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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know a good workstation story for AMD? I'd really like to have a development workstation with an EPYC CPU (like the 7302P) and a motherboard that actually supports ECC, DDR4-3200, and PCIe 4.0. All I can find are not-yet-launched products like the Supermicro H12 mobo. Whitebox system integrators are shipping older Zen-compatible mobos that don't have PCIe 4 and 3200MHz memory, and there don't seem to be any OEMs in the game (Dell, HP, Lenovo are all Intel-only).

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Do you need RDIMM/LRDIMM or would ECC UDIMM suffice? If the latter, have you considered a Ryzen 3950X or a Threadripper 3960X? There are plenty of X570/TRX40 motherboards that properly support ECC UDIMM (but there are also some that don't).

If you need RDIMM/LRDIMM the only current AMD alternative to EPYC is the recently announced Threadripper Pro. Launch partner is Lenovo with the ThinkStation P620 where you can get 12-64 cores with up to 1 TB of RAM. Expected to be available in September.

I don't need a ton of memory so whatever DIMMs are electrically compatible with the CPU will do the job (I imagine that 8 DIMMs of 8GB each is common?). I want it as a development platform for this PCIe 4 peripheral, so that's a hard requirement, and I would like if it resembles a production server as much as possible, so 8 channels at 3200MHz is desirable.

PCIe 4 and 3200MHz ECC are readily available on the Ryzen and Threadripper platforms. But if 8 memory channels is a hard requirement, then AMD's answer for you is the above mentioned Threadripper Pro in the ThinkStation P620.

If you can live with 4 memory channels, consumer Threadripper opens up your options enormously.

TRX40 with a Threadripper 3960X supports PCIe 4.0 (64 CPU lanes) and 8x ECC UDIMM. This would be a quad channel configuration (2 DIMMs per channel), not 8 channels and DDR4-3200 ECC UDIMM may be hard to find at retail. Threadripper is based on the same silicon as EPYC, though, so it may be close enough for your purpose. ASRock TRX40 Taichi, ASUS Prime TRX40-Pro or maybe ASRock Rack TRX40D8 could be a suitable motherboard.

Threadripper Pro will be even closer to EPYC with 8 memory channels, 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes and RDIMM/LRDIMM support. However, you'd have to wait until September and the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 may be the only choice at time of launch.

One of the 3 computers I work on a daily basis is a Threadripper. It never crossed my mind to look for an Epic CPU just because I have no special needs not met by the TR. For the build I just ordered parts from Amazon and assembled instead of getting a prebuilt configuration.

I've been using a previous gen system for almost 3 years: EPYC 7401P with a Gigabyte MZ31-AR0, 8x16GB of ECC, and a bunch of PCIe flash and some SATA rust. I love it; it's my favorite workstation in a long time.

For my new machine next year. I'm currently leaning towards ASRock Rack's ROMED8-2T, which is available for order but is not "in stock" at most places (e.g. provantage). It's PCIe 4.0, runs DDR4 at 3200 MHz, and has a reasonably long RAM QVL. I'll go with whatever the best value is for a CPU when I pull the trigger on the upgrade.

From a few days ago: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15910/amd-announces-ryzen-thr...

tl;dr: Lenovo ThinkStation P620 coming in September

If you've got the setup for rackmount, the Dell R7515 has PCIe4, but not 3200MHz memory support I think.

Supermicro's H12 range was launched a year ago.

It was "launched" into the "Coming Soon" channel. That's why all the usual supermicro integrators are still shipping H11 boards with DDR4-2933 and PCIe 3.

No, our company's first H12 server batch with DDR4-3200 and second-generation EPYCs arrived last fall.

System 76?

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