I have been running 3647 platform pretty much since they were released and recently I got the upgrade itch. But I am pretty hard pressed to find a "stick to scratch it".
My current system is:
The clarify my requirements/priorities are:
Am I missing something or really the 3647 is still the homelab king? For the money I will for sure get better performance but I am not sure I will get better performance per W. Compute performance is not limiting factor for me today and with the new system I will get reduce my flexibility.
How do you see, have considered similar upgrade?
My current system is:
- Xeon Gold 6230
- 192GB RAM
- 3x Intel NVME SSD - 6 + 8 TB + 400GB boot
- 4HDDs
- nVidia 1660 Supper (considering adding second GPU for another gaming VM)
The clarify my requirements/priorities are:
- low power consumption - living EU explains a lot + the server is next to me --> need to be low noise.
- low IDLE power consumption - the server is not running anything taxing all the time, so idle/low load power consumption is essential
- As much PCIe as possible - I am using it to host VMs for network play with pcie passthrough + old enterprise HW usually uses wider but slower PCIE interfaces
- A lot of RAM - the above mentioned gaming VM/VMs + zfs + playing with k8s cluster need it
- Reasonable price (it is a homelab after all)
- Current Intel/AMD server platforms, W790 included - simply too expensive, power hungry and I don't really need the new features (PCIE 5, DDR5, 50 cores, etc.)
- Rome/Milan EPYC
- high power consumption
- PRO: able to reuse my current RDIMMs
- PRO: more than enough PCIE lanes
- socket AM5
- limited choice of "server" grade motherboards with multiple PCIe slots
- idle power consumption seems to be higher that than the Intel alternative
- 192GB RAM support is questionable at least with the current CPUs
- DDR5 is still at premium
- socket 1700
- a few boards with multiple PCIE lanes (Pro WS W680-ACE, H13SAE-MF). Can make such configuration work
- DDR5 is still at premium
- CON: power hungry at high loads
Am I missing something or really the 3647 is still the homelab king? For the money I will for sure get better performance but I am not sure I will get better performance per W. Compute performance is not limiting factor for me today and with the new system I will get reduce my flexibility.
How do you see, have considered similar upgrade?