Intel Xeon vs. Ryzen

[Phishfry]

Quite a few of those off-brand Chinese board makers are offering brand new G34 boards (with custom heatsink) for under the $100 mark. Been tempted to try one just for fun.

Are these the boards I see labeled as X89 chipset??? Cracks me up they are copying Intel monikers. (ie. X79 X99)
just like the Asrock Rack board above. X470 makes it sound like an Intel chipset. (ie. X270, X370)

I found the Opteron 6380 has a 10K passmark score and that is good for a 7 year old board.
The Opteron 6370p sounds more my style at 99W TDP instead of 115W on 6380.
It is a rare CPU and appeared to be a fresher version using Warsaw.

G34 Drawbacks, DDR2 and SATA2, biggest hit for me is PCIe 2.x on those chips boards.
The SuperMicro H8 boards look good but still not cheap.

Overall I am happy I ended up on LGA2011.
It is pretty versatile socket and lots of cheap cooling as well as heatpipes and copper.

LGA3647 and EPYC sound groovy but I do have a house payment to make.

 

[steveoc64]

yep, thats the one.

says DDR3 on the specs though, ecc supported, apparently.

or go supermicro for 200, German supplier, ipmi and all the good stuff.

 

[Phishfry]

The SM Opteron boards do seem to mirror thier Intel conterparts.
How about an EPYC H11SSL.
128 Lanes of PCIe bus and the clowns put x8 slots on the board.
All need to be 16X you idiots. Who designs this stuff. Geez.
They act like they never designed a server board.
Why hold back. Are X16 slot parts cost really that much higher? Maybe so many traces they need more PCB layers?
Inquiring minds want to know.....

Plus what is up with this:

Up to 32 Cores

i thought EPYC was carrying lots of cores too. 32 sounds low these days.....
Intel is packing more in their LGA3647 GOLD line. But you do need to be somewhat wealthy to partake.

 

[toorski]

Why hold back. Are X16 slot parts cost really that much higher? Maybe so many traces they need more PCB layers?

They'll loose all the FreeBSD gamerz, as potential customers, without x16 PCIe slot on that motherboard

 

[Phishfry]

EPYC chips do top out at 32 cores 64 threads. (For Now)

https://www.amd.com/en/products/epyc-7000-series-1-socket-models?items_per_page=6&page=1

No EATX Single socket boards.

Technologically Advanced High-End Motherboards | Supermicro

Supermicro’s in-house design superiority is tailored for the needs of gaming, IoT or Enterprise; consistent highest-quality and production expertise

www.supermicro.com

The H11DSi has 256 Lanes of PCIe available yet they thought it was ok to use some x8 slots in there.

 

[Phishfry]

Maybe it is all a big conspiracy. To get early access to Intel silicon SM must behave.
They use this A+Plus division and sell neutered AMD gear with their overlords permission.
So then Intel also gets early access to AMD samples via them.

 

[Remington]

i thought EPYC was carrying lots of cores too. 32 sounds low these days.....
Intel is packing more in their LGA3647 GOLD line. But you do need to be somewhat wealthy to partake.

You can add more cores by finding motherboard that can support 2 or 4 epyc chips. It's definitely overkill for what you need.

 

[olli@]

i thought EPYC was carrying lots of cores too. 32 sounds low these days.....

Well, 32 cores (64 threads) isn't too bad for a single package. There are servers that take multiple packages. For example, the ASUS RS700-E9-RS12 has two Epyc CPU sockets, so you have 64 cores (128 threads) in a single system. It supports ECC, by the way (up to 2 TB octa-channel DDR4).

The upcoming Ryzen3-based Epyc is rumored to have up to 48 cores (96 threads), coming close to 200 threads for a two-package system. That's pretty good for a single x86-based node. And if that's still not enough for you, well, then just put more of those servers into your rack.

 

[Phishfry]

Yes you are correct plus you need to go to Intel LGA3647 'PLATINUM' for over 24 cores on Intel. GOLD maxes at 24 Cores.
PLATINUM does go up to 56 cores.

It does only offer 6 channel RAM versus 8 channel on EPYC.

 

[stratacast1]

Let me give the skinny on HP Xeon boxes.
Motherboard uses custom 18 pin power supply header and is non-standard gear.
I think you can do better.

Notice the connectors from this pic:

HP Z440 Workstation Motherboard LGA 2011 Ddr4 710324-002 761514-0 for sale online | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for HP Z440 Workstation Motherboard LGA 2011 Ddr4 710324-002 761514-0 at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!

www.ebay.com

I wouldn't have caught that, thank you for saving me some headache down the road! I think I can afford that new, shiny board...at least the CPUs are cheap

If you are going to use bhyve you want cores and memory. Your 32GB will be paltry with a couple of VM's. No offense.

With what I have going on, 32GB is more than plenty. But it seems a lot of these boards are quad channel(?) so if I ever want an upgrade I can just get the same set of sticks again and go up to 64GB. Right now my VM projects are on low-duty because I only have 8GB on what I'm using...and my real server has 16GB, and I plan on moving those VMs over to the new server and really start utilizing my VMs more than just being plinkers.

I thought AsrockRack had a "server grade AM4" board in their catalog

AsRock Rack X470D4U Micro ATX Server Motherboard AM4 Ryzen - Newegg.com

Buy AsRock Rack X470D4U Micro ATX Server Motherboard AM4 Ryzen & Ryzen 7nm PGA1331 AMD X470 with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!

www.newegg.com

Might be worth a look, esp if you already have some AM4 CPUs floating around ?

My (short) experience with FreeBSD on Ryzen is a bit of a mixed bag.
- Getting so much processing power and cores, for the money, and relatively low power consumption == good
- Getting bhyve failing catastrophically trying to boot - Ubuntu, Dragonfly, Win10 == not so good
- I have no problems on this machine loading FreeBSD in a bhyve under freebsd mind you.
- Support the market disrupter and all that == good

Ive had no problems getting bhyve running on i3 / i5 / Xeon 1151 ... but zero luck with Ryzen so far. Hopefully its a bad batch of hardware ?

I do have a Ryzen 1600 I was wanting to use...I upgraded my tower under the impression it wouldn't be a big deal going Ryzen for my server since my current server is ancient and slow. But, I use bhyve and want to use it more and the fact that Ryzen + bhyve don't get along well is a dealbreaker for me. You're the second person I've heard having difficulties with Ryzen and bhyve.

You could have a look on some Cavium ThunderX (v1), and FreeBSD is supposedly (I don't have one to assure) to be quite stable on ARMv8.

That would be awesome if I could just get the board/CPU for a good price and not have to shell out for a whole box!

 

[rigoletto@]

That would be awesome if I could just get the board/CPU for a good price and not have to shell out for a whole box!

You may try to talk with Gigabyte or if you are located in Europe with Avantek; however I could ask a friend in the project who has a foot in the ARM métier if he can help somehow. In the last case you can ping me in private; however I think that would be difficult to happen.

This one seems to be in USA.

 

[steveoc64]

Gotta say - those Raptor Blackbird / Power 9 boards are looking interesting.

I know its way off the mark from what the OP was asking ... but still

 

[olli@]

I do have a Ryzen 1600 I was wanting to use...I upgraded my tower under the impression it wouldn't be a big deal going Ryzen for my server since my current server is ancient and slow. But, I use bhyve and want to use it more and the fact that Ryzen + bhyve don't get along well is a dealbreaker for me. You're the second person I've heard having difficulties with Ryzen and bhyve.

Just for the record … I've got a Ryzen 2700 and tryed bhyve for a quick test. It worked well in general, but bhyve doesn't support passing a Blu-Ray drive to a guest, so I had to switch to VirtualBox which supports that. VirtualBox works very well with the Ryzen.

 

[steveoc64]

Just for the record … I've got a Ryzen 2700 and tryed bhyve for a quick test. It worked well in general, but bhyve doesn't support passing a Blu-Ray drive to a guest, so I had to switch to VirtualBox which supports that. VirtualBox works very well with the Ryzen.

I cant get bhyve working on ryzen with ubuntu. .. several versions.

wonder what im not setting up?

any magic tricks you can think of?

 

[olli@]

I cant get bhyve working on ryzen with ubuntu. .. several versions.

wonder what im not setting up?

any magic tricks you can think of?

No, I didn't do anything special, as far as I can remember. I installed Suse, though, not Ubuntu, but it's all the same Linux kernel, I assume. What kind of problems are you facing exactly?
A cursory search with my search engine of choice yields several reports of people runnung Ubuntu on bhyve on Ryzen without apparent problems, for example see this forum post at iXsystems.

 

[kpedersen]

This could be a good option

HP Z440 Workstation Intel Xeon Quad Core 3.5GHz 8GB DDR4 500GB HD NVIDIA Win 10 | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for HP Z440 Workstation Intel Xeon Quad Core 3.5GHz 8GB DDR4 500GB HD NVIDIA Win 10 at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!

www.ebay.com

I use the Z420 at work and my colleague uses the Z440. They work well with FreeBSD and are extremely boring (which is certainly what you want in a server).

Interestingly we could never get the inbuilt card readers and front facing USB ports to work on Windows but they work great on FreeBSD.
If you ditch the NVIDIA shite and go with an AMD GPU, it even works well with OpenBSD/X11.

 

[steveoc64]

Solved - FreeBSD 12-RELEASE + Ryzen + Bhyve == any luck ?

New build here - Older generation Ryzen2600 (6c/12t . 65W, very cheap) Asrock B450-Pro4-F (very cheap) Nvidia GT710 (very cheap) 64GB of cheap DDR4-2666 NVME drive (very cheap) FreeBSD 12.0 running great, fantastic little headless server box for general duties and developing jailed apps ...

forums.freebsd.org

^ got a thread there that details the issue - and one other member so far with the same issue.
I have put zero effort into trying to debug it so far - will get more time on the weekend hopefully.

No, I didn't do anything special, as far as I can remember. I installed Suse, though, not Ubuntu, but it's all the same Linux kernel, I assume. What kind of problems are you facing exactly?
A cursory search with my search engine of choice yields several reports of people runnung Ubuntu on bhyve on Ryzen without apparent problems, for example see this forum post at iXsystems.

 

[stratacast1]

I use the Z420 at work and my colleague uses the Z440. They work well with FreeBSD and are extremely boring (which is certainly what you want in a server).

Interestingly we could never get the inbuilt card readers and front facing USB ports to work on Windows but they work great on FreeBSD.
If you ditch the NVIDIA shite and go with an AMD GPU, it even works well with OpenBSD/X11.

I was eyeballing this guy, but apparently they have a proprietary power connector...since you have the box, if you were willing to take a moment would you confirm?

 

[Sevendogsbsd]

Let me give the skinny on HP Xeon boxes.
Motherboard uses custom 18 pin power supply header and is non-standard gear.
I think you can do better.

Notice the connectors from this pic:

HP Z440 Workstation Motherboard LGA 2011 Ddr4 710324-002 761514-0 for sale online | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for HP Z440 Workstation Motherboard LGA 2011 Ddr4 710324-002 761514-0 at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!

www.ebay.com

Yep, poudriere server I have is an HP z800 and nothing in it is standard. Been running great when I use it but I only power it up a couple times a month . I am.not looking forward to if/when the proprietary 1100 watt PSU dies...

 

[Sevendogsbsd]

This thread has made me wonder if anyone can use my spare 20gb of DDR3 ECC ram? 2gb sticks x 10. Free and I will ship to you if you are in the US.

 

[Phishfry]

if you were willing to take a moment would you confirm?

Here is the adapter you can use for a regular power supply.

ATX PSU 24Pin + Dual Molex IDE 4Pin to 18+10pin Power Supply Cable for HP Z800 | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for ATX PSU 24Pin + Dual Molex IDE 4Pin to 18+10pin Power Supply Cable for HP Z800 at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!

www.ebay.com

 

[kpedersen]

I was eyeballing this guy, but apparently they have a proprietary power connector...since you have the box, if you were willing to take a moment would you confirm?

Neither of them use anything particularly non-standard for the power. Just a standard UK "kettle" lead for these ones.

https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/power-cable-assemblies/2621126/

Is this the power connector you meant or internally to the motherboard? (I can take some photos if you would like)

On thing to note is that if I recall (changed the GPU a long time ago) the NVIDIA card that came with it didn't come with HDMI. Only DisplayPort which is more "open" and less patent encumbered but practically a bit annoying because most monitors at work are HDMI haha.

 

[stratacast1]

I want to resurrect my thread if you guys don't mind I have some extra money coming in and want to revisit this with the information that was shared. I'm a CPU/mobo away from a system still. I've looked at Phisfry's suggestions around the Intel E5 26XXv3/4 and like those ideas. I'm wondering though if it's possible to avoid some of the meltdown stuff. I'm seeing Intel performance dip on Linux these days too as their newer kernels come out and I wonder if that is also an overall trend to expect on FreeBSD as I think a lot of the performance hits are for security controls. If that's unavoidable, I like that option. EPYC is still pretty dang expensive, even 1st gen looks steep since it's still new. I know I'd also encounter those bhyve issues and I don't want that. What's the deal with Cavium ThunderX these days? It looks like a solid platform to invest in but I presume the cost is still too high and a 32 core machine would be way too overkill. I do want something that'll go another 5 years. Is it possible to just get a motherboard/CPU or are you forced into sacrificing a kidney on a new machine?

 

[Phishfry]

I'm wondering though if it's possible to avoid some of the meltdown stuff.

Yes with the same performance issues.

 

[stratacast1]

I've concluded that for EPYC/ARM there is nothing for me. Maybe one day the market will change! But it's not today. So I purchased an HP Z440 like I was considering a long while back. Perfect timing too. Xeon 1650v3 and 64GB of ECC memory for a solid price. I figure I can just drag and drop my drives in the new system and it should work properly (I hope)