Zen 4 Linux Workstation Build Log

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UPDATE: I’ve started the build and am going to post updates under this thread for all the stuff I encounter with the following parts: Zen 4 Linux Workstation Build Log - #16 by reserve_d

Hey everyone! I’m on the last stages of a new workstation build, and as someone who is going to do it for the first time (I’ve always purchased pre-assembled workstations until now) I am looking for advices/shortcomings on some parts.

– CPU: Ryzen 7950X

– Motherboard: Crosshair Hero vs Strix E-E

I really wanted to get an AsRock Taichi Carrara (it looks very cute, has USB4 and 2.5G while being cheaper than Hero) but unfortunately it is not for sale in where I live. ProArt was my second option but it seems to be out of stock too.

The price difference between Strix and Crosshair ones is around ~200$, and I’d like to pick the one that would be the most reliable out of two. As far as I understand, there seems to be an active bug (kernel bug 216652 [can’t post links?]) around the ethernet drivers for Strix E-* series that is not really present in the Crosshair Hero boards so I might choose that one (also it has USB4 which is a nice addon I guess).

– Ram: 64 GiB GSkill 6000MT/s CL30/32

I want a stable system and these systems to be the ones that AMD uses in their test system. I would love to get 128GiB but that doesn’t seem likely with Zen 4.

– Disk: SN850X vs 990 Pro vs Something Else?

990 Pro was my initial candidate but due to the reliablity issues and not official Linux support (the firmware updating process seems super hacky) I changed my mind to go with SN850X assuming it is the next best. I am open for recommendations on the SSD part though. Having a low latency drive really makes a lot of difference for my I/O based workloads (unfortunately can’t get a cheap optane ATM).

– Cooler: Arctic 360 vs Something Else?

For some reason (I think it is the looks that bother me) I don’t really like air coolers. Want to go with a nice AIO (not nice as in full of RGB and displays but rather just looks elegant) but I know there are a lot of problematic ones in the market. Arctic is both very cheap and seems reliable so could go with it but also open for recommendations on other AIOs (360mm).

– Case: Corsair 5000D / 5000X

Looks pretty, seems to be easier to build inside.

– PSU: Corsair RM850 – Something Else?

I wanted to get 1050W but they seem to be starting at 300$ mark (at least the reputable brands) compared to 850W ones (which are around ~150$) in where I live. Since the price difference is very huge and I don’t see myself using a high end GPU I think this should be fine.

– GPU: RTX 4080 / 4070 Ti / 3080

Undecided. CUDA support is a must for some of the AI workloads I am dealing with. So have to go with nvidia. I don’t play a lot of games but for large models I might need more vram than 4070 Ti offers (12GB might not fit some AI models).

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I went with triple 2TB Kingston Fury Renegade and a Samsung 980 500GB as boot. The Kingston ones really pack a punch and are really cheap (got the 2TB variant for 160€ each). I heard good things about the Phison P18 controller before and I can only recommend those drives. I probably replace the Samsung with another Kingston and get a cheap SATA boot drive in a few months and get a 4-way NVMe RAID.

Carrara is a nice looking board, I went with the cheaper Steel Legend because it has dual LAN (1G+2.5G) and an extra PCIe x4 slot. Allowed me to upgrade with a 10GbE NIC, but anything 4.0 x4 will do.

128GB is possible, but don’t expect high clock speeds. Probably somewhere around 4000 or 4400 MT/s if you’re lucky.
There are new 24GB and 48GB DIMMs coming/just released, making 96GB possible without major clock speed problems. But this is new tech and I wouldn’t bother using them without new BIOS version or listing in the QVL. 2x32GB DIMMs remains the sweetspot for AM5 as of now.

These are more budget versions, but a board is a board. If a nice paintjob or USB4 is worth 200-300€, go for it. But that’s budget you can spend on X3D, GPU, storage or another PCIe card upgrade.

up to 850W units ship in volume. Everything larger lacks quantity. And they usually have good efficiency. I went with beQuiet Dark Power PSU for the efficiency at 30-50% load.

Can’t say much about AI workloads, my stuff requires CPU and GPU is AMD just for Gaming. But I’d rather get a card with more VRAM to retain viability for larger models in the future.

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That’s a good idea actually. I don’t use a lot of hot storage (have a NAS where I offload pretty much everything) and I generally keep a couple of big datasets (ranging from 50 to 300GiBs) so having a single 2TiB drive is generally enough for me. Low latency and high random IOPS is all I need.

From what I understand, no motherboard provider lists those configurations in their official memory QVL pages. That is why I kind of want to avoid 128 GB – to be sure that everything will work reliably.

Good quesstion. I am wondering whether there is any quality of life (and more generally – overall reliablity) issues I would suffer if I choose a lesss expensive motherboard. My main options are:

Strix E-A/E-F: 550$ (not included in the combo deal)
MSI MPG: 580$ (combo deal with 7950X, originally somewhere in the range of ~675$)
Strix E-E: 600$ (combo deal with 7950X, original price is ~700$)
Crossshair Hero: 800$ (combo deal with 7950X, original price is ~900$)

None of them are cheap. So if another 200$ is going to make my life easier I’m ready to swallow the pill but if these are more less the same then it’d be nice for me to save 200$ for future.

Within my budget, I have the following options (>850W):

  • FSP Hydro MX1000W 1000W (175$ – never head of them)
  • Gigabyte GP-P1000GM 1000W (200$ – don’t really trust Gigabyte even though they fixed their issue)
  • FSP Hydro G Pro HG2-1000 1000W (215$ – never head of them)
  • FSP Hydro PTM PRO HPT2-1200M 1200W (265$ – never head of them)
  • Asus ROG-STRIX-1000G 1000W (275$ – seems to be using Seasonic for the underlying PSUs, so might choose it)
  • Antec Extreme HCG1000 1000W (280$ – never head of them)
  • MSI MPG A1000G 1000W (300$ – don’t know their OEM)
  • Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W (315$ – don’t know their OEM)
  • Asus ROG-STRIX-1000G-AURA 1000W (325$ – seems to be a fancier version of the 1000G but with a 50$ markup)

I think I’d be open for non-corsair ones [don’t know why I stuck with them – just found them always reliable I guesss] (since I can’t find any Corsair PSUs within my price range), is there a particular brand above which I should choose (or avoid)?

By the way, thanks a lot for giving me exhaustive answer @Exard3k!

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As far as MOBO you may also want to look at a couple of b650e chipsets. Look at the Rog strix B650e -e gaming wifi. see what you think? you keep many of the features pcie 5 x16 or x8 x4 then pcie 4 x4 from the chipset. 2 m2 pcie 5 X4 and 2 M2 PCIE 4 X4 with a decent back io. plus headers for additional thunderbolt add in card as well as additional usb 3 etc

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The cheapest B650E-E is 486$ (which I find as an absurd price) and compared to X670E-E (which is 600$ if I buy it with the CPU) it seems like a significant step back for ~125$.

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are you in US or Canada?

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Nop.

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Why not got for a 3090? Either new or used, those 24GB of VRAM are really useful for some larger models.

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really you are not giving up much over the x670e -e slightly lower spec vrms which are ludicrously over engineered anyway and some back IO. https://www.asus.com/us/product-compare?ProductID=R_159836,R_158372&LevelId=motherboards-components-motherboards

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In general I agree with you for a zen 4 build, but I went the other way.

I got a supermicro SP5 motherboard, and the epyc 9124, 16 core up to 3.7ghz cpu. So far I have 64GB of ram, but the motherboard has 12 channels of ddr5 ecc. The motherboard has ipmi for remote management, or a local consol with VGA. There is also 10gb ethernet on board as well as a 5 unoccupied PCIe card slots, so there is room for expansion in the future.

The motherboard is +$200 what you were contemplating
The CPU is +$400
The ram is +30%

But instead of the system being at the pinnacle of what can be achieved on that motherboard, it is at the base. I am sure that newer Ryzen CPUs will eventually arrive with zen 5, and zen 6, which will be faster, but you may not be able to upgrade past 64GB reliably. Faster GPUs will come and go, but you will be limited to one, or maybe 2. I have 3 16x pcie5 slots that can take double width cards. I can also use a pair of oculink ports on the motherboard to make a 4th 16x pcie5 slot if I found the need.

From where I am on this motherboard, more money will bring me more capabilities, the expansion potential from here is vast. Ryzen, not so much.

What ryzen brings is 50% faster single threaded performance.

I liken it to what is better, a Porsche or a Semi truck? They both cost over 80K and have large engines. The difference is in the workload.

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@mikeGrok totally! I think for me it was cost of entry. Looking at my needs now, and being honest about what my current use case. A Threadripper or Epyc system is more than I need, that might change and will probably change as my skills and work grow, but for entry point into workstation system, zen 4 provides me a good value and enough expandability to get there for a good while. Just really not that thrilled that almost all products are gamer focused. But I found that if you look past the bullshit marketing and willing to cheat a bit I think there are opportunities to stretch the platform a bit. and when I say cheat I mean repurpose M2 pcie lanes.

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That is a valid point, probably 3090 Ti / 3090 would be much a better candidate than 3080 or 4070 Ti for me (if I can find one in a decent condition). I always thought 3080 had the same VRAM as 4080 (16 GiB) but seems like it had 12/10 GiB which makes it not really useful.

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If I weren’t going to daily-drive this, I think I would go into the same route but this is the main point for a daily driver. I already have access to lots of server-grade parallelism on the cloud but the thing that bothers me most is slowness in the local development environment. Being bottleneck’d by the compiler/linker/dependant tests [albeit much of them are IO dependant – there is still a ton of time a faster CPU with high ST perfomance can bring] sucks so much.

I guess I would prefer 32 Cores + 128 GiB DDR5 RAM over some degree of ST performance loss (e.g. a Zen 4 Threadripper or 9004-F EPYC CPU – the ones with lots of ST performance --) but it will probably be an upgrade once I have the barebones of this system running (since it is the best I can get, the 9004-Fs are insanely expensive and Zen 4 threadripper is nowhere near release (?) not super sure).

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If it is going to be your daily driver, Single Threaded performance is king. Go for it.

I got my cpu from wiredzone.com, if you go to the below site and search for “4F” you can see all of the threadripper like products.
https://www.wiredzone.com/shop/category/components-processors-113?filter=55-1418

Here is the list of all of the processor variants, click on “SPECIFICATIONS” in the header.

“4P” cannot be used in dual processor systems.

Supermicro SP5 (h13) motherboards are around $700 with 1G, $800 with 10G, otherwise identical. I don’t know who has them in stock now. It is changing every week.

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Parts update: I was able to get a pretty sweet deal on Strix E-A + 7950X for just ~1100$ (635$ for CPU, 465$ for the motherboard). If I had purchased them separately (or somewhere else where there isn’t a sale) I probably would have spent 200-250$ more.

I was really worried whether E-A was good enough but apparently other than some PCIE slot changes and the number of USB ports, it isn’t that much different from E-E.

Also ordered the drive (SN850X 1TB for now), the cooler (Lian Li Galahad 360) and the case Corsair iCUE 5000X. Now it is time for RAM and PSU :eyes:

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PSU and RAM update, decided that it would be easier to also get them now without overthinking so I’ve decided to go with:

  • G.SKILL TZ5 Neo RGB DDR5-6000Mhz CL32 64GB (2X32GB) DUAL (32-38-38-96) 1.40V AMD EXPO Ram

This seems to be the in the same series of G.SKILL RAM that AMD used in their test systems when they advertised 7950X. Also AFAIK 6000 MT/s is the sweetspot for AM5, so it probably should work well :crossed_fingers:

  • Asus ROG-STRIX-1000G-AURA 1000W 80+ Gold Aura Edition Power Supply

Honestly this was more than the double of my initial price estimate for a PSU, but after reading a lot of reviews and re-thinking my GPU needs I think this is by far the most suitable one. It costs around ~350 USD here, and pretty much beats every other available PSU in its class (in terms of efficiency and quietness). Cybernetics was really useful. Would have gone with Corsair if I hadn’t read the detailed reports for RM1000x.

In total, without a GPU, the system came to this:

  1. AMD Ryzen 9 7950X → 635$
  2. ASUS Rog Strix X670E E-A Motherboard → 465$
  3. G.SKILL TZ5 Neo RGB DDR5-6000Mhz CL32 64GB Ram → 400$
  4. Lian Li Galahad 360mm CPU Cooler → 170$
  5. WD SN850X PCIE4.0 SSD 1TB → 100$
  6. Corsair iCUE 5000X Chasis → 225$
  7. Asus 1000G-AURA 1000W 80+ Gold Aura Edition Power Supply → 350$

In total it comes down to ~2345$ (probably you would get all of these for %25-%30 less than what I paid for if you live in north america). With a decent-ish GPU (thinking an A4000, goes around ~600$ in second hand markets), I should still be well under the 3500$ mark (which is what I would have spent if I got a pre-built workstation with probably a much less powerful machine).

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Here is how it looks (still waiting for the GPU, which is now ordered, a brand new RTX 4070 Ti [although I am doubting myself over whether 12G VRAM is going to be really problematic but we’ll see]). Not the shiniest or best managed one, but as a first timer I’m really proud of how it all came together:

image
image737×1316 101 KB

Installed the latest stable bios update (v0925, there is also v1003 which is said to add support for higher densities like 4x48GB and improve POST times but it is marked as beta so i’ll wait for it to promoted to stable before installing). The POST time is around ~30 seconds, not too good but also not too bad (64GB of DDR5-6000 XMP RAM). I haven’t changed anything in terms of memory training which might mean there could be some potential there (it doesn’t really bother me that much and I’m curious what v1003 will do out of the box).

Weirdly Kubuntu 23.04 (upgraded from 22.10 image) doesn’t play nicely with Ryzen 7950X’s iGPU (screen flickers with a white image, super annoying). Although this is a fixed problem and when I updated to Linux 6.2.7 (which is meant to be used for the final 23.04 release) it was all gone.

Unlike my initial expectations though, the iGPU is not super great. I have two displays (4K 60Hz and 2K 75Hz) and when I start playing a video stream everything slows down (e.g. menu animations). I’m hoping that it would not persist when I switch to the dGPU (4070 Ti) once it arrives.

In terms of performance, I can reliable see ~5.8 GHz for the first few cycles and once the temparatures ramp up it goes to ~5.3/5.4 all core average on %100 usage sustained workloads which is amazing.

It is also super quiet with Galahad II and 3 chassis fans (nothing else, not even an exhaust one which I might get after the dGPU). Using the silent profile from the motherboard settings work like a charm. It ramps up when I am doing something that requires intensive compute power (compilation) and then immediately scales back once it is over (super quick response time).

I’ve also tried some PBO tuning (curve optimizer with -15 + %100 fan power for max cooling) but it only brought up the performance on my workloads (ran a large test suite which also has IO sensitivity and other aspects) by %10 which is not worth at all (so leaving everything as default + configuring Q-Fan settings to be silent works perfect for me).

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