Epyc 7713 vs Threadripper Pro for a Workstation?

why is amd overwhelming us with choice there's so many confusing options that are on different levels of technology i i want the latest technology always right well not necessarily this is the pro ws wrx 80 se sage wi-fi that's well it's kind of a mouthful this is for threadripper pro this is the rog zn2 xtreme alpha also a mouthful but for threadripper not pro and both of these right now today you can get zen 2 based processors for them this is the consumer enthusiast platform this is the i gotta get stuff done work platform this supports unbuffered error correcting memory and non-error correcting memory this works ideally with registered error correcting memory you know because the uh the processor socket is turned one way or the other the processor sockets might look the same but they're not compatible just depends on what you want to do to make matters more complicated potentially more confusing amd just launched mulan 3rd gen epic those are based on zen three cores and depending on what you're doing you could see a nine to like 25 30 percent plus uplift i mean it's 19 ipc plus uh you know you get a little bit of a frequency bump so depending on what you're doing you could see a substantial increase in performance overall depending on what your workload is so does it make sense to do epic as a workstation well i've got the relatively pedestrian s8030 from tie in i don't think it makes sense to use epic as a workstation as long as the boards available are roughly like the the tie-in motherboard here but it's actually even a little more complicated than that let's dive in all right so i've done a lot of thread ripper workstation builds water cooled not water cooled using nacho tower cooler using the unfortunately not very reliable intermax lictech all-in-ones they're not bad if you redo the fluid in them i've done videos on that so i don't really feel the need to super talk about the threadripper platform it really is a question of zen two or zen threes and two or zen three and i thought it'd be fun to look at the motherboards side by side so you know what features you're getting there are some things in common between these two motherboards the tie-in s 80 30 and the asus pro ws wrx 80 have built-in 10 gigabit intel ethernet well depending on what version you get you might only get built-in one gig they both have ipmi which is for remote management you can basically log into your computer when it's off that means they've got onboard vga now the wrx80e sage has a vga breakout header because they know that you know that back rear panel i o uh area is the maybe something you shouldn't use your vga connection for because nobody's actually going to use that whereas on the taian motherboard it's built in it's on the i o backplate speaking of i o backplate that's where you should look to determine the main differences between these two motherboards this is a desktop motherboard you're going to use it like a desktop computer you're going to use it as a workstation the server motherboard has basically no rear i o you've got your network connection you got that vga connection you got a couple of usb ports that's it nothing else the sage sc wi-fi has a built-in wi-fi and a total of 10 rear usb ports and seven front usb ports so that's hugely different you can actually use it like a workstation otherwise you're going to need a hub or going to need to use one of your expansion slots this is another thing that may seem paradoxical the wrx80 has seven expansion slots seven well on the wrx platform with threadripper pro you get all 128 pci express lanes and that's also true on the server platform with epic you get 128 pci express lately directly distributed and that kind of hints about our next major difference this has a chipset for io the server platform doesn't there's not really a chipset wrx in this case is the chipset we're talking about you know even desktop boards that have am4 the cpu is connected to another chip that manages peripheral io because on a desktop most of your peripherals are slow the cpu is the fast thing in a server that's not necessarily true and a server it could be a little bit of a bottleneck passing all of your peripherals through a chipset wrx gives you both seven slots plus a chipset so no matter what you're doing you're covered so i think all of these things make a server type epic platform i mean i'm not picking on tie-in it just makes the server type platform super unattractive for a desktop class experience because you're going to have to claw all those things back in with add-in peripherals and then you'll run into little compatibility issues and little qualification issues that's what you're paying asus for asus in this board they've put usb controllers on here they've done the connection they've done they've done the routing they've done the power distribution to make sure that everything is working as it should and so i think that until there are workstation class motherboards for epic it doesn't really necessarily make sense to try to use epic as a workstation platform now i don't know if amd's grand vision is to replace threadripper with threadripper pro pretty much across the board because if i had a choice between threadripper and threadripper pro i think i'm going to lean a little bit toward threadripper pro and if we look at epic pricing epic milan those p series cpus which are cpus that are designed to work in single socket systems they've got a 24 core cpu that is a p series cpu and it costs elite dollars one three three seven dollars that's the uh the tray price i guess or the the bulk volume price the recommended price and so uh one three three seven for zen three cores thirteen hundred dollars for for 24 zen three cores that's pretty good i mean if we look at thread ripper not pro pricing 32 cores for two thousand dollars and and on up now now the p series milan cpu is like 24 2500 somewhere in that range so it's a little bit more expensive than the 32 core threadripper threadripper pro is a little harder for system integrators to deal with because they've got more complex routing as far as memory goes because it's eight channels of memory not four channels of memory on the regular threadripper platform both of these platforms the epic server and the wrx that's eight memory channels so there's there's you know feature parity there one really cool thing about the wrx 80 is that it does support unbuffered and buffered memory registered memory unregistered memory error correcting memory not error correcting memory wrx don't care because it works a trx40 twerks so based on this pricing and market conditions it sure looks like amd could get away with you know if it's possible i don't even know if it's possible seems like it might be to enable you know epic compatibility with the wrx platform that would be pretty cool but if threadripper pro is needed because the memory compatibility isn't exactly the same across the board i mean this you know like i say this supports unbuffered memory and and non-error correcting memory whereas i don't think you can get away with that at least on the epic motherboards that i've tried no post so and it might have actually damaged one of the dims that i tested but it was older it was 2133 it was a reference dim so it's probably fine uh but yeah i couldn't get post on two different epic server motherboards that i tried when i was using non-air correcting memory um would i like to see epic support in something like this well yeah heck yeah but i think that you know the pricing sort of gets interesting because i don't think the pricing can get a lot better like if you look at the p series cpus you know 1300 ish for a 24 core epic cpu it's pretty good i mean it's basically on par with last gen's you know zen 2 threadripper and threadripper pro is a little bit more expensive but when the new threadripper pro comes out hypothetically based on zen 3 or something based on zen 3 then that could be a thing now here's the other interesting thing this launch with milan andy's launching with a lot more skus is that because they've been wildly successful with rome which make no mistake they definitely have been rome is market leading in pretty much everything and milan only seals the deal because there were certain workloads with rome where it was at parity or a little bit worse than other options available in the market but now milan pretty much leads in just about any workload we're gonna have to see how the market responds to that and what new products are produced to sort of fill the gap or how those products you know come about but again looking at the pricing in the distribution you know will we see a threadripper cpu that has a lot more wattage that was a differentiator early on now we've got the cpus like the 75 f3 which are basically at the upper end you know 280 watts does that mean that we would see a 300 watt or a 320 watt threadripper i don't i don't know maybe i mean stuff like that is pretty much the only thing that should really drive um segmentation between the pro platform and the non-pro platform me personally i'd love to see them just unlock the wrx80 platform for epic if that's possible if that's electrically a safe thing to do maybe it's just a matter of qualification i don't know but if it means that threadripper is going to stick around and it's going to be at basically the same price point and it's going to have some differentiating features like more tdp okay cool i welcome that i can wait a little bit for that you know when epic rome launched i got a little impatient then too i took an epic roam 24 core cpu threw it in a server motherboard and we did that we added the peripherals necessary to uh make that work on a gigabyte motherboard and that was okay that's why i say based on my experience and putting it together and that kind of thing just wait for whatever is coming for a workstation i don't know what that is it's fun to speculate but uh the workstation experience with boards like this i mean this is nicer than even the nicest threadripper boards you can get really seriously i mean this doesn't have an oled screen but i don't care about an oled screen you know what i like i like having dual intel 10 gig nics i mean the equantia nick is fine but it ain't no intel x550 another key difference between server-ish and workstation-ish or desktop-ish motherboards is around the vrm and it's not that one vrm implementation is dramatically better than another it's a question of use case and airflow so look at the vrm the power delivery here two huge banks now the tdp of the threadripper pro and the new uh milan-based epic cpus they're roughly equivalent and also the rom cpus i mean you know up to 280 watts tdp that's nothing really new that's why epic mulan is basically drop in compatible with epic rome across the board but you can't help but look at it and see that there's a clear engineering difference between these two boards a huge engineering difference the difference is not one of overclocking or quality or anything like that because hey the wrx platform doesn't even support overclocking it has to do with airflow so server motherboards and server-ish motherboards are designed for really high airflow cases they have a very small modest heat sink compared to this and that's because they're designed for you know those cases that we've taken a look at that have very high rpm fans they're very loud now people don't want that on their desktop so how do you deal with that well big heat sinks you're not getting a lot of airflow but the airflow that you are getting you can take better advantage of if you have more area to dissipate the heat that's what asus has done on the wrx80 they've added two huge vrm areas on either side of the cpu to deliver that 280 watt up to tdp for the you know threadripper pro cpus that call for it whereas on server motherboards if you're going to stuff this into a desktop tower case that server motherboard had better be getting excellent airflow directly over the vrms you should be able to put your finger on the vrm and feel the airflow that's what the engineering expectation was for the engineer that designed that motherboard to go into a rack mount case or other high airflow case if you don't have that in your desktop machine the vrm is going to overheat it's going to shorten the lifetime of the motherboard or your processor is going to throttle or both so you really have to consider that if you're going to go off script and try to build an epic workstation with a motherboard like that whereas this motherboard has been perfectly engineered for workstation use so let's go hang out on the forum especially if you're thinking about building a machine like this have you got a workload you want to test on something like this do you think it might make a good video reach out let's uh let's talk let's put it together i'm well this is level one i'm signing out and i'll see you in the level one forums

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 42,596

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: 4LoJEL1PC0g

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/cuttino_mowgli]

So Patrick from serve the home is partially right when he call threadripper PRO as WEPYC.

[u/Jmarin2377]

One of my favs channels.