In fact, I wonder how much market there will be for threadripper once we have 32c/64t consumer grade desktop CPUS.
Max Memory Speed
2x1R DDR5-5200
2x2R DDR5-5200
4x1R DDR5-3600
4x2R DDR5-3600
Though theoretically that will stop being an issue when it’s viable to only hand the gpu 4-8 pcie 5.0 lanes and 1-2 lanes to an nvme drive or two. Then there would be plenty left over for other things.
Is it working just by accident?
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X Memory: GSkill Trident Z5 Neo 6000 MHz. Mobo: Asus Tuf Gaming x670e WiFi 6e
Probably a case of "not exactly". You're just overclocking the memory, and both your memory modules + the rest of the system are happy with those particular speeds.
It'll probably run happily at those speeds basically forever, so nothing to really worry about from doing that.
Does something prevent Zen 5 CPUs from using ECC memory?
Or maybe you mean that ECC puts more load on the memory controller, potentially reducing top RAM speed compared to non-ECC configurations?
> Finally, ECC RAM is slightly slower than non-ECC RAM. Many memory manufacturers say that ECC RAM will be roughly 2% slower than standard RAM due to the additional time it takes for the system to check for any memory errors. To verify this, we examined multiple benchmarks that we run on each system we produce. By using comparable CPUs (For example: Intel Core i7 4771 3.5GHz Quad Core 8MB versus Intel Xeon E3-1275 V3 3.5GHZ Quad Core 8MB) we found that this 2% estimate to be roughly correct. Our own benchmarks showed a performance hit ranging from .72 to 2.2% which, given normal testing deviations, is right in line with the 2% estimate.
[1]: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Advantages-of-ECC...
Anyway what bugs me about Zen < 4 is that you can install ECC memory, but you can't be sure that ECC is really working on some motherboards.
For Zen 4 at least there's DDR5 with its on-die ECC, but the path to the CPU might still be unprotected.
Indeed, they seem to be aiming their ECC sticks at the server market, their "overclockable" sticks at the gamer market, and not mixing the two. Perhaps this would change if more workstation motherboards officially supported ECC.
In the meantime, I suspect today's ECC RAM and X3D cache CPUs might complement each other well.
> For Zen 4 at least there's DDR5 with its on-die ECC, but the path to the CPU might still be unprotected.
Some Zen 4 motherboards do support ECC. ASUS lists it in their manuals and exposes settings for it in their EFI setup, for example.
As for being sure that it's working, I suppose that depends on the OS. This addition in Linux 6.5 looks helpful:
Memory Channels: 2
Memory Channels: 8
What frustrates me is that in the last 2 or so generations, you cannot simply buy a CPU. One has to buy an entire system from a vendor like Lenovo or HP. When I built my box in 2018, the 2990-WX was available for ~$1900. Which is a lot, but doesn't match the $5k->10k prices for the entire systems.
There just aren't that many affordable, reasonably efficient ways to get >= 32c these days. (and by efficient, I'm excluding used server-class boxes from older generations that are power hungry).
Price... now that's definitely a story :). The current 32 core Threadripper is around $3,000 itself now. It does have some advantages like the 8 memory channels but even just trying to build a low core count box with a lot of PCIe lanes is an extremely expensive endeavour. I think part of it has to do with the gap between the consumer and server markets widening over time, it becomes harder to justify doesn't something special for the HEDT market.
Threadripper was, yes. Threadripper Pro wasn't. It was a workstation CPU. Threadripper was discontinued while Threadripper Pro wasn't, because workstation CPUs are profitable, while HEDT CPUs aren't.
(AFAICT the HEDT "class" of CPUs only existed for a short time when CPU production was such that all the individual cores could perform really well, but the die as a whole could still fail validation as a server/workstation-grade CPU. I think, with chiplets, this just doesn't happen any more.)
Though with CPU/firmware exploits commonly getting patched it does seem like there are a lot of reasons to reboot server style systems these days.
I built the machine to be more basic for now but be able to upgrade over time into a powerful computer to run electromagnetic simulations.
I've got a 13900k NAS build with 14 NVMe drives in it and 25G network connectivity. If you do W680 for the motherboard instead of the typical boards you get to keep the ECC too. Saved me thousands compared to getting equivalent I/O and total CPU performance with a server board. Reminded me a lot of when I got a 1650v3 prior really, "oh, it's kind of just consumer stuff but fully loaded", but ran a lot faster (of course).
The hardest part is finding a board which breaks out the things out into ports instead of trying to figure out how to cram 2 extra cheap "gaming" nics, wi-fi, 50 USB ports, or other useless things in statically instead.
I will say my experience with the memory controllers on modern Intel systems has been SIGNIFICANTLY better than my experience with them memory controllers on modern AMD systems. I could barely get my 7950X to do 64 GB at 6000, and that was one of the better experiences have had with the Zen memory controllers, but the Intel builds easily blow past that.
That is assuming 1600Gb/s is already possible with ConnectX-7 XD.