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Comment by cyphar | Hacker News Reader

I'm setting up a home server and decided to just go with Ryzen. You get a bunch of server features (ECC RAM, lots of PCIE lanes, and lots of cores) for a lot less cash than the equivalent EPYC build.

Obviously EPYC has a place but for the home usecase you could use a Ryzen as a substitution for Intel Xeons because of the baseline features of Ryzen.

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Ryzen only has 20 PCIE lanes, it's not that much. Basically the same as Intel since Intel uses DMI 3.0 (basically pcie x4) for communication to the chipset. So on Ryzen you get 16x lanes directly to CPU + 4 to chipset where it multoplexes, and on Intel you get 16x lanes directly to CPU + dmi3 to chipset which multoplexes to pcie.

Threadripper has 64 lanes, though, which is definitely a lot.

Ryzen has 24 PCIe lanes: 16 for graphics (can be split to 8/8), 4 for NVMe storage, and 4 for the chipset. So you get 4 more lanes compared to Intel's consumer platforms.

Be aware of the fun with numa nodes and AMD. https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/9ngwzf/amd_epyc_on_esx...

These will be made irrelevant in the immediate future due to Zen2's dedicated I/O chiplet.

Do you need Ryzen Pro for ECC?

You only need your motherboard to support ECC (not sure if they all do), that's the only prerequisite.

They don't all support ECC. ASRock seems to be the most-supported in this category.

Nope. Regular Ryzen supports unbuffered ECC modules.

What about registered (buffered) ECC modules?

Nope, Ryzen and TR don't. Epyc does.

Thanks!

Unbuffered ECC modules can be hard to find, though.

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