EPYC for multiple usecases (1st vs 2nd gen question)

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Caennanu

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May 18, 2021
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Good day all,

Recently i had purchased an Asrock rack EPYC D8-2T as a replacement for my Ryzen 1700 platform to act as my unraid server.
My Unraid server is used in multiple ways, next to NAS, CCTV, VM's (passthrough and headless) and docker 'host', ill also be hosting dedicated game servers on it for me and friends. (think factorio, ARK, Conan Exiles, the likes).

So in essence its a multipurpose server.

Now in the past i've had issues with Factorio running slow, but that was when i was on the bulldozer platform still with a 4300 and DDR3.
And that raises the question.

Originally i had planned to combine this mainboard with a 7282, but it didn't work, wouldn't post or anything (i have another post for this somewhere). Since i RMA'd both the board and the CPU, both were found to be dead. the mainboard is replaced and the cpu is a different story i won't get into.

Now i'm looking into a 7401. It is a first gen, so won't have the IPC gain, higher clock speeds or PCI-E 4.0 (which the board doesn't support anyway) compared to the 7282, i will however have increased amount of cores.

Now the question:
How does a 7401 with 24/48 1st gen compare to a 7282 16/32 2nd gen in terms of performance in regards to headless game server hosting?
 

i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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I don't have any experience with game server hosting and what I know from my home lab and the esxi hosts at work it's often not the cpu but io or memory that's limiting.
Both got a lot better with the rome cpus because amd added the memory/io die that "fixed" some problems of naples cpus (see https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7002-series-rome-delivers-a-knockout/4/ for more information about the io die).
This in combination with pcie 4.0 are reasons why I would always choose rome over naples cpus.
 

Caennanu

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May 18, 2021
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Thanks for the reply @i386 and i totally get it.
However, game server hosting 9 out of 10 times is heavily dependant on memory and cpu cycles, not so much on I/O.
I know for fact i doubled my performance on the factorio server (big map) when i upped the memory speed from 1333 to 2133 with a cpu utilization of 50% (main thread always keeping 1 core at 100%)
 

Caennanu

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May 18, 2021
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@Wasmachineman_NL or... Laundry man.
I am aware, but this is the only actual example i have where i ran into bottlenecks related to cpu.
But that also leads me to the same question. Will the lesser IPC and lower clock speeds of the 1st gen impact game servers in general?
 

alex_stief

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May 31, 2016
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What kind of prices are you looking at? Maybe That could solve the issue from another angle.
1st gen Epyc has its weaknesses. Low clock speed, low performance per core, and most importantly: lots of NUMA nodes. I am still using it in my main workstation, because the CPU intensive stuff I run is NUMA aware/agnostic. But for anything other than that, 1st gen Epyc should be avoided by now if you asked me.
This should only be a debate at all if you can get a 7401 for less than 300$. Then again, what's the point in saving a few hundred bucks if the end result doesn't do its job properly.
 

Caennanu

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May 18, 2021
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@alex_stief prices are debateable. i don't really have a fixed budget, but i try to use my money sensibly. So even if i would have the means of purchasing an $4000+ cpu, i'm not likely to do so. Because why would i, as a home user, need a 64/128 cpu? it is not that i'm using in a commercial setting or a startup or anything the likes.

My guidelines right now are that i want atleast 16/32, and if the price difference isn't too much ill take the update upgrade to 24/48. (2VM's that i might want to combine with passthrough incase of a lan party of sorts)
The reason im tempted to go for a 1st gen is indeed price. i have an option to get a 24/48 for a decent price that is well under the cheapest 16c+ 2nd gen i can get (lets say 40% of the price for 6 more cores, but 20% less performance per core?). And as a home user, security isn't my biggest concern.

Therefor, i'm wondering what the performance impact is and if i as a home user would actually notice it.
 
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Caennanu

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May 18, 2021
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Also worthy to note.
The reason i'm going for EPYC and not another Ryzen is because of PCI-E lanes.
Ryzen itsself does not have enough lanes for me to fulfill my need.

The other option of threadripper would ofcourse also be viable. But at this point in time the Threadripper CPU alone would cost more than the EPYC and mainboard combined at the expense of 'some' core speeds. And also, epyc mainboards generally come with SAS controllers build in and in my case an 'onboard VGA chip' which saves me an PCI-E slot. Not to mention that IPMI is just awesome.
 

alex_stief

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May 31, 2016
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@alex_stief prices are debateable. i don't really have a fixed budget, but i try to use my money sensibly. So even if i would have the means of purchasing an $4000+ cpu, i'm not likely to do so. Because why would i, as a home user, need a 64/128 cpu? it is not that i'm using in a commercial setting or a startup or anything the likes.
That wasn't remotely the point
 

Caennanu

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May 18, 2021
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@alex_stief than what exactly was the question? i've asked a question in regards to performance and if i will notice it in terms of hosting game server(s). Or in other words, 24 cores with 80% performance vs 16 cores 100% performance. (which in theory the 24 should have an overal better performance)

To your response the only thing i could respond to was my budget? So that's what i did.
 

NateS

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Apr 19, 2021
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@alex_stief than what exactly was the question? i've asked a question in regards to performance and if i will notice it in terms of hosting game server(s). Or in other words, 24 cores with 80% performance vs 16 cores 100% performance. (which in theory the 24 should have an overal better performance)

To your response the only thing i could respond to was my budget? So that's what i did.
Personally, I'd go with 16 faster cores over 24 slower ones for a game server, since a ton of games don't know what to do with more than 4 or 8 cores. Your other workloads may or may not be enough to occupy the remaining cores -- depends on how heavily you're utilizing the NAS/VMs/etc. The 20% slower 24 core option is only faster when 20 or more cores are being fully utilized, so if you think your system will be doing that most of the time, get the 24 core, but otherwise the faster 16 core is a better option. And for anything that's single-thread performance bound (which again, lots of games in this category), the 16 core will always be faster.
 

Caennanu

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May 18, 2021
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@NateS thank you for this feedback. That is also what i was thinking. I dont think ill be using all 24 cores in the near future.
4 cores per vm, so thats 8 allocated, the remaining 8 for docker and unraid. since my cctv is going to be using hardware encoding, it shouldn't need much cpu.
 

bayleyw

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Jan 8, 2014
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@NateS thank you for this feedback. That is also what i was thinking. I dont think ill be using all 24 cores in the near future.
4 cores per vm, so thats 8 allocated, the remaining 8 for docker and unraid. since my cctv is going to be using hardware encoding, it shouldn't need much cpu.
Part of the point of VMs is that you can oversubscribe the cores, because not all the VMs will be fully loaded at any given time. I'd go with the 16c Rome over the 24c Naples, in terms of raw throughput the 16c Rome will perform like a 20c Naples, but the internal layout is much better and much less likely to cause pathological behavior.
 
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Caennanu

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May 18, 2021
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@bayleyw thanks for the reply. Yeah it should even out, ok ok i get 4 more cores.
What do you mean with oversubscribing cores? as in pinning cores to VM's to be solely VM's?
That i have rarely done, mainly because i only have 8 to work with in current setup ofcourse, i have currently pinned 4/8 to 1 vm, 2/4 to another (which is basically just an auto start backup for remote acces if anything would go down)
But i don't isolate the cores away from unraid.
 

Caennanu

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May 18, 2021
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update: after these feedbacks i have decided on a 7352. Gen2 and 8 more cores. Why? the price difference between the 7352 and 7282 was 5 euro.
 
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