Atom C3000 / Proxmox VE / SOHO - 4 or 8 cores?

[TKH]

Hi,

being conscious of cost (hardware, power consumption) I am wondering whether I should go for the Supermicro A2SDI board with 4 cores (4x2,2GHz, 8MB) or for the one with 8 cores (8x2,2GHz, 16MB). Planning to equipe my small home office with 2 Linux VMs and Office work (LibreOffice) / internet browsing requirements (no gaming, maybe 1 VM Win7, but only used one time a month for tax declaration software pruposes). Data resides on a small Synology DiskStation (do not intend to move the data to the server, i.e. only planning on installing just a M.2 NVM SSD on the server for Proxmox itself and the two VM installations). My network is 1 GbE.
I don't want to spent the extra money for 8 cores if I don't need them and if the additional cores would idle most of the time; but then on the other hand I also do not want to invest a few hundred dollars/Euros in new hardware, still underspend and then be disappointed and not have a satisfactory user experience. I am planing to run SPICE on the two clients and not have a GPU board installed in the server - hoping this is a good way to go).
(Note: Comparing the specs of the boards the differences, besides number of cores, between the boards appear marginal to me and given my use case described above don't seem relevant to me).

Can someone please advise and help in the decision making please?

Thanks

 

[Joel]

Sounds like a used Xeon-E3 build would be right up your alley. Do you really need NVME? How about mirrored SATA SSDs?

 

[TKH]

The data I wanted to leave on my Synology, i.e. storage space requirements on the Proxmox server itself are low and I thought I should be using the best I/O interface the SuperMicro board I have in mind supports in terms of performance (as I/O throughput I hear is important in a virtualized environment). Price tag of a 256GB Samsung 960 EVO seemed okay to me.

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

I ended up spending extra on the 8C model purely because I wanted the extra SATA ports - if you've got a NAS already you might not require these, but then personally I'd then build this up as a replacement or backup NAS. In the UK at least the price difference between the 4C and 8C versions is about £280 vs. £430.

The GPU for the board is in the form of the IPMI chip which incorpoates its own 2D chip. as these are designed to run headless - additional GPU is only needed if you intend to run something that requires a "proper" 3D GPU. Depending on how it works for you, you might be able to avoid SPICE on the linux clients at least - you could just ssh into them and run X over the network but this isn't something I've tested for some time.

However if you're buying this for virtualisation I'd agree with Joel in that an E3 build might be more up your street as they've got far superior single-threaded performance. I'm using mine with a couple dinky LXC's (1P, 512MB), so not really "virtualisation", but for things like office work and other desktop workloads you will probably want the superior performance.

 

[MiniKnight]

E3 may be a good choice for this. It doesn't sound like you need gobs of RAM so even a E3 V3 or V5 might work for you.

 

[TKH]

Haven't done much research looking at the E3 CPUs you are suggesting - mainly because they seemed to have TDP starting at 65W while I didn't want to go over 35 TDP (as low [better very low or no] noise is important to me along with power consumption and I might try going fanless with this later). Isn't a motherboard with a socket for the XEON E CPU plus the CPU not more expensive than an embedded ATOM solution?

Would the key question on number of cores I need not remain to be answered for a XEON E as well?

Mostly trying to find out if I would be disappointed when deciding to go with the less expensive 4 core model.

Wanted to use SPICE instead of GPU pass-thru as at least one of my two clients I would already have a very silent AMD E-350 system with 8GB RAM which hopefully would work really well again when being used as client in a virtualized environment rather than as, like now, in a stand-alone physical set up.

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

TDP is supposedly the maximum power the CPU will consume, not the typical amount it will actually consume when running mostly idle; an E3 might idle a couple of Watts higher than a C3000 system but there won't be a great deal of difference.

FWIW my Xeon E3-1230v3 (80W TDP) system idles at about 65W - at least 25W of that being the hard drives and 5W for the IPMI. The C3000 system I think clocked in at about a 40W idle (although has less hard drives in it). In a nutshell, unless you're running the CPU at full tilt all the time you should ignore the TDP setting.

At the time I built at least, my E3 was cheaper than any of the C2000 models that were doing the rounds at the time.

 

[Joel]

TDP is supposedly the maximum power the CPU will consume, not the typical amount it will actually consume when running mostly idle; an E3 might idle a couple of Watts higher than a C3000 system but there won't be a great deal of difference.

This.

 

[TKH]

ok, but with >= 80W TDP for the "standard" E3 or E5 I need to give up my ambitions to potentially cool passively and get rid of annoying fan(s).
The only Xeon E version with higher single thread performance when in turbo mode (4 Core, 8 threads, 2,1 GHz normal, 3.2 GHz turbo) and 25W TDP as far as I can see is the Intel Xeon E3-1240L v5, 4x 2.10GHz, so may this would be the CPU of choice then?

 

[Joel]

Ahh, now the new requirement comes out.

Totally fanless operation wasn't mentioned until just now. Though if it's destined to be a remote machine, just throw it in a closet or garage and noise problem is solved.

 

[TKH]

fanless or very low noise wasn't on the initial post, but it was mentioned not just now

guess it boils down to
- are 2.2 GHz enough for surfing the net and doing office work?
(of these two I would think rendering performance in the browser is the real challenge, not Office software)
- how many cores do I need for two employees? users? 4 or 8 - which was my introductory question

@Joel: with your experience of the 8C board, would it be possible for you to answer the first bullet as your Atom 8 Core has the same GHz as the 4C (not sure how much and what impact the 8 MB versus 16 MB cache would have though and are you using SPICE?)

 

[Joel]

It was Effrax that has experience with these Atom boards, I have none.

As far as quiet, it's quite trivial to get any modern machine to "very low noise" as long as "small physical size" isn't also a requirement. Fractal Design Define series case, Noctua CPU cooler, etc...

I have a dual E5-2667V2 machine in a Fractal Define R4 case that's very quiet even at 100% load and pulling 300w from the wall.

 

[PigLover]

You can get really quiet cooling for the E3 series chips, even at the higher TPDs. Noctua, etc, are nearly silent even when their fans spin up.

I have an E3-1240L. It is solid and can easily run passive cooled.

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

As someone who's got their entire home server stuff sitting in home areas (I live in a flat and space is at a premium), I too have spent a great deal of time getting things to run quietly - a look through my posts will show my (eventually successful) tribulations quelling the fan on my A2SDi into submission, to the extent that it idles at ~3000rpm and isn't audible over the noise of the case fans and hard drives. However with the Atoms and the Xeon-D's you're mostly stuck with non-standard (or non-existent) options for third party cooling.

My E3 sits underneath a Noctua NH-L9i; runs at 900-1000rpm most of the time and far quieter than the cooler on the Atom.

Both of these are in tiny NSC-800 mITX chassis, but if you can afford the space cooling them passively would be easily possible. Making quiet small systems is certainly possible, but you need to plan your build very carefully and accept you're never going to have a Gibson under your bed. Seriously, I think about half my posts on this forum are about doing server stuff reasonably quietly. I lived with a noisy 4U under my bed once - never again.

I do have one entirely passively cooled machine (well, two if you count my router), an HTPC using a Streacom FC8. If you don't mind spending a big capital outlay on the case, they're as quiet as you're ever going to get, and no reason you couldn't fit an E3 system and a couple of SSDs into one of those - but you are of course also paying for something that'd look pretty under your telly.

Coming back to your earlier post; yes, a 2.2GHz Atom is certainly usable for surfing the net and suchlike, but I'm not sure you'd ever call it quick. Javascript (which is the main component slowing down browsing once you've got an ad-blocker installed) unilaterally desires nothing more than single-threaded performance, so the Atom would be OK but not "fast" in any sense of the word, especially when you throw in virtualisation and remote client rendering into the mix.

As to what is a decent enough load for ~2 office users - depends entirely on workload. There's every extreme from the aged secretary who checks her email in mutt twice a day to the financial wunderkind/madman who's constantly wrangling world debt in a 17GB excel spreadsheet. Ideally you'd need to have a very good idea of what the current workload is and then plan up from there. But as a rule of thumb I'd expect desktop tasks to require a bare minimum of 2P/4G these days so if they're both going to be using the system simultaneously you might want to spring for the 8C model.

 

[Evan]

If fanless is a priority and you don’t need ipmi but want sort of quality, not cheap but something like this may work...
Supermicro | IoT | E100-9S

Should perform better for desktop tasks, otherwise the e3 could be a winner.

I don’t have any c3000 hands on but looks interesting.

Other option is something like what I have in the x10sdv board, 8 core Xeon-D 1540/41 but to keep it below $500 the d-1521 could be a good and fast option.

 

[TKH]

I have two HFX Micro cases, one fanless with the BorgFX heat pipe system (and an old Intel ATOM D525 Pineview mainboard) which I was using as a "server" for Squeezebox music streaming and into which I had installed an active ISDN telephone card so I could use it for telephone conferencing in my business environment. The other HFX Micro case is a "client" with an ASUS AMD E-350 mainboard, unfortunately with a fan - which I find soooo annoying. Both systems are long overdue for being replaced - but I still love the cases.... So coming back to my server used for private and business needs: As the Squeezebox was replaced by Sonos and the phone system is now is part of the Fritz!Box Router - both these requirements are gone. But now I took interest in virtualization and setting up a system that could server my new home office business needs...
Having gotten used to the case and hearing the difference between fanless and the one with a fan I would so much like to remain fanless with my new Proxmox server - but while I was glad to have found the A2SDi and actually a German company here specialized in CPU heat sink manufacturing that offer a CPU heat sink for the new socket of the C3000 atoms it is now single thread performance I hear not being ideal in addition to the bullet that I would need to bite loosing warranty when sending the case and A2SDi board to the company asking them to install the new mainboard into the case with their heatsink as they had offered and which they are confident would work (although they also do not guarantee this)...

It seems you can't have it all and I need to give up on fanless and/or add buying a new case as well into the yet unsolved puzzle...

 

[Evan]

Hmmm fanless c3000 does sound cool though

 

[TKH]

Further exploring my options trying to keep my HFX Micro case and looking for a server mainboard considering the feedback received so far and valuing single thread performance over number of cores:

- mini-ITX (mandatory for me)
- with ECC support (luckily the 32GB limit should not be a problem considering max 2 users - right?)
- for the Intel Xeon E3-1240L v5, 4x 2.10GHz (unfortunately the TDP of the E3-1260 is too high for my case)
- with 2 1GbE LAN ports (10 GbE not required, but 2 ports are minimum)
- and an NVMe M.2 PCIE-SSD slot

then I find the ASROCK RACK C236 WSI, the ASUS P10S-I and the Gigabyte MX11-PC0.

Did I miss any mainboard meeting above requirements?
Of the those listed above any that would be preferred when using Promox VE? or would all work?

Thanks again for all your help and feedback.

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

... actually a German company here specialized in CPU heat sink manufacturing that offer a CPU heat sink for the new socket of the C3000 atoms...

If you know of someone in the EU selling a heatsink for the Supermicro C300 boards (the same 51x51mm fitting at they use on the Xeon-D 1xxx line IIRC) I'd be very happy if you included their details here. The only aftermarket heatsink I saw available for these boards was the Cooljag BUF-E and I couldn't find anyone selling/shipping these to the EU. Or does the latter part of your paragraph imply that they only fit on a per-machine basis and you have to send the entire unit to them for fitting a custom HSF?

Further on that note - I'd be very surprised if your current cases fitted the C3000 mounts correctly, and another reason why I think a Xeon E3 might be a better fit for you. Likewise with my Streacom case, I had to do a fair bit of legwork finding motherboards that would work with them correctly.

The C236 WSI uses a bog-standard socket, however depending on the internals of your case, heatpipe mounting might be impossible (it certainly would be for my Streacom). Additionally, as far asI'm aware ASRock still haven't adopted an HTML5-based IPMI GUI, meaning you're stuck with wrangling with Java for access to IPMI. That was probably the one most important reason for me moving away from ASRock to Supermicro for my latest build. For anything vaguely linuxey though, my money would be on ASRock as IME their BIOSes are far more linux-friendly than Asus or Gigabyte (but then I've spent about 5yrs avoiding Asus or Giabyte; they may well have improved considerably since then).

On other points;
Depending on workload, 32GB shouldn't be a constraint for 2 simultaneous users, but my earlier comment about knowing your workload holds true for that, and make sure you take future memory bloat into account.
Personally I've given up splurging extra for L-rated Xeons; it's extra money spent for an artificial ceiling on performance and really only useful in the most extreme of power-or-TDP-limited scenarios. You're generally better of buying a regular CPU and either running it at stock (and counting on the thermal throttling to kick in), underclocking/undervolting, or supplying hardware utilisation limitations in the OS itself. What are your actual TDP constraints?

 

[TKH]

The company I spoke to was impactics.com based in Germany. They do not list the coolset on their home page, but in the text on their page claim they also would/can build custom heatsinks if required. So I called asking for a CPU heatsink that would fit not only the new ATOM C3000 CPU on the Supermicro board, but would also allow me to continue using my HFX Micro chassis specific heat pipe system. Their technician said he would actually have the heat sink available on stock (i.e. no need for a custom build) and stated he would also know the HFX Micro chassis (which was manufactured in Austria) I am owning. Issue he saw was that it would most probably only be possible to use the cooling block on one side of the chassis as the Supermicro A2SDi boards would have the memory banks on the side and in the way / pretending to also use the second chassis side. But he was confident their heat sink would be sufficient enough to even cope with this constraint as the board TDP would only be 25W (the chassis specifications allows for 35W max). When I said I would not be an expert I was offered I could send them the chassis and the board and they would assemble it for me and also run a burn-in test and watch temperatures. The charge for the heat sink would be 40 EUR, the assembly and testing was offered for 15EUR which I found very fair/reasonable. They suggested I should use the A2SDi-xC-HLNF4 - not the "+" version when buying the main board. The main drawback seen was I would loose Supermicros warranty if they do the modification and a small risk their expectation would be wrong and their testing would show cooling they can achieve to be insufficient. No fan whatsoever used in the case was understood and not considered a problem as they would do this all the time in industrial environments with chassis that are closed and not allowing dust penetration.
To your comment the case will probably not fit the C3000 mounts - I thought mini-itx is a standard and this being a possibility was not brought to my attention before - so this would be another unexpected complication.
Hard to tell what my actual TDP constraints are - as said the case is specified at 35W, chances are only 50% can be used but confidence was expressed this should still be sufficient for the 25Watts of the board with 8 cores....