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Comment by chrisper | Hacker News Reader

I just recently replaced my old i7 920 in the homeserver with an AMD Ryzen 5 2600. Really like it so far. Price / performance is great. This is my first AMD since probably ever....

The two things I don't like is that their CPUs are pin based. It seemed kind of old fashioned after Intel CPUs. But this is really a minor thing. The other issue is memory compatibility is a bit finicky. Maybe it has to do with the CPU being so new. Not sure.

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> don't like is that their CPUs are pin based

To me that's a win. If a CPU pin is bent it's typically fairly easy to straighten it. Fixing a bent pin a socket is a massive pain.

But it's much easier to protect socket pins with the cover. So there are pros and cons either way.

True, though it is much easier to damage a pin-based CPU in the first place.

Usually, I'm very careful with the CPU, more than the motherboard, so I think that balances out.

Massive pain is an undestatement. Fixing a socket pin with a that small of a package size and 1151 pins is nearly impossible.

Good luck. You better have a loop or magnifier.

I buy Intel Mobile CPU boards for exactly this reason. Pins. I have not bent a single one in years. The Notebook CPU's are so thermally efficient it is a real selling point to me.

Ryzen chips scale in performance more than Intel when you overclock the RAM. Some part of the chip cache is more tightly coupled to the RAM latency, and my rampant speculation is that Intel doesn’t really care about memory bandwidth as much on the desktop anyways.

Ryzen CPUs divide the cores into two "core complexes" that communicate over a bus called infinity fabric. Probably to make the engineering easier, the memory controller and RAM speed is the same as the infinity fabric's speed. You'll get good gains up to 3000 MHz, less so with more.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11857/memory-scaling-on-ryzen...

http://www.legitreviews.com/ddr4-memory-scaling-amd-am4-plat...

And the only thing I'll add is that "infinity fabric" is a singular clock-domain across all dies. So in Ryzen, its not a big deal cause there's only one die.

But in Threadripper (2-dies) or EPYC (4-dies), the "infinity fabric" bus is what connects the CPUs and Memory-controllers together.

Threadripper is lga ;-)

Putting a Threadripper in a homeserver is overkill.

Besides I wanted to replace the i7 920, so that it won't be that hot anymore in that room (130W TDP vs 65W). I think a threadripper would achieve the opposite.

Maybe I should just do seasonal CPUs... Threadripper in Winter and Ryzen in Summer.

For home server/NAS/HTPC you are likely fine with some Atom-based Celeron/Pentium ;-)

But where is the fun in that!

I would say get something a bit more beefy like i3 or i5, as most people will want to run some basic things like Game servers, database or maybe a plex server, and it's good to be able just to run things compared to either rebuilding or renting something in the cloud in a lot of instances.

Latest Gemini Lake is already past the level of Phenom 2/Core 2 but with 10W TDP. They are also faster than Broadwell i3 on the same frequency in single thread (but have no hyperthreading).

If you still have the old motherboard you can buy an old Xeon X56xx and use it as a drop in replacement in the LGA1366 socket. An X5650 for instance cost about $25 on ebay, is clocked at 2.66 GHz like the i7 920, has six cores, a TDP of 95W, and overclocks really well. I don't know if most i7 motherboards support ECC, but the CPU supports it.

The LGA1366 motherboards still fetch some money too, if you'd rather sell it.

> Putting a Threadripper in a homeserver is overkill.

Running 2 gaming VMs for me and my kids and one ubuntu WS on a 12 core Threadripper. Host is also doing file serving and runs Unifi controller.

One server to rule them all.

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