q-code 0D and the computer never boots to the OS. I had to turn off some options from the defaults to make it consistently boot.
Stress testing the CPU, RAM, and iGPU for 3 hours did not bring the system down. But playing a YouTube video whether the video is showing or not consistently triggers reboots about a half hour into playing a video. Go figure.
I’m in the middle of sussing out the issue; I just need to wait for an extra CPU and RAM kit to determine which part is defective. But that has been my experience so far. I was hoping I would be able to start doing professional work on the new machine, but the platform seems to be inherently unstable if ASUS’ own forums are any indication. Then again, there is probably a selection bias going on. Who would be motivated to post there if their systems were running fine?
Regarding TR - we have considered that but we were also running this app on some Xeon Gold CPUs that were boosting to 4.4 or 4.5 ghz I don’t remember right now and it was significantly too slow for us. That’s more or less TR PRO level. Note that we’re not aiming at 5950x but 7950x which is one generation ahead. It’s gonna take some time before we’re gonna see TR 7000 in the wild and in terms of single core 7950 walks over any TR PRO 5000 because even 5950x already did…
We ended up ordering 3U rack chassis compatible with water cooling and ASUS Prime X670E PRO since according to ASUS it’s their “CSM” motherboard so… I guess it should be somewhat more stable?.. We decided to go with 420mm radiator (NZXT since it has 6 years warranty so we expect it to survive at least 2 yars of 24/7 usage under 100% load) with 3x 6000 rpm 260 CFM server fans strapped to it and we’ll see how much we can squeeze out of this with pbo…
I think you need to wait a bit in that case - I know X570 had workstation boards like Asus. Pro WS X570-ACE｜Motherboards｜ASUS Global as well as ASRock but I didn’t find them when looking for 7000.
The one I tried to get was Asus ProArt X670E Creator. My problem was removal of some features to enable 2 40gbps and 1 20gbps type-c connections (I guess it’s called USB4). Because of that board got not so nice support for PCIe because it has to share second slot and such while ASRock Steel Legened x670E has it separated a bit nicer for me since I’d like it not to have port if it’s going to share some bandwidth. I would’ve gone with it anyway and reused 40Gbps ports to connect JBOD or such but then ~ 720 USD vs 480 USD (converting Europe prices to USD which includes VAT and those things). So best thing about Creator board in that case would be 10Gbps Lan with extra 2.5 port and 3 slots for full length cards but speed may warry. And yes they do think it could run 24/7 for couple of years (3 I think) :D. Not sure if it comes close to what you need.
I was expecting to hear all sorts of weird issues on AM5 as a new platform. Strangely I didn’t hear much on r/AMD this year. I think mainly it’s due to very few people buying into the platform (yet). Sorry to say but good to hear some anecdotal evidence to support my gut feeling.
When I surveyed the few “top-end” launch motherboards, I didn’t find it mentioned in their specifications. I guess folks like ASUS cut this feature to save cost. So it’s not like a UEFI update will bring back the feature. However, next-gen motherboards may resurrect this feature.
It’s in everybody’s interest to keep AMD competitive against Intel. But AMD is indeed nobody’s charity (and realistically consumers should not expect so).
While a lot of people expected DDR5 DIMMs to be expensive, the past month showed that their prices were quite reasonable already. Less so for the AM5 motherboards and CPUs. AMD made a one-off price reduction across the Ryzen 7000 series in the name of festival shopping. Likely more user reports will come out in the coming weeks.
Earlier sources reportedly said that sales of Ryzen 7000 was not good following the launch. Hence, the temporary price reduction.
That am5 boards are so expensive is of course not really AMD´s fault.
It´s simply a matter of higher production costs for motherboard manufacturers,
because of the implementation of pci-e5, ddr5 and all the complexity that comes with it.
That and also still chip shortages.
Comparable intel boards are not that much cheaper really.
The only benefit that intel offers is basically the backward compatibility for ddr4.
And that way motherboard manufacturers can produce some slightly cheaper boards,
in that segment.
But Z790 boards with DDR5 are fairly comparable to am5 x670E counterparts,
sometimes a little bit cheaper depending on specific models.
But in the realm of an entire build those differences are marginal.
It can’t just be DDR5 that blows the cost out though because DDR4 boards on Intel are pretty well priced as far as I have seen, so pcie 5 can’t add too much to the bom and memory controllers are on-die now
It is but those prices will drop eventually.
The only thing that makes things unnecessarily complicated are the several chipsets,
and how motherboard manufacturers deal with that.
This also kinda adds costs i think.
I have to say that from my personal look at it most am5 boards are pretty underwhelming to me.
And ¨some¨ intel boards look a bit better balanced in regards to features / price tag if you will.
But AMD on the other hand offer higher core count cpu´s on am5.
They ¨likely¨ have a longer support and upgrade path.
And there will be x3d cpu´s for it as well.
So in that regards there are pro´s and con´s on both ends.
It´s a matter of choosing the right tool for the job really.
In the end in the realm of an entire build the added cost price differences,
for the motherboards specifically will be marginal.
This is so disappointing to hear. I am also looking to build such a system and ECC support is stated in their Specification page. Looking at their bios Manual looks to be a ECC configuration listed but nothing that states functionality. For a future Bios Update?