Best place to buy used Epyc (non-china version)

starcaptain · Jun 12, 2023

I have read many post on STH but it's my first time creating an account (due to the reddit blackout) so hopefully this is in the right section, if not my apologies.

So I made a mistake in buying an Epyc on ebay from china before realizing that they have the performance throttled due to IP/license restrictions. It looked exactly like an official epyc but at this point i'm guessing it was a relabeled Hygon Dhyana.

I discovered this when I ran a cpubenchmark.net test and mine scored 21,000 when the average is 40,000. To give you an idea of how bad it is, I setup elastic search on two machines, an i5-13600k and the 7551p both with 128gb+ of memory. To index 10M docs in elastic It takes 2.2 hrs on the i5 and 9 hrs on the epyc; 4x worse processing. I use my homelab quiet heavily and am downloading and processing 200Mb/s of big data 24x7 so the performance hit showed up real quick.

I'm looking for a good place to buy a used unlocked epyc which is truly from AMD and at a fair price.
Any recommendations on where to buy from?

bitbckt · Jun 12, 2023

One of the generally-preferred sellers around here is in this thread. Skip to the end.

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/amd-epyc-7302p-supermicro-h11ssl-i-version-2.37913/

If you really want to avoid China, parts.cafe on fleaBay is reputable.

gb00s · Jun 12, 2023

What Epyc do you need? Are you from US or EU area?

starcaptain · Jun 12, 2023

bitbckt said:
One of the generally-preferred sellers around here is in this thread. Skip to the end.

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/amd-epyc-7302p-supermicro-h11ssl-i-version-2.37913/

If you really want to avoid China, parts.cafe on fleaBay is reputable.

Is "ebay tugm4470" the person you're referring to?

bitbckt · Jun 12, 2023

starcaptain said:
Is "ebay tugm4470" the person you're referring to?

Yes.

ano · Jun 12, 2023

which CPU? and did SKU everything look correct?

Ive bought from china (tugm4470) but also parts cafe, (there are lots of other selles with similar names ish, so be aware)

starcaptain · Jun 12, 2023

gb00s said:
What Epyc do you need? Are you from US or EU area?

I'm not overly picky but the more cores the better. That's why I went with the 7551p is the 32 cores and 40k benchmark. The mobo is a supermicro H11Sl-i and supports 1st and 2nd gen epyc. So I can choose another 1st gen 32 core or 2nd gen 24/32 core (64 core is outside my budget).

bitbckt · Jun 12, 2023

A $600 7502p would probably be a good move.

starcaptain · Jun 12, 2023

ano said:
which CPU? and did SKU everything look correct?

Ive bought from china (tugm4470) but also parts cafe, (there are lots of other selles with similar names ish, so be aware)

I just actually looked up my order from march and it came from tugm4470 this listing :/

bitbckt · Jun 12, 2023

starcaptain said:
I just actually looked up my order from march and it came from tugm4470 this listing :/

Hmm. Just based on my own experience with them, I'm inclined to suspect something other than the chip, but I'm sure they would work with you on an exchange. 7001 CPUs are a bit different than the later EPYCs, in that they can have severe NUMA imbalance problems, for example.

Just taking the PassMark scores at face value, there do seem to be some that land down in the 20K range.

NablaSquaredG · Jun 12, 2023

starcaptain said:
but at this point i'm guessing it was a relabeled Hygon Dhyana.

Very unlikely. How does it identify with CPU-Z?

starcaptain · Jun 12, 2023

bitbckt said:
A $600 7502p would probably be a good move.

Agreed that would be the sweet spot in terms of price and performance. I just noticed that the epyc I have issues with came from tugm4470.

bitbckt said:
Hmm. Just based on my own experience with them, I'm inclined to suspect something other than the chip, but I'm sure they would work with you on an exchange. 7001 CPUs are a bit different than the later EPYCs, in that they can have severe NUMA imbalance problems, for example.

Just taking the PassMark scores at face value, there do seem to be some that land down in the 20K range.

It's possible something else is off, however i cant think of what it would be. It's just the mobo, cpu, 8x64gb Hynix memory, ubuntu 22.04 desktop. The one metric that is really low was the floating point numbers, average on cpubenchmark was 100k and mine came in at 23k. Foating point is supposedly where things are limited due to those IP restrictions so that's why i was thinking it was the knockoff epyc.

starcaptain · Jun 12, 2023

NablaSquaredG said:
Very unlikely. How does it identify with CPU-Z?

It's ubuntu so I used CPU-X, here is the results. I'm not sure what to look for though.

bitbckt · Jun 12, 2023

Huh. It reports AES though.

Auggie · Jun 12, 2023

Anecdotal, I know, but here's my experience.

CPU/mobo/ram from tugm4470:

Code:

                          PassMark PerformanceTest Linux

a
AMD EPYC 7402 24-Core Processor (x86_64)
24 cores @ 2800 MHz  |  125.6 GiB RAM
Number of Processes: 48  |  Test Iterations: 1  |  Test Duration: Medium
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
CPU Mark:                          47455
  Integer Math                     164837 Million Operations/s
  Floating Point Math              99275 Million Operations/s
  Prime Numbers                    322 Million Primes/s
  Sorting                          96881 Thousand Strings/s
  Encryption                       51477 MB/s
  Compression                      737739 KB/s
  CPU Single Threaded              2158 Million Operations/s
  Physics                          5078 Frames/s
  Extended Instructions (SSE)      41291 Million Matrices/s

Memory Mark:                       1869
  Database Operations              15556 Thousand Operations/s
  Memory Read Cached               24670 MB/s
  Memory Read Uncached             11578 MB/s
  Memory Write                     12044 MB/s
  Available RAM                    19352 Megabytes
  Memory Latency                   107 Nanoseconds
  Memory Threaded                  96384 MB/s
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

watercooled machine at very large bare-metal hosting provider:

Code:

                          PassMark PerformanceTest Linux


AMD EPYC 7402 24-Core Processor (x86_64)
24 cores @ 2800 MHz  |  125.6 GiB RAM
Number of Processes: 48  |  Test Iterations: 1  |  Test Duration: Medium
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
CPU Mark:                          47388
  Integer Math                     165243 Million Operations/s
  Floating Point Math              98775 Million Operations/s
  Prime Numbers                    322 Million Primes/s
  Sorting                          95199 Thousand Strings/s
  Encryption                       51557 MB/s
  Compression                      725440 KB/s
  CPU Single Threaded              2176 Million Operations/s
  Physics                          5516 Frames/s
  Extended Instructions (SSE)      40130 Million Matrices/s

Memory Mark:                       2981
  Database Operations              16682 Thousand Operations/s
  Memory Read Cached               25007 MB/s
  Memory Read Uncached             13212 MB/s
  Memory Write                     13379 MB/s
  Available RAM                    68831 Megabytes
  Memory Latency                   49 Nanoseconds
  Memory Threaded                  120508 MB/s
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Both are running proxmox and a few services. I couldn't be bothered to turn off the excess to run the benchmarks. There is quite a bit faster ram in the hosted machine.

RolloZ170 · Jun 12, 2023

starcaptain said:
before realizing that they have the performance throttled due to IP/license restrictions

starcaptain said:
That's why I went with the 7551p is the 32 cores and 40k benchmark

I only trust benchmarks that I have faked myself.

starcaptain · Jun 12, 2023

bitbckt said:
Huh. It reports AES though.

If it's not the CPU do you have any guess on what could be causing the worse performance; even a shot in the dark?

Both are running ubuntu 22.04 desktop with NVME drives attached and running their own elastic indexes which aren't linked together. The only difference is the i5 memory is 3600 DDR4, Epyc is 2400 DDR4 ECC. Also the epyc has a slower single core speed obviously. But in my mind I cant see how these would cause the time it takes to index documents to jump by 4x.

RolloZ170 · Jun 12, 2023

use other benchmark, cinebench i.e. CPU-Z bench first.
some workload does not benefit from many cores.

starcaptain · Jun 12, 2023

Auggie said:

Anecdotal, I know, but here's my experience.

CPU/mobo/ram from tugm4470:

Code:

                          PassMark PerformanceTest Linux

a
AMD EPYC 7402 24-Core Processor (x86_64)
24 cores @ 2800 MHz  |  125.6 GiB RAM
Number of Processes: 48  |  Test Iterations: 1  |  Test Duration: Medium
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
CPU Mark:                          47455
  Integer Math                     164837 Million Operations/s
  Floating Point Math              99275 Million Operations/s
  Prime Numbers                    322 Million Primes/s
  Sorting                          96881 Thousand Strings/s
  Encryption                       51477 MB/s
  Compression                      737739 KB/s
  CPU Single Threaded              2158 Million Operations/s
  Physics                          5078 Frames/s
  Extended Instructions (SSE)      41291 Million Matrices/s

Memory Mark:                       1869
  Database Operations              15556 Thousand Operations/s
  Memory Read Cached               24670 MB/s
  Memory Read Uncached             11578 MB/s
  Memory Write                     12044 MB/s
  Available RAM                    19352 Megabytes
  Memory Latency                   107 Nanoseconds
  Memory Threaded                  96384 MB/s
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

watercooled machine at very large bare-metal hosting provider:

Code:

                          PassMark PerformanceTest Linux


AMD EPYC 7402 24-Core Processor (x86_64)
24 cores @ 2800 MHz  |  125.6 GiB RAM
Number of Processes: 48  |  Test Iterations: 1  |  Test Duration: Medium
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
CPU Mark:                          47388
  Integer Math                     165243 Million Operations/s
  Floating Point Math              98775 Million Operations/s
  Prime Numbers                    322 Million Primes/s
  Sorting                          95199 Thousand Strings/s
  Encryption                       51557 MB/s
  Compression                      725440 KB/s
  CPU Single Threaded              2176 Million Operations/s
  Physics                          5516 Frames/s
  Extended Instructions (SSE)      40130 Million Matrices/s

Memory Mark:                       2981
  Database Operations              16682 Thousand Operations/s
  Memory Read Cached               25007 MB/s
  Memory Read Uncached             13212 MB/s
  Memory Write                     13379 MB/s
  Available RAM                    68831 Megabytes
  Memory Latency                   49 Nanoseconds
  Memory Threaded                  120508 MB/s
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Both are running proxmox and a few services. I couldn't be bothered to turn off the excess to run the benchmarks. There is quite a bit faster ram in the hosted machine.

Thanks for running those, especially since yours came from tuggm4470. I just couldn't figure out why the performance was less than ideal. Maybe I just got one that is genuine but just happened to be bottom of the bin. Several people recommend him as a seller so I will reach out and ask a couple additional questions and possibly upgrade to the 2nd gen 24 or 32 core epyc.

RolloZ170 · Jun 12, 2023

AMD EPYC works different than Intel.
Intels max. core clocks are fused.
AMD EPYC clocks can get higher if there is some Power left, means the motherboard and BIOS adjustments are VERY
important. specialy with Linux check setting the Perfomance options to BIOS control, not OS.

Best place to buy used Epyc (non-china version)

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