AMD 2700X or 2920x

[davidst95]

Hi, I'm building a home server to run ESXi.   I'm looking either the AMD 2700X or the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2920X.   Both are priced in my budget ($159 and $299 at Microcenter).   I plan on get a SATA controller to pass through to either a Unraid or FreeNAS VM for my storage.   I plan running 3 or 4 VMs with one for a Plex Server.  The price difference between the two processors and motherboard is about $300.   Any advice would be greatly appreciated. 

 

David

[Electronics Wizardy]

What are the vms doing?

 

The 2700x(or really 2600) is preobably fine for what you have listed.

[mariushm]

Depends on the number of pci-e lanes and ram you need.

 

am4 limits you to 64 gb of ram, tr 4 gives you up to 128-256 , and also ecc

 

you have 20 pci-e lanes on am4 ( 16 video, 4 m.2) and 6-8 lanes from chipset .. if you plug a video card in the x16 slot you'll have only 4 lanes for the adapter card, unless you go with x370/x470 that allows splitting into 2 x8 slots. 

tr4 would give you some extra flexibility for VMs but not sure they'd matter for you.

 

Don't think you really need threadripper... the 3700x at 320$ will actually give you higher brute performance than 2920x and you don't have hassles with numa nodes, latency between cores and memory slots etc not to mention you'd be fine with just 2 memory sticks on am4 while with threadripper it would be best to use 4 sticks.

 

combine it with one of these (all support bios flashback in case they're not from the box with ryzen 3xxx support, you can simply put the bios on usb stick and push a button to flash bios, without cpu installed in socket)

MSI B450-A Pro AM4 ATX AMD Motherboard - Micro Center

MSI B450 TOMAHAWK AM4 ATX AMD Motherboard - Micro Center

This one's very good, but for a "server" you don't need to pay extra for fancy sound card and rgb and other stuff.

MSI B450 Gaming Pro Carbon AC AM4 ATX AMD - Micro Center

 

This one is with x470 and would allow you to split the x16 in two x8 , which could be useful for installing two x8 raid/hba cards or video+card. However, it doesn't have bios flashback, so better ask there if they can update the bios for you, or give you a cpu and memory for a few minutes to install the latest bios in the store

MSI X470 GAMING PLUS AM4 ATX AMD Motherboard

 

 

[davidst95]

9 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Depends on the number of pci-e lanes and ram you need.

 

am4 limits you to 64 gb of ram, tr 4 gives you up to 128-256 , and also ecc

 

you have 20 pci-e lanes on am4 ( 16 video, 4 m.2) and 6-8 lanes from chipset .. if you plug a video card in the x16 slot you'll have only 4 lanes for the adapter card, unless you go with x370/x470 that allows splitting into 2 x8 slots. 

tr4 would give you some extra flexibility for VMs but not sure they'd matter for you.

 

Don't think you really need threadripper... the 3700x at 320$ will actually give you higher brute performance than 2920x and you don't have hassles with numa nodes, latency between cores and memory slots etc not to mention you'd be fine with just 2 memory sticks on am4 while with threadripper it would be best to use 4 sticks.

 

combine it with one of these (all support bios flashback in case they're not from the box with ryzen 3xxx support, you can simply put the bios on usb stick and push a button to flash bios, without cpu installed in socket)

MSI B450-A Pro AM4 ATX AMD Motherboard - Micro Center

MSI B450 TOMAHAWK AM4 ATX AMD Motherboard - Micro Center

This one's very good, but for a "server" you don't need to pay extra for fancy sound card and rgb and other stuff.

MSI B450 Gaming Pro Carbon AC AM4 ATX AMD - Micro Center

 

This one is with x470 and would allow you to split the x16 in two x8 , which could be useful for installing two x8 raid/hba cards or video+card. However, it doesn't have bios flashback, so better ask there if they can update the bios for you, or give you a cpu and memory for a few minutes to install the latest bios in the store

MSI X470 GAMING PLUS AM4 ATX AMD Motherboard

 

 

 

Thanks for the reply.   I'm plan to build my server with a MicroATX motherboard with the Fractal Design Node 804.   I'm looking at the Asrock X570M.   My thinking is that I can get a cheap 2700X now and wait for the prices to come down on the R9 CPUs later down the road.   The motherboard will run at PCIe 3.0 16/1/4 when used with a 2nd generation AM4 CPU.

 

David

[davidst95]

26 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What are the vms doing?

 

The 2700x(or really 2600) is preobably fine for what you have listed.

I was going to have a VM for Plex, a Ubuntu dev machine and a minecraft server.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, davidst95 said:

I was going to have a VM for Plex, a Ubuntu dev machine and a minecraft server.

then you probably won't need the extra cpu power of threadripper, id just get a 2600 here personally.

[bowrilla]

The question should be: how many of those VMs are you going to run in parallel? I'd give Plex 2 vcores, the Ubuntu dev machine at least (!) 4 (have you thought about the WSL? it can give you quite a lovely seamless Linux dev environment), and 2-4 vcores for the Minecraft server. If everything runs at the same time that makes up to 10 vcores. The 2700 or 2700x offers 16 threads/vcores, the 2600 12 threads/vcores. I wouldn't go below 4 on the host. If everything is running at the same time, the 2600 will be pretty much pushed beyond its reasonable limits, the 2700/2700X has power to spare. If you go the FreeNas route and want to use deduplication then that takes some more resources, especially memory but also cpu power. If you also virtualize FreeNas (why exactly?) then you'll push the 2700/2700X to its limits as well. If you don't intend to run everything at once, the 2600 would be fine. 

Bhyve is absolutely fine to run VMs no matter the guest OS. Eliminate the host to virtualize FreeNas and just get better performance out of everything and get along with less hardware.