Ryzen 9 vs Threadripper Pro

[mvanorder]

Budget (including currency): 5000 USD

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: NAS and virtualized Windows and with IOMMU for passing GPU, and USB to the guest

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): 

Only part I currently have is a Corsair 900D eATX case.

 

I'm trying to decide between the following:

Ryzen 9 5950X overclocked

DDR4 4000 CL18 dual channel

Parts list here: https://newegg.io/a18a3c6

Currently $2106

 

Threadripper Pro 3955WX

DDR4 3600 CL16 4 channel running at 3200 CL14

Parts list here: https://newegg.io/fb46ca6

Currently $3368

 

I know the TR Pro can run 8 channel, I put 4 in my list for comparison at 128GB but not 16GB sticks

I don't know if I'll get better performance out of the Zen 3 Ryzen or if it's worth the extra $1200 for more memory bandwidth and on Zen 2 with a lot more head room for CPU/memory upgradability down the road.

 

[dizmo]

Might want to change your title, you should have Ryzen 9 vs Threadripper Pro.

[mvanorder]

1 hour ago, dizmo said:

Might want to change your title, you should have Ryzen 9 vs Threadripper Pro.

LOL Thanks,  IDK what happened there.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

Depends on if you care more about multicore or single core

 

Threadripper is a ripoff, just go amd epyc, 7502 32 core are ~1500$ on ebay and 7702 64 core are ~3000$. Only gain from tr pro is just overclocking and thats basically useless, not to mention you can even get zen3 epyc if you want, though they are very expensive cause current gen

 

Decent boards cost 600$+, supermicro boards are cheap but meant for servers so there are some issues with them, there is an sth threaad but i cant find it, some of the issues are not compatible with windows, stupidly long boot time, driver issues, etc.  Id suggest an asus, gigabyte, or asrock board as those are pretty good

 

Ecc ddr4 32gb dimms are 80-100$ for the decently priced ones, to filter out the garbage but a brand name you want the ics to be like samsung ecc ddr4 32gb, i suggest 2400 or 2666 since you can just minor oc to 2800 or higher

 

 

Ryzen wise overclocking is pointless unless you wanna hook up a car radiator or 2 to it or basically any way to keep it under 60c, prefferably near ambient or subzero. Youll only see a pathetic 100-200mhz gain which doesnt really justify the amount of volt you need to cram through it, just stick with pbo and thatll do the ocing for you

 

And spending 700$ on a measly 64gb kit is stupid, thats the kind of money i expect to spend for an 8x32 ecc ddr4 kit (256gb ecc ddr4)

[brob]

Without any indication of loading it's pretty difficult to provide reasonable analysis. But if multiple users will be using multiple GPU, Ryzen 9 is less than ideal.

[mvanorder]

1 hour ago, brob said:

Without any indication of loading it's pretty difficult to provide reasonable analysis. But if multiple users will be using multiple GPU, Ryzen 9 is less than ideal.

I will be the only one using it as a desktop, so I really only need 1 GPU.  The rest of the resources will go to NAS and VMs for game servers, web servers, tinkering, etc.

[mvanorder]

1 hour ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

Depends on if you care more about multicore or single core

 

Threadripper is a ripoff, just go amd epyc, 7502 32 core are ~1500$ on ebay and 7702 64 core are ~3000$. Only gain from tr pro is just overclocking and thats basically useless, not to mention you can even get zen3 epyc if you want, though they are very expensive cause current gen

 

Decent boards cost 600$+, supermicro boards are cheap but meant for servers so there are some issues with them, there is an sth threaad but i cant find it, some of the issues are not compatible with windows, stupidly long boot time, driver issues, etc.  Id suggest an asus, gigabyte, or asrock board as those are pretty good

 

Ecc ddr4 32gb dimms are 80-100$ for the decently priced ones, to filter out the garbage but a brand name you want the ics to be like samsung ecc ddr4 32gb, i suggest 2400 or 2666 since you can just minor oc to 2800 or higher

 

 

Ryzen wise overclocking is pointless unless you wanna hook up a car radiator or 2 to it or basically any way to keep it under 60c, prefferably near ambient or subzero. Youll only see a pathetic 100-200mhz gain which doesnt really justify the amount of volt you need to cram through it, just stick with pbo and thatll do the ocing for you

 

And spending 700$ on a measly 64gb kit is stupid, thats the kind of money i expect to spend for an 8x32 ecc ddr4 kit (256gb ecc ddr4)

I definitely want good single core performance as I'd like to use it as a gaming desktop and don't want to be limited if I'm trying to run a game that's not optimized for multithreading.

The reason I was looking at TR instead of Epic is motherboard selection for an ATX/EATX case is slim, and the ones I did find had very little I/O and/or SATA.  I assume the SATA part is due to servers using PCIe RAID cards.

 

ECC vs non ECC is another thing I was considering.  However I'm not seeing any ECC RAM with close to the performance of non-ECC:

$1360 non-ECC 3600 CL19 -> faster transfer rate and 8.88ns latency

$1100 ECC 2666 CL 19 -> slower transfer rate with 14.25ns latency

 

 

I get there's not much head room to OC AMD chips, but if I can I'd like to try to get something more than stock.

 

I meant to have them both at 128 GB.  So with 2 4x32GB the TR Pro with just the CPU, Mobo, RAM and SSD is now double the price of the Ryzen 9.

[mvanorder]

Ok so looking at Epyc it looks like I could get an ASRock Rack ROMED8-2T for $500 and 7502 as mentioned for $1500, in all about $300 cheaper.  That would double my core count, but run at 2.5ghz base to 3.35Ghz boost. The TR Pro is 3.9Ghz base and 4.3Ghz boost.

 

I'm still not sure the price difference is worth it over the 5950X.  And how is gaming performance on say 6 or 8 cores of zen 2 based Epyc vs zen 2 TR Pro or zen 3 Ryzen 9?

[Somerandomtechyboi]

2 hours ago, mvanorder said:

The reason I was looking at TR instead of Epic is motherboard selection for an ATX/EATX case is slim, and the ones I did find had very little I/O and/or SATA.  I assume the SATA part is due to servers using PCIe RAID cards.

Theres a reason why theres an absolute boatload of pcie lanes and weird server interfaces

 

The pcie lanes you can just shove a boatload of cards in like usb, sata, thunderbolt, etc. And the weird server interfaces are just extra i/o that might be convertible to more consumer i/o

 

2 hours ago, mvanorder said:

I definitely want good single core performance as I'd like to use it as a gaming desktop and don't want to be limited if I'm trying to run a game that's not optimized for multithreading.

In that case then 3 options

 

search for a qs, es, or an epyc that ends with -004 (oem), do some whacky bios modding (downgrade agesa to 1.0.0.3 or less), put some vrm cooling, get good cooling for the cpu (pref very beefy cooling that can keep it under 60c at all times), then start overclocking the balls off the poor epyc with zenstates or editing the msr manually, id also reccomend using something to bypass ocp like elmor evc2

 

Go for zen3 epyc but these are ludicrously expensive

 

Or just stick with the 5950x and leave pbo to auto oc the cpu

[mvanorder]

I'm stuck now between: Zen 2 is a lot better than what I have so it'll be plenty good enough while also having upgrade options for later, and: spending this much on a new PC I want it to be as fast as possible, but 5990X will probably be the pinnacle of the AM4 and X570.

 

Also looked at the Epyc CPU/motherboards a little more, and put together a list which is 16 core zen 3 and slightly less expensive than the TR Pro 16 core zen 2:

https://newegg.io/e6fe472

 

[pdub]

On 3/3/2022 at 3:35 AM, mvanorder said:

Ok so looking at Epyc it looks like I could get an ASRock Rack ROMED8-2T for $500 and 7502 as mentioned for $1500, in all about $300 cheaper.  That would double my core count, but run at 2.5ghz base to 3.35Ghz boost. The TR Pro is 3.9Ghz base and 4.3Ghz boost.

Can I ask where you're seeing these prices? I can't find anything close to that anywhere and this is the exact setup I've been looking for!

[mvanorder]

3 hours ago, pdub said:

Can I ask where you're seeing these prices? I can't find anything close to that anywhere and this is the exact setup I've been looking for!

Epyc 7505: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=epyc+7502&_sop=13

ASRock Rack ROMED8-2T: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=m570.l1313&_nkw=ASRock+Rack+ROMED8-2T&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=0&_odkw=epyc+7502&LH_BIN=1&_sop=15

And correction, the lowest price for a good board is $670, or $660 retail

Also Zen 3 16 core 7313: https://www.newegg.com/amd-epyc-7313-socket-sp3/p/N82E16819113699?Item=N82E16819113699

[pdub]

5 hours ago, mvanorder said:

Also Zen 3 16 core 7313

Isn't the 7313 a better choice anyway if the cores aren't a huge issue /w higher clock and lower tdp?

[mvanorder]

On 3/4/2022 at 7:34 PM, pdub said:

Isn't the 7313 a better choice anyway if the cores aren't a huge issue /w higher clock and lower tdp?

That's what I'm thinking.  The 7313 has better performance per core, and you can overcommit cores to VMs as long as not all the cores will be required by the VMs at the same time.  And not only does the 7313 have 10% higher clock, zen 3 is supposed to have a 19% improvement on IPC.