Gigabyte EPYC MOTHERBOARD FOR SALE

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simmse

New Member
Oct 8, 2017
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Central TX
Perhaps this is a silly question, but would you not be better off just getting a proper server for build tasks for the team?
Sure. However, there is a quantity and frequency analysis with 25+ developers, how often a build request occurs, how often automated building and testing occurs, how often a production release versus debug versus 32-bit versus 64-bit, and so on. With the recent advances in overall system hardware (e.g. NVME SSDs, Epyc, Xeon, Threadripper, i9-7980XE, SATA III RAID - or not, booting with NVME, booting with NVME RAID - or not, ...), all of the reasonable combinations are under review.

In three combinations, hardware is purchased to continue verification and comparing to systems already in use. So far, two new systems' performance compared to a seven years old Super Micro Xeon system are very disappointing. The "out of date, old technology" system with booting magnetic hard drive RAID 10, wins by a huge margin.

To summarize differently, it is an ongoing learning process to obtain the goal of decreasing compilation time to minutes instead of an hour plus. The hardware review and analysis process commences very recently. The largest learning item so far is the support for NVME SSD booting, and the hardware combination that does it. The next item is how many PCIe Generation 3 slots are present. The motherboard list becomes fairly short between PCIe 3.0+ and 3.0+ slot quantity.

The availability of the best NVME SSD is a hindrance. There is at least one main board manufacturer where the motherboard M.2 port under-performs by 50 percent. Not being in the room when the BIOS is configured, I do not know whether selecting the non-Auto choice resolves the drop off. In this example, the best performance for the NVME SSD turns out to be using one of the PCIe 3.0 x8 slots and a single NVME adapter. Regardless, things like that are also contributing to the analysis and hardware testing.