craigr

6.12.11 to 6.12.13 seemingly smoothly. Now going to bed.

Back on topic. With my Intel E-2288G, before I had four cores (eight threads) isolated for VM's (usually just Windows these days, sometimes Ubuntu) and only three cores (six thread) pinned for dockers. I changed this around and have improved performance substantially for actual real-world use. I un-isolated two cores (four threads) for my VM's. That left two cores (four threads) isolated for VM's. Then I pinned six cores (12 threads) for VM's. I then also pinned five cores (ten threads) for dockers. Windows is faster as the dockers don't often need a lot of power; PLEX when it's analyzing shows for library, commercials, intros, and NZBGet when it's downloading, repairing, and decompressing. NZBGet now maxes out all ten threads and gets done MUCH faster. Windows is a lot more zippy. This is where I am now. In any event, I think I squeezed another year or two easily out of my current setup.

I'll have to check. They are all Ultra's because I insist on wired connections whenever possible. They are at least three or four years old at this point. My mom alone has five of them. Then my three siblings and a couple friends. I use ShieldTV in my house because they can handle EVERYTHING on their end and I have four for me and the family, but all but one of my own TV's are UHD (kitchen is still old). The rest of my family is not tech savvy, at least not in this area so Roku works well for them (I'm not customizing and maintaining like ten more ShieldTV's). I run custom launchers on my Shields which greatly reduces complexity; my then six-year-old daughter couldn't use the TV, but with my own home brew interface design she literally learned to work it in less than five minutes. My Shield interface. This is what you see on my TV's and projector when the Shields boot (home screen): No garbage in the way. Could it be easier? I really hope there is a Shield 2. I've derailed my own thread, but at this point it doesn't matter I guess.

The TV’s the Rokus are connected to are not UHD. I don’t think the Rokus can down sample and tone map UHD. We are talking lots of Rokus, multiple family member households. And users who don’t want to change stuff on their end and/or I have to be the person that sets it all up.

Lastly, I also can't believe I've had my current CPU/MB nearly five years already. How time flies. I tend to hold onto builds for a long time and this would have been a very short cycle for me. I closed all the browser tabs for EPYC I made over the last few days. It's done for now.

I found these resources helpful: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/4346vs4708vs3546/AMD-EPYC-7413-vs-AMD-EPYC-7443-vs-Intel-Xeon-E-2288G This site is no ARK, but it's a place to start. Some of the information is wrong or incomplete, but it's a good place to start: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/epyc Best, craigr

Well, I think I will do nothing at the moment. It's not a good time in my life to play with this. Maybe in three to six months I will revisit the idea. I like the 7443 by far the best as an option. It's even slightly better performance per core than my current Intel, but it's still too expensive IMHO. If I were going to buy today, I would probably go with the 7413. Then there is the question of ROMED8-2T or H12SSL-i motherboard. I got really excited about the ASRock, but after careful consideration, I'd get the Supermicro instead. More it comes down to bias probably for me. SM has been making high quality MB's for longer and I trust them a lot more. I HATE that both have 2x 10GB RJ45 Ethernet ports, I'd much rather they have nothing or SFP+. But those are the two options for a home lab when you want enterprise grade server boards. I'm going to eventually circle back to Intel as well and see what I can do there. Thanks for chatting Vr2Io.

Yup, I think PARITY checks would run faster in an 8x slot.

Well, you edited your post and I like it better. I thought you meant with my current board. I like your idea. I can live without more cores for a while longer. I really want a server level board with IPMI though.

On my current SuperMicro X11SCZ-F? My SuperMicro X11SCZ-F has PCIe 3.0; one 16x lane and two 4x lanes in 8x slots. My Nvidia GTX 1650 is in the 16x lane, and both my HBA and 10GB NIC are in the 4x lanes. I have 20x 3.5" drives connected to my HBA. It's less than ideal. That said, I'm souring on this idea all together. I think I'm going to put a fork in it and look back at Intel in a few months when I have more free time. Basically, I'd like 8-16 more cores, more 16x and/or some more 8x PCIe 4.0 lanes, two or more NVMe 4.0 slots, and an iGPU. That's the wish list. I found a really good deal on another site for a 7643 with 128GB ECC, but than I think, do I really want 48 cores?

AMD is so much more cryptic than Intel with the details. There is not ARK for AMD that I am aware of. It's just plain hard to figure all this out. The last AMD I bought was 15+ years ago. A big reason is because I find it difficult to know what I am getting. I hear such great things about the EPYC line though, I'd like to try it.

Looking into this more the loss of the QuickSync iGPU is become a bigger deal breaker than I expected. The HDR to SDR UHD transcode is really important because I stream PLEX to family members (like my elderly mother) who use Roku players and 2/3 of my movie collection (as well as much of my TV collection) is UHD now... and most of them don't have UHD TV's. So that means an expensive less capable GPU taking a PCI slot and using power to only be used sometimes. I really like the "Inno3D Nvidia GTX 1650 Single Slot" that I have now because it uses almost no power at idle, but the card doesn't seem to be made anymore and I can't find a duplicate (it's not like it was ever prolific). I bought it from grooves.land in September of 2000 for $195. Any recommendations on GPU's for plex transcoding that do HDR to SDR tone mapping, are not expensive, and don't use a lot of power (used or new)? Maybe I should wait two years and get an EPYC 4004 with 16x cores because they have iGPU's. But really they are just rebranded Ryzen 7000's and we are back to 28 PCI lanes. Ugh. Why not just put an iGPU in an EPYC AMD?

You have a good point here. Both EPYC's have slower cores than my current intel by a LARGE margin.

It gets trickier if you want enterprise hardware. I want ECC memory, Xeon or EPYC, VT-D, good IOMMU virtualization ... Running a couple VM's and dockers changes the equation. Nothing Intel makes (made) is like the above two AMD options with so many PCI lanes with all the features that I can afford. Another advantage to moving from my current platform to EPYC is that I get registered ECC where now I have unregistered.

Ho-hum. I guess I'm not in a rush. Prices don't usually go up on this type of hardware.