Building a high memory capacity workstation

[just_bob]

Hello,

 

I do some heavy Houdini sims and am looking to get at least 64GB of memory in my upcoming workstation. I did quite a bit of research on my own, but would like to hear some feedback whether to go AMD or Intel. My research so far points out that Ryzen can't really handle that much memory well, since the infinity fabric is dependent on RAM speed and shoving in a 4x16GB kit plummets the speed all the way down to 1866MHz. While it is possible to OC the memory somewhere near 3200MHz, it pretty much requires getting that Samsung B-die which goes for 940‎€ right now (https://www.alternate.de/G-Skill/DIMM-64-GB-DDR4-3200-Quad-Kit-Arbeitsspeicher/html/product/1351449?). If I got it correctly, Intel does not suffer from same affliction and I would be able to get some cheaper (not B-die) RAM and OC it to 3200Mhz without any issues. Taking into consideration Buildzoid's recommendation to get Crosshair VII Hero if you want to unlock 2700X's true potential, it makes me wonder if Ryzen is the best bang for the buck in my case scenario. 2700X pretty much requires the best motherboard and best RAM to actually see the numbers that are shown in most benchmarks. While I would prefer having 64GB of RAM either way, going 8700K does open up the doors to the third option which is 32GB RAM + 280GB Optane as swap (which is the cheapest option of the three). Unfortunately I haven't really found many benchmarks showing Optane getting hammered for more than just a few hours and how exactly it compares to RAM speeds. I will probably wait for September to see if Z390 coffee lake happens by then and how it affects the whole situation, but i doubt I will be able to wait for 7nm Ryzen.

 

Please correct me if I got something wrong over here and share any potential advice.

Thanks

[Solomon Online]

I will start to use Houdini and wondering why you aren't considering Threadripper, but Ryzen... Here my own build so far...

 

[just_bob]

1 hour ago, Solomon Online said:

I will start to use Houdini and wondering why you aren't considering Threadripper, but Ryzen... Here my own build so far...

 

I'm not going TR route because cash, of course. If you can afford it, sure, go ahead. Do bear in mind not all work in Houdini is multi threaded, single core performance is still important. There is a certain amount of threads sims can use and for-loops are a whole other topic (don't ask me the numbers, I'm no expert), making TR build more of a render-slave.

But tbh, considering I did most of my Houdini stuff on an old FX-8350 so far, I'm sure 8700K or 2700X are more than sufficient as long as I provide them enough memory.