News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Best CPUs for Workstations. Parent comment

Re:Best CPUs for Workstations by vonmoltke on Tuesday May 05, 2020 @04:19PM (#23084514)
If I was going to go the AM4 route, I wanted a board that supported the full 128GB of RAM the processor does and has an X570 chipset. I also wanted a board that has at least 5 PCIe slots (of any type) and 6 SATA ports. While there are a number of boards in the $200 - $300 range that satisfy these requirements, I can't find anywhere that actually has them[1]. If my home workstation hadn't just died I would just wait until the pandemic-related supply issues abate.

[1] Well, has them for a reasonable price. Newegg as third-party sellers offering a few of them for 60%+ markups, but I feel better paying $500 for a $500 board than I do paying $275 for a $160 board.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Best CPUs for Workstations by AnthonBerg on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @03:55AM (#23088793)
Yes!, a higher-end motherboard can certainly be worth paying for. Conversely, I paid $150 an Asus X470-F that checks mostly the same boxes except it only takes 64GB RAM and doesn't have PCIe 4.0. I put a 3900x in it. It's pretty great. - But it was bought before the pandemic so idk if it's still available.

If only 12-16 cores with 64GB of RAM are enough to be useful, then the Ryzen 9 gets A LOT of work done for an unprecedented low price. But if the work being done can make use of 128GB quad-channel RAM and 24-32-64 cores, then the $350 extra for a Threadripper motherboard is nothing. Doesn't take many billable hours to pay for it :)

[ Parent | on HN ]