sTRX40 support?


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I'm looking to upgrade my server to the next level. I need a beefier VM for Sabayon Linux Development. Due to this I'm looking at throwing a lot of money into a Threadripper 3960X 24 core or 3970X 32 core. I'm also looking at the ASRock sTRX40 Creator board. Will unraid support this? I know for much of Ryzen stuff (especially Threadripper) 5.4+ kernel is recommended. The 2 NICs could also be an issue with older kernels..

 

https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/TRX40%20Creator/

1 x 10 Gigabit LAN 100/1000/2500/5000/10000 Mb/s (AQUANTIA® AQC107):
1 x 2.5 Gigabit LAN 10/100/1000/2500 Mb/s (Dragon RTL8125AG):

 

 

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Thanks, I need QEMU for this server to even work. No point in me having a 32-core 64-thread server if VMs are a no-go... I guess I just need to find a solution to get a 5.4+ kernel and have Nvidia card support? Sounds like a steep request considering unraid is very much like a "live distro". Guess I'll have to look into solutions for the 5.x kernel problem?

Edited by Darksurf
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1 hour ago, Jerky_san said:

TO my knowledge it will with some limitations.. Limitations include QEMU isn't fully supporting the 3k series yet and without the 5.x kernel temp monitoring will be fubar..

What are some symptoms of missing QEMU Support?  I googled it and it sounds like it would cause issues with running VM's but I haven't noticed any issues, granted I only have one MacOs VM running. 

 

16 hours ago, Darksurf said:

I'm looking to upgrade my server to the next level. I need a beefier VM for Sabayon Linux Development. Due to this I'm looking at throwing a lot of money into a Threadripper 3960X 24 core or 3970X 32 core. I'm also looking at the ASRock sTRX40 Creator board. Will unraid support this? I know for much of Ryzen stuff (especially Threadripper) 5.4+ kernel is recommended. The 2 NICs could also be an issue with older kernels..

 

https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/TRX40 Creator/

1 x 10 Gigabit LAN 100/1000/2500/5000/10000 Mb/s (AQUANTIA® AQC107):
1 x 2.5 Gigabit LAN 10/100/1000/2500 Mb/s (Dragon RTL8125AG):

 

 

I'm currently running unraid 6.8.2 on the following hardware:
Gigabyte TRX40 AORUS XTREME
Threadripper 3990x

The mobo has dual 10gbps ethernet. I'm currently only using one of them ( haven't got around to configuring link aggregation yet ), but its recognizing both of them. 
I'm also using an nvidia GTX 960, ( Haven't decided on the new GPU yet ) and was able to get that handling hardware transcoding in a plex docker container via the Unraid Nvidia Plugin. 

All of this to say I haven't noticed any issues with sTRX40 and unraid. But to be fair this is my first unraid server, and I've only had it running for a couple weeks so maybe there may be things I just haven't run in to yet. 

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5 hours ago, Darksurf said:

Thanks, I need QEMU for this server to even work. No point in me having a 32-core 64-thread server if VMs are a no-go... I guess I just need to find a solution to get a 5.4+ kernel and have Nvidia card support? Sounds like a steep request considering unraid is very much like a "live distro". Guess I'll have to look into solutions for the 5.x kernel problem?

 

4 hours ago, djrico20one1 said:

What are some symptoms of missing QEMU Support?  I googled it and it sounds like it would cause issues with running VM's but I haven't noticed any issues, granted I only have one MacOs VM running. 

 

I'm currently running unraid 6.8.2 on the following hardware:
Gigabyte TRX40 AORUS XTREME
Threadripper 3990x

The mobo has dual 10gbps ethernet. I'm currently only using one of them ( haven't got around to configuring link aggregation yet ), but its recognizing both of them. 
I'm also using an nvidia GTX 960, ( Haven't decided on the new GPU yet ) and was able to get that handling hardware transcoding in a plex docker container via the Unraid Nvidia Plugin. 

All of this to say I haven't noticed any issues with sTRX40 and unraid. But to be fair this is my first unraid server, and I've only had it running for a couple weeks so maybe there may be things I just haven't run in to yet. 

Basically there was a person on the VM part of this forum with a 3970 having performance issues. It is related to the chiplet design and how the different CPU cache levels are presented. They were getting less performance than expected due to (I'm assuming) cache hit misses. The 5.x kernel is coming in 6.9(whenever that maybe) though I've actually made a special request in the "General Support" board about potentially getting an RC1 with JUST the kernel. Anyways Ryzen in general requires more tuning then Intel so just keep that in mind. My 2990wx had a lot of tuning and tweaks in the beginning that have been slowly fixed by patches on of QEMU in unraid releases. I assume the next release will have QEMU updates for the 3k series to fix the cache as well. If I had a 3k series I'd probably know more about fixing the issue but honestly don't know if I'm going to upgrade again for a while. Been waiting to see what 4k threadripper series brings.

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On 3/4/2020 at 8:08 AM, Darksurf said:

I'm looking to upgrade my server to the next level. I need a beefier VM for Sabayon Linux Development. Due to this I'm looking at throwing a lot of money into a Threadripper 3960X 24 core or 3970X 32 core. I'm also looking at the ASRock sTRX40 Creator board. Will unraid support this? I know for much of Ryzen stuff (especially Threadripper) 5.4+ kernel is recommended. The 2 NICs could also be an issue with older kernels..

 

https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/TRX40 Creator/

1 x 10 Gigabit LAN 100/1000/2500/5000/10000 Mb/s (AQUANTIA® AQC107):
1 x 2.5 Gigabit LAN 10/100/1000/2500 Mb/s (Dragon RTL8125AG):

 

 

 

Thats Horrible board, when i had to choose my TR3 mobo i watched every video, especially VRM disassembly and going deep on this issue.

ASROCK TR3 boards, all of them should be ignored, get ANY ASUS, ANY Gigabyte or MSI Creator [below creator MSI board are trash and basic]

I went with ASUS Zenith II, but the one below it also worth it and excellent, if you need 10G Etherent, its 80$ to 100$ extra even if mobo doesn't have it, its not worth buying something youll hate later, my Zenith II has 10G, but I also have PCIe 5G cards I got for 40$ and 10G can be found for 80 to 100 easily and sometimes for 60$

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4 hours ago, Hexenhammer said:

 

Thats Horrible board, when i had to choose my TR3 mobo i watched every video, especially VRM disassembly and going deep on this issue.

ASROCK TR3 boards, all of them should be ignored, get ANY ASUS, ANY Gigabyte or MSI Creator [below creator MSI board are trash and basic]

I went with ASUS Zenith II, but the one below it also worth it and excellent, if you need 10G Etherent, its 80$ to 100$ extra even if mobo doesn't have it, its not worth buying something youll hate later, my Zenith II has 10G, but I also have PCIe 5G cards I got for 40$ and 10G can be found for 80 to 100 easily and sometimes for 60$

I dunno, the reviews claim its a decent linux workstation board, albeit with an issue with the sound card possibly fixed in newer kernels? I've had pretty good luck with ASRock. Even my Desktop uses the ASRock Phantom Gaming ITX X570. I've used ASRock Rack boards in the past too without issue. Wendell with LVL1Techs did a review and decided it was a decent board, especially for the money. He said the VRM heatsink actually did pretty well and the VRM may only be 8-phase, but it was high quality. The Fan can be loud, but it's going to be in a server chassis in a rack so I'm not really worried about that. The VRM is sufficiently cooled to even during overclock.  Cinebench, Blender,, and even 7zip Benchmarks all showed the same Scores as all the other boards. There was no real difference outside of margin of error and ECC memory works and is supported by the board. What's not to like? It's perfect and affordable for my situation.

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10 hours ago, Darksurf said:

I dunno, the reviews claim its a decent linux workstation board, albeit with an issue with the sound card possibly fixed in newer kernels? I've had pretty good luck with ASRock. Even my Desktop uses the ASRock Phantom Gaming ITX X570. I've used ASRock Rack boards in the past too without issue. Wendell with LVL1Techs did a review and decided it was a decent board, especially for the money. He said the VRM heatsink actually did pretty well and the VRM may only be 8-phase, but it was high quality. The Fan can be loud, but it's going to be in a server chassis in a rack so I'm not really worried about that. The VRM is sufficiently cooled to even during overclock.  Cinebench, Blender,, and even 7zip Benchmarks all showed the same Scores as all the other boards. There was no real difference outside of margin of error and ECC memory works and is supported by the board. What's not to like? It's perfect and affordable for my situation.

8 phase VRM is old, do you need 10gbps USB ports? In future you can add more stuff, ASUS boards for example has x9 10GBPS ports and 16 phase VRM

This video compares all TRX40 boards VRMs and a little bit of their features, almost 40 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT41-TdvF4c

 

Here is a an article just lays out all prices and features.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/first-look-all-the-amd-trx40-motherboards-for-third-gen-threadripper#1


 

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VRM concern is only applicable if you overclock. If you don't (and you shouldn't with Unraid server) then you don't need so many phases.

 

I always recommend Gigabyte mobo because its BIOS allows you to pick any x16 PCIe slot as "Initial Display Output". That gives flexibility for PCIe card placement if you need a GPU for Unraid to boot with (e.g. for easier dumping of vbios, helps with AMD reset bug, hardware transcoding etc.).

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I don't plan on overclocking. The CPU is plenty beefy by default. I do plan to "OC" memory but I don't see 2933mhz on unbuffered ECC as pushing my luck.

 

I avoid gigabyte like the plague after running though a BIOS bug that would hardlock the system (even in the BIOS before reaching the OS!) Using a configuration they claimed to support and they blamed it on the fact that I use Linux and refused to support me.  Even after explaining it locked up without even reaching an OS, they finally relented but claimed their bench test station doesn't have the hardware they claimed to support so they couldn't test. They basically left me hanging and kept claiming it was Linux so they could close the case. The specific scenario was using a specific AMD APU with 2400mhz DDR3 with the GPU set to 2G instead of 1G.

 

They aren't Linux supporters and they suck when it comes to my experience with them. 

 

I'm normally an AMDGPU user, but my Unraid server uses a GTX 1050Ti for video transcoding in my Plex docker. It's my only Nvidia GPU.

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I just wanted to thank Limetech for getting Unraid 6.9-rc1 out with the 5.5 Kernel. Thanks guys, I really do appreciate it. This should get me going without much issue. The only part I lack is the CPU itself and I plan to order it in the next couple of weeks so this really smooths out my server transition.

 

I'll update with what support looks like after the server switch. Thanks again.

Edited by Darksurf
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  • 4 weeks later...

So just an update, I'm currently stuck between a rock and a hard place. I can switch to Unraid 6.9-rc1 and have no hardware transcoding OR I can stay on 6.8.3 and keep hardware transcoding for my Plex Docker, but lose the ability to monitor temps, efficient VMs, etc. 

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  • 1 month later...
On 3/6/2020 at 5:51 PM, Hexenhammer said:

16 phase VRM

Zenith II has only 8 phase as well. Doublers don't equal phases. Zenith Extreme Alpha, released January, has 16 phases. Other Asus boards run 8.

Aorus Xtreme and Gigabyte Designare are solid, without ROG tax and run 16 phases, come with pcie 4.0 NVME addon card (4 nvme drives). Designare comes with TB card too.

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12 minutes ago, contay said:

Zenith II has only 8 phase as well. Doublers don't equal phases. Zenith Extreme Alpha, released January, has 16 phases. Other Asus boards run 8.

Aorus Xtreme and Gigabyte Designare are solid, without ROG tax and run 16 phases, come with pcie 4.0 NVME addon card (4 nvme drives). Designare comes with TB card too.

 

ROG Zenith II Extreme has 16 Infineon TDA21472 70A power stages.

ROG Zenith II Extreme Alpha has 16 Infineon TDA21490 90A power stages.

They dont use doublers.

Both Extreme and Alpha use ASUS Teamed Stage Design

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