Xeon Scalable Gen 1 vs Gen 2 for home use

[nexox]

I have just ordered a system based on the Supermicro X11DPL-I board, which I intend to build into my future workstation, but I suspect that when it arrives the included Xeon Bronze 3204 CPUs won't satisfy my performance desires and so I am already browsing around the usual places for upgrades.

I am tempted to go for much cheaper Skylake CPUs now and wait for the Cascade Lake refresh CPUs to come down in price in a couple years, and I see in the motherboard manual that I would lose support for 2933MHz memory and 16Gb DIMMs, but I can live without those for now, is there anything else major that I would miss?

For reference, my workload is mostly compiling, FreeCAD (tends to be single threaded,) and occasional ffmpeg encoding. My current single E5-2690v2 is fast enough, but it is showing signs of aging after ~9 years of 24/7 operation, and of course I want more performance even if I don't really need it.

 

[RolloZ170]

this board is limted to 140W TDP per socket.
this is not blocked by BIOS but limited by ME/SPS (TDC <= ICC_MAX compare)
by VRM re-program this TDC limit can be removed.

 

[nexox]

by VRM re-program this TDC limit can be removed.

Thanks, I did come across your other very helpful posts and figured that out a couple days ago, I see several Skylake options under the 140W cap which should work well for now, but when it's time to upgrade to Cascade Lake refresh CPUs I think I'll probably want to go for one of the 150W options.

 

[RolloZ170]

but when it's time to upgrade to Cascade Lake refresh CPUs I think I'll probably want to go for one of the 150W options

if the VRM has to be modified anyway, you can even install processors up to 165W ( 205W with extra VRM cooling)