Threadripper Pro: First Look at the ASUS Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WIFI + 32 Core TR Pro 3975WX

i got a fever and the only cure is more cores so pretty much that's just threadripper pro right i mean come on well you know what i'd probably settle for uh more clock speed as well threadripper pro i don't think anybody was expecting amd to come out with threadripper pro they partnered with the lenovo lenovo got the exclusive for almost a year give or take so threadripper pro sits in between threadripper and epic it's even more like epic than threadripper you get eight memory channels now you only get one dim per channel so you have less overall memory capacity on threadripper pro but when i say less overall memory capacity i mean theoretically like two terabytes that is an impressive amount of memory capacity remember threadripper tops out at 256 gigabytes now we've reviewed threadripper and 64 core threadripper for certain kinds of software development workloads is an unmitigated monster 64 core threadripper pro is even more of an unmitigated monster because you've got twice the memory bandwidth potentially uh yes if you're running error correcting memory you're not going to find registered ecc memory running at 3600 but the availability of registered air correcting memory running at 3200 is pretty good these days and 3200 is basically what this supports across the board now when you get into it on the memory side of things and i'm getting a little ahead of myself here there is load reduced dams registered error correcting memory and you know quad rank potentially and not all of those are supported so you have to refer to what amd is supporting specifically and the qualification list for your motherboard and there's there's some eyes you want to dot and t's you want to cross because if you're doing what i did you're diying it you're not buying that ready to go lenovo system i've got up for testing the 16 core the 32 core and the 64 core monster threadripper pro cpus and if that's our royalty or our most honored deity what sort of chariot are we going to have to carry that well that's going to be the asus wrx80 motherboard it's the sage variant and this is probably the nicest motherboard that i have ever owned at the rear i o literally everything is 10 gigabit except for the things that are 20 gigabit yeah all the usb ports they're all they're all 10 gigabit not only that this motherboard like most server motherboards has ipmi so you can remote manage this motherboard it actually has an onboard vga controller that's part of that ipmi solution and you're going to want to remember to disable that with this slide switch underneath the chipset if you intend to use an add-in gpu that's not fully uefi compatible if you need the csm module you got to turn that vga off otherwise you can have some weird edge cases where you're trying to boot up linux and it's like whoa i don't understand what's happening it's fine it's completely fine if you have a uefi supporting gpu when you plug that in it knows to make the uefi gpu the primary gpu you're not going to have any trouble but just be aware of that because at first i was worried it was like i don't understand but i used the ipmi to log into the system even though it didn't work and troubleshoot because it'll show you voltage and control you can remotely power on the system you can remotely control the system if you only have that vga console otherwise you need to redirect to a serial port or something like that so that you can you know run a tty on a serial if you're running linux basically what i'm telling you to do if you need that for the ipmi because it'll support that really well as well now in terms of performance differences okay threadripper versus threadripper pro well there's a cost difference there in just the cpu of about 35 it's a 35 price premium what do you get well double memory bandwidth like i was saying and depending on what your workload is that can really be worth it now for visual effects workloads yes we need to revisit visual effects workloads real world visual effects workloads but threadripper pro is a monster even over regular threadripper for a lot of those workloads and part of the reason is the increased memory bandwidth part of the reason is the increased memory capacity being able to run 512 gigabytes which and i can't believe that i'm saying this 512 gigabytes of memory is kind of a sweet spot for a vfx workstation these days 16 gigabyte dimms are not insanely expensive 32 gigabyte dimms are not insanely expensive 64 128 gigabyte dams okay those are getting into more expensive territory but if you're rocking 32 gigabyte dimms you got eight channels that's a lot of memory to be able to run your workstation it is it's just a fantastic amount of memory combine that with storage that motherboard comes with a 4 up nvme you know hyper m.2 card so you can just throw in four m.2 on this one pci express add-in card throw that in your machine and if you're using really fast ssds you're talking about being able to do 20 30 gigabytes per second on that storage array and the rest of the platform can definitely keep up with that even the ethernet is 10 gigabit ethernet that's a dual intel x550 10 gig solution right on board also on board this motherboard you got three m.2 slots so that's basically seven m.2 right out of the box if you're gonna go crazy with storage just pick up another hyper m.2 8 nvme i mean who's counting it's fine at that point you can clear 11 million iops on this platform no problem at all especially with those higher speed pci express 4 nvme like the keoxia the cd6 and the cm6 depending on what you're looking for have some different iops and performance characteristics those are in the u.2 form factor so you would want to use this in a case that has the u.2 option the case that i use for this platform because it's got a lot of nice airflow is the fractal meshfy 2 xl i also went with a custom loop cooling solution for this from ek i'm actually recycling it from another previous threadripper build and all of that fits in this case with ample room you know as you can see i've gone crazy with the tesla v100 and an older radeon card and also a 6800 for vfio passthrough so i can run all the virtual machines here i've actually got a total of seven slots and most of them are blocked by heatsinks so this is maybe something i need to revisit maybe i can do a new amd threadripper edition of uh you know seven somethings one something else because 512 gigabytes of memory divided by seven clients and 64 cores divided by seven clients and gpu pass through and nvidia is warming up to gpu pass-through because they've recently updated their drivers to allow pass-through without erroring out because of code 43 thanks nvidia that's uh that's why jensen's you know we prayed to jensen and he answered our prayers it's a it's an exciting time so this was a fun build and a sort of a fun first look at threadripper pro there's actually so much to talk about with redripper pro i can't really fit it in one video i can give you a sort of a preview a first look at some of the benchmarks that we've done with the furonics test suite if you want to check that out in the link below it's sort of some mind bending numbers yeah the 32 core system here goes you know toe to toe with like the uh xeon 3175x with the 4.5 gigahertz overclock it's not pretty the 32 chord threadripper pro is a whole other universe of performance i mean i mean i know skylake x is getting kind of old but the 3175x is a monster of a cpu and it's it's it's really something that it's obsolete this quickly in the ecosystem and these are zen 2 threadripper pro we've also got zen 3 in epic cpus so we know that zen 3 threadripper is coming at some point what sort of a monster is that gonna be i mean the mind reels with this platform so this has been a first look at threadripper pro the parts are available now if you want to build your own threadripper pro system and you need advice or input come to the forums at level one i'll be glad to walk you through it or understand what your problems are or you know let's get building whether we're doing data analysis or you're a researcher or a scientist or something like that i really think that uh amd's got an interesting platform here with threadripper pro and the future looks really bright now rumor has it intel is launching new intel xeon cpu soon new platform new process lithography i think they're focused a little more in the server space than the workstation space but still that's pretty exciting if you do decide that you want to go off script it's like no i don't i want epic right now i want the 75 f3 a 32 core 4 gigahertz monster epic cpu but i want that in a workstation format well i don't know that i would necessarily recommend that but i am going to do a build around the 75 f3 in more of a workstation-ish configuration and we'll take a look we'll see but uh i'll give you a little spoiler doesn't really exactly turn out how you'd expect i mean if you're gonna do that we need different motherboards than we have now but that's that's a video for another day i wonder this is level one this has been a quick look and build with the wrx80 platform the asus sage motherboard threadripper pro and i'm really happy with how this build turned out so if you're looking at doing a build like this definitely come to the forum we can talk options you don't have to go custom loop cooler you've got some options there but let's talk about it because there are some gotchas like for example if you're going to use the ice giant thermo siphon which is an incredible cooler and works great with 64 core threadripper don't recommend it for threadripper pro because the orientation of the socket affects how well that cooler can work it'll work in a desktop configuration but not a tower configuration come to the forum let's talk you don't know what you don't know until you know i'm one of those level one i'm signing out i'll see you there

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 58,039

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

Id: G1yiOgtE7D4

Length: 10min 19sec (619 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 04 2021