AMD Makes A Compelling Case For Budget-Friendly Ryzen Dedicated Servers

[orzel]

So, unless you're including RAM in that price, I have no idea where you're getting that figure. But, if you can get fully-functional second-hand systems that meet your needs for cheaper than building them. I'm not trying to argue that you shouldn't. It's good to see machines get a second life.

Yes, sorry, I should have been clearer. You mention cpu at ~1k$ and motherboard at ~500$, but a complete server is far more than that, with PSU, case and, indeed, RAM. A typical current system with more than 256G of ram, even "epyc bottom line" is ~6k$ new. We could source such complete systems with 256~384 G of RAM for ~500$ each. Only DDR3 and the CPU is certainly far less powerful that even bottom line recent EPYC, but it does the job well.

[coder]

What made this motherboard especially valuable was its support for PCIE bifurcation on it’s 16X slot, so for $80 I could add 4 PCIE GEN4 M2 SSD slots, each with a full 4 lanes. And since it has basic built in video support, I didn’t need that slot for a video card.

What kills me about the ASRock Rack X570D4U-2L2T is their PCIe layout. They put the true x16 slot right next to the x1 slot. So, if you put a double-wide GPU in it, you lose access to the x1 slot. And if you had a x1 card you need to use, now you have to bifurcate your x16 slot so that you can put it in the remaining open-ended x8 slot.

So, what ASRock did was basically to design a uATX board with 3 PCIe slots, where someone wanting to use a normal GPU, at full x16 width, has to forego the use of all their other slots!

The obvious thing to do (from a usage perspective, not from a PCB designer's point of view) is to put the full x16 slot at the bottom. Then, it doesn't physically block the x1 slot. Also, they could've left the x1 slot open ended.

[msroadkill612]

.... What made this motherboard especially valuable was its support for PCIE bifurcation on it’s 16X slot, so for $80 I could add 4 PCIE GEN4 M2 SSD slots, each with a full 4 lanes. And since it has basic built in video support, I didn’t need that slot for a video card.

Loved ur post.

For the less flush (mobo $$$), it bears noting that the (asus etc) quad port m.2 adapters, can be used on a (not uncommon) bifurcated 8 lane slot, yielding just 2x active Pcie x4 nvme ports.

This yields a pretty good tally of 3x native pcie 4 nvme plus 2/3 on the chipset, & on a 2x 8 lane slot X570 mobo w/ a pcie 4 GPU, a probably fully capable GPU (the usual 16GB/s of pcie 3 bandwidth equivalent).

Asus mobo bifurcation listing:

https://www.asus.com/us/support/FAQ/1037507/

I checked on ur mobo & as a warning to others, they need to do ur homework on bios updates for the 5000 cpuS - it can be a bugger

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/pzqr4q/x570d4u_5950x_doesnt_work/

[yaneti]

I understand that DASH support exists only for a variant of RTL8111 chipset so you don't get DASH mobos without Realtek LAN. But there are Linux tools.

https://developer.amd.com/tools-for-dmtf-dash/

These are the client tools that you use to manage the system, but in Realteks case the internal OOB firmware depends on some cooperation from the OS and driver to actually perfrom even basic functionality like say , reset the system after the OS is booted. And the folks from Realtek are no sharing details but trying to tell you to ask ASrock for a specific "DASH driver", thats of course not in mainline, and ASRock doesn't support Linux for that at all.

[coder]

Far too expensive, both the CPU, and the whole system, obviously new and top-of-the-line, will go in, at least, ~6k$. While for less than 1k$ you can find used servers with lot of RAM.

I just quoted you two inexpensive CPU options, and I'm seeing single-CPU EPYC motherboards on Newegg starting at about $500.

• https://www.newegg.com/asrock-rack-e...82E16813140011
• https://www.newegg.com/supermicro-h1...96-0002-00376?

So, unless you're including RAM in that price, I have no idea where you're getting that figure. But, if you can get fully-functional second-hand systems that meet your needs for cheaper than building them. I'm not trying to argue that you shouldn't. It's good to see machines get a second life.

Oh, you're welcome, BTW.

[edwaleni]

Used Ryzen's, especially the 2700 series make great Proxmox nodes. Enough cores to run lots of VM's and services, still powerful enough for certain server tasks. I know that generation wasn't reviewed here, but when the 5000 series AM4 Ryzens came out, lots of cheap used 2700's showed up as people upgraded. (lots of bent pins too)

Now if >1Tb SSD's would come down in price.

[orzel]

Using Registered memory? These only support Unbuffered.

Yes.

If you need lots of RAM, check out the bottom of the EPYC stack

Far too expensive, both the CPU, and the whole system, obviously new and top-of-the-line, will go in, at least, ~6k$. While for less than 1k$ you can find used servers with lot of RAM.

[orzel]

IMO the 128 GB size is about the limit for the workloads you'd be running on a Ryzen. The bigger problem is that ECC memory is only officially supported with the "PRO" variant of the chip which is OEM-only and not available at retail.

In average I guess it's true. One of our applications is really about RAM. It needs a decent amount of CPU, but not that much. And in this case, our solution was to use some old servers, with weak CPUs (by current standard), but enough RAM. You can get those for cheap on the second market. Most of them are ECC, and all are registered (this is kinda required to fit several 100's of G of DDR3 on the same motherboard).

[coder]

All the Pro APUs cost a premium now.

It's so dumb that AMD doesn't at least sell them directly from their website, if not in normal retail channels.

https://www.amd.com/en/direct-buy/us

I guess they'd rather the scalpers make the profit on this market.

[coder]

Are there any similar solutions based on Intel alder lake desktop CPUs?

Most Intel i3's have traditionally support ECC memory (in addition to the E3 or E-series Xeon-branded desktop CPUs), if you pair them with a server/workstation board that also does.

Recently Intel just announced they'll be supporting ECC memory on standard Alder Lake desktop CPUs, as long as your motherboard has a W680 chipset.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17308...e-workstations

Exciting times!