On Wed, Apr 17, 2024 at 6:33 AM Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On the AM5 link, I found a mobo that I kinda like. I still wish it had > more PCIe slots tho.
AM5 has 28 PCIe lanes. Anything above that comes from a switch on the motherboard. 0.1% of the population cares about having anything on their motherboard besides a 16x slot for the GPU. So, that's what all the cheaper boards deliver these days. The higher end boards often have a switch and will deliver extra lanes, and MAYBE those will go into another PCIe slot (probably not wired for 16x but it might have that form factor), and more often those go into additional M.2 slots and USB3 ports. (USB3 is very high bandwidth, especially later generations, and eats up PCIe lanes as a result.) Keep in mind those 28 v5 lanes have the bandwidth of over 100 v3 lanes, which is part of why the counts are being reduced. The problem is that hardware to do that conversion is kinda niche right now. It is much easier to bifurcate a larger slot, but that doesn't buy you more lanes. > It supports not only the Ryzen 9 > series but also supports Ryzen 5 series. That is because the 9 and 5 are branding and basically convey no information at all besides the price point. The Ryzen 7 1700X has about half the performance of the Ryzen 5 7600X, and that would be because the first chip came out in 2017, and the second came out in 2022 and is three generations newer. Likewise the intel branding of "i3" or "i7" and so on also conveys no information beyond the general price level they were introduced at. You can expect the bigger numbers to offer more performance/features than the smaller ones OF THE SAME GENERATION. The same branding keeps getting re-applied to later generations of chips, and IMO it is intentionally confusing. > I looked up the Ryzen 5 7600X > and 8600G. I think the X has no video and the G has video support. Both have onboard graphics. The G designates zen1-3 chips with a GPU built in, and all zen4 CPUs have this as a standard feature. The 7600X is zen4. See what I mean about the branding getting confusing? > I > haven't researched yet to see if the mobo requires the G since it has > video ports, two to be more precise which is the minimum I need. All AM5 CPUs have GPUs, but in general motherboards with video outputs do not require the CPU to have a GPU built in. The ports just don't do anything if this is lacking, and you would need a dedicated GPU. > Anyway, those two CPUs are cheaper than the Ryzen 9 I was looking at. I > could upgrade later on as prices drop. I'm sure a new Ryzen is lurking > around the corner. Zen5 is supposedly coming out later this year. It will be very expensive. Zen4 is still kinda expensive I believe though I haven't gone looking recently at prices. I have a zen4 system and it was expensive (particularly the motherboard, and the DDR5 is more expensive, and if you want NVMe that does v5 that is more expensive as well). > I have a FX-8350 8 core CPU now. Would the Ryzen 5's mentioned above be > a good bit faster, a lot, a whole lot? So, that very much depends on what you're doing. Single-thread performance of that 7600X is 2-3x faster. Total performance is almost 5x faster. The 7600X will use moderately less power at full load, and I'm guessing WAY less power at less than full load. It will also have much better performance than those numbers reflect for very short bursts of work, since modern CPUs can boost. That's just pure CPU performance. The DDR5 performance of the recent CPU is MUCH better than that of the DDR3 you're using now. Your old motherboard might be PCIe v2 (I think the controller for that was on the motherboard back then?). If so each lane delivers 8x more bandwidth on the recent CPU, which matters a great deal for graphics, or for NVMe performance if you're using an NVMe that supports it and have a workload that benefits from it. Gaming tends to be a workload that benefits the most from all of these factors. If your system is just acting as a NAS and all the storage is on hard drives, I'm guessing you won't see much of a difference at all, except maybe in boot time, especially if you put the OS on an NVMe. If this is just for your NAS I would not drop all that money on zen4, let alone zen5. I'd look for something older, possibly used, that is way cheaper. > Still, I need more memory too. 32GBs just isn't much when running > Seamonkey, three Firefox profiles and torrent software. Ok, if this is for a desktop you'll benefit more from a newer CPU. RAM is really expensive though these days. Getting something off-lease is going to save you a fortune as the RAM is practically free in those. You can get something with 32GB of DDR4 for $150 or less in a SFF PC. > I'm not running > out but at times, it's using a lot of it. I was hoping for a mobo that > would handle more than 128GB but that is a lot of memory. Any recent motherboard will handle 128GB. You'll just need to use large DIMMs as the limit is on the number of channels/slots. > Most of them seem to > test gaming speeds which isn't of much use anyway for me. I'm more > about compiling and such. Compiling is similar to gaming, but tends to be more multi-threaded. Unless you're building in tmpfs the storage and memory performance are both very relevant. A modern CPU will have a noticeable improvement. That said, if you just mean that you install packages on Gentoo once in a while, I'm not sure I'd spend a fortune just to make my background package updates happen faster. It is a nice-to-have though. If you're doing software development and often rebuild stuff, you'll notice it. > This opens a new option that might be easier to accomplish. Still wish > that mobo had more PCIe slots tho. What you want exists - just not so much on consumer hardware. You'd have to look for PCIe switches to try to get what you want. Definitely possible if you use integrated graphics and then use the 16x slot for a switch, and can find something that does what you want. If you want what you're looking for out of the box, this is the server zen4 equivalent of the CPU you're looking at: https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/h13ssl-nt All the RAM slots and PCIe slots you want, as well as M.2 slots and 8 SATA ports. I saw one on eBay (just the board) for under $900, and you can imagine what it costs to fill the rest out. Suffice it to say any website of an authorized seller will say "call us for pricing." -- Rich
