Worth upgrading Xeon E5-v4/X10Dri-T server to Epyc/H11SSL-i?

[trumee]

Hello,

I have an Supermicro X10Dri-T motherboard which is a dual Xeon motherboard and has Xeon E5-2650 V4 cpu. It is acting both as a NAS and compute combined and runs NixOS. I have seen lot of posts here about the Epyc/motherboard coming out of china and was wondering whether it worth upgrading to? I do like PCIe ports and lower power consumption will also help.

Thoughts?

 

[kapone]

No.

 

[RolloZ170]

and lower power consumption will also help

not with EPYC. they have much more performance, but expect big increase of IDLE power draw.

 

[reasonsandreasons]

Been looping through this same process on my side of things (X10SRL-F and a 1660v4) and have come to a similar "probably not" answer. I don't really need meaningfully higher single-thread CPU performance and if I need more cores it's so much cheaper to upgrade the processor--a 2697v4 is down to like $36. My machine idles at a bit over 100W with 6 hard drives and frankly too many expansion cards (a mix of NICs, NVMe, and a fiber channel card for an LTO drive). I have a hard time imagining anything newer would improve on that; my LGA 1700 backup system certainly doesn't.

 

[kapone]

In most modern systems from the last 10-12 years onwards, the platform (CPU/RAM/Chipset/Motherboard) power consumption has become low enough that it's not worth thinking about. The moment you add your peripherals...NICs, HBA/Raid cards, NVMEs, U.2/3, GPUs, expanders etc etc...the platform power consumption becomes even less important.

Take my recent "upgrade" (ha!) as a prime case. I moved to a new dual Xeon system (X9DRX/dual 2667 v2/256gb RAM) because I needed more pcie slots than I currently had.

- The board/CPU/RAM with a single SSD for boot idle at ~80w.
- Once I put them into the actual chassis where they need to go...and add peripherals....idle at ~200w. This is because the chassis has 3x power supplies, two 24 port SAS expanders, 6x 120mm fans, two Mellanox 40g NICs, an Adaptec HBA, a Fusion IO SX350 6.4TB SSD, an Nvidia P400 GPU, 8x 500gb SATA SSDs, two 80gb boot SSDs and a couple of smaller fans...

So, the base system is consuming ~1/3 of the overall power draw of the system. Even if I move to a comparable, "newer" system that can save power, it'll only apply to the base system. It might go from ~80w to 60w and that would be a meaningful change, but overall...that's just 20w less out of ~200w.

Not much when you think about it.