Is that a significant number of people? I kind of expect almost everyone that waited this long to sit tight on their current builds and keep waiting until RAM goes back down.
AM4 has high end gaming CPUs available and there are not yet major limitations besides future upgrades.
AM4 parts probably makes the best value gaming build you can get right now.
The number of people that don't have a previous computer and are shopping based on individual parts is even smaller.
> AM4 parts probably makes the best value gaming build you can get right now.
Has the value improved in the last year and a half? The people that would want AM4 have had a long time to buy AM4.
FWIW I recently upgraded and ended up getting something else, but mostly due to lack of availability of ITX AM4 motherboards. I got one with a soldered high end laptop CPU, it was much cheaper.
Consistent drops from secondhand stock sound good.
Him are you sure about some of the PCI slots? I think some marked as 4x get downgraded to 1x on these boards…
Further edit - this maybe accurate - how are you getting this / confirming it?
I found it useful and thought others might also like it.
On the server side, seven x16 slot motherboards exist.
In previous decades, non-mainstream CPU sockets were also more accessible to consumer budgets; first-gen Threadripper started at only 8 cores, so it was possible to pay extra for more memory channels and IO lanes without also buying an excess of CPU cores. But that had little to do with the popularity or viability of multi-GPU consumer systems.
The chipsets on consumer motherboards are pretty much PCIe switches plus some SATA and USB controllers, but they're clearly in a different league from anything that's relevant to connecting GPUs. The host interfaces are x4 or occasionally x8, and the downstream links don't support links wider than x4, and at most a few of those. The link speeds are often a generation (sometimes two) behind what the CPU's PCIe lanes support. The high-end motherboards for AMD's consumer platform support more SSD slots by daisy-chaining a second chipset off the first; you get more M.2 slots but it's all still sharing a single PCIe gen4 x4 link to the CPU.
In the PCIe gen2 era, it was common to see high-end consumer motherboards include a 48-lane PCIe switch to take x16 from the processor and fan it out to two x16 slots or some combination of x16 and x8 slots. That kind of connectivity has vanished from consumer motherboards, and isn't really common in the server or workstation markets, either. 48-lane and larger PCIe switches exist, but are mostly just used for servers to connect lots of NVMe SSDs.
NVMe traffic is very tame when compared to GPU traffic.
NVLink is another one you might have heard of, although it might also fall in the exotic category. I think some systems take AXI off-chip too. So there's various other weird and wonderful things. But none you're likely to have in your PC I think.
On-chip is another story, you can connect USB or NVMe or GPU "peripherals" using an on-chip interconnect type. But I guess you are asking about off-chip.
In a pedantic/technical sense, no. Practically speaking though, yes.
All the motherboards these days make me feel claustrophobic. My current workstation is pretty old, but feels like it had more expansion capability (relative to its time) than what's on the market today.
I really suggest not seeking a lot of PCIe lanes unless you really need them right now, though. The price premium for a platform with a lot of extra PCIe is very steep once you get past consumer boards. It would be a shame to spend a huge premium on a server board and settle for slower older tech CPUs only to have all of those slots sit empty.
It’s a good idea to add up the PCIe devices you will use and the actual bandwidth they need. You lose very little by running a GPU in a PCIe x8 slot instead of a full x16 slot, for example. A 10G Ethernet card only needs 1 lane of PCIe 4.0. Even fast SSDs can get away with half of their lanes and you’ll never notice except in rare cases of sustained large file transfers.
For example, putting a cheap 2nd-hand dual 25G NIC in a DIY server is quite attractive. But those are using PCIe Gen3 - so unless you're giving it 8 lanes it is being bottlenecked.
Same on the storage side: that PCIe Gen4 x4 slot might technically have enough bandwidth for four SSDs in most storage applications, but the board doesn't support bifurcating it.
The total platform bandwidth is plenty, it just isn't available in the way I want to use it.
Sorta yes but kinda the other way around — you’ll mostly notice in short high burst of I/O. This is mostly the case for people who use them to run remote mounted VM.
Nowadays all nvme have a cache on board (ddr3 memory is common), which is how they manage to keep up with high speed. However once you exhaust the cache speeds drop dramatically.
But your point is valid that very few people actually notice a difference
https://pcpartpicker.com/forums/topic/423337-animated-graphs...
What those graphs illustrate is SLC caching: writing faster by storing one bit per NAND flash memory cell (imprecisely), then eventually re-packing that data to store three or four memory bits per cell (as is necessary to achieve the drive's nominal capacity). Note that this only directly affects write operations; reading data at several GB/s is possible even for data that's stored in TLC/QLC cells, and can be sustained for the entire capacity of the drive.
I appreciate your advice. I use the machine for a variety of different tasks, and am looking to accommodate at least two high-end GPU's (1 for passthrough to virtual machines for running things like Solidworks), a number of SSD's, and as many PCIe expansion cards as possible. Many of the cards are older-gen, so could be consolidated to just a few modern lanes if I could find an external expander with sufficiently generous capacity. Here's a quick inventory of what's in the existing box:
- Mellanox Infiniband. For high-speed, low-latency networking... these days, probably replaceable with integrated NIC's, particularly if they come with RDMA.
- High-performance RAID. I've found dedicated cards offer better features, performance, capacity, resilience and reliability than any of the mobo-integrated garbage I've tried over the years. Things like BBU's/SuperCaps, seamless migration and capacity upgrades, out-of-band monitoring, etc. e.g. I've taken my existing mass storage array created on a modest ARC-1231ML 15+ years ago, through several newer generations to an ARC-1883, with many disk and capacity upgrades along the way, but it's still the same array without ever having had to reformat and restore from scratch. Incidentally I've been particularly happy with Areca's hardware, and they've even implemented some features I requested over the years (like the ability to hot-clone a replacement disk for one expected to fail soon then swap in the new one, without having to degrade the array and wait for a lengthy rebuild process that reduces your fault tolerance while hammering all member disks; as well as some other tweaks for better compatibility with tools like Hard Disk Sentinel). I notice they're finally starting to come out with controllers oriented to SSD's, like a PCI 5.0 product (https://www.areca.com.tw/products/nvme-1689-8N.html) for up to 8 x4 M.2 SSD's that boasts up to 60 GB/s, which is interesting (though the high-queue-depth random performance still doesn't match directly-plugged drives). I know software-RAID for the solid state stuff is also an option (as is just living without redundancy), but it's been convenient outsourcing the complexity.
- Slim, low-performance accessory GPU for more displays
- A few others this crowd would just laugh at me for (e.g. a PCI I/O card that includes a true parallel port, because nothing is more fun™ for hobbyist stuff and USB-based alternatives were found to have too much abstraction or latency; a SCSI adapter for an archaic piece of vintage hardware I'd love to keep installed permanently but there ain't space, and occasional one-off use stuff like a high-bandwidth digitizer).
The motherboard had 6 PCIe slots, and I've got two more provided by an external PCIe expander (after accounting for the one lost for it's own connection). If I could find some kind of expander that took a single PCIe 5.0 slot and turned it into half a dozen PCIe 3.0 slots (some full-width) I'd be set.
I know I'm at the crazy end of how-much-crap-can-you-jam-in-one-PC, but it still seems bizarre to me that newer boards have so many fewer slots yet feel lane-constrained, when between leading-edge SSD's and high-bandwidth GPU's the demand for more lanes is skyrocketing. When I built the previous PC it felt tight but doable... these days it feels like I can barely accommodate the level of graphics and storage I'd like, and by the time I do, there's nothing left for anything else. Granted it's been a few years since I got my hands dirty with this stuff, so maybe I'm just doing it wrong?
And yes, I've heard of USB... and have a bazillion devices plugged in (including some of exotic ones like an LCD display, logic analyzer, and a legit floppy drive that does get used once in a blue moon like when I need to make a memtest86 boot disk for a vintage PC). I've actually found some motherboards have issues where the USB stack gets flakey once you have too many devices connected (even using powered hubs to mitigate power constraints).
Ok... go ahead and have at me; tell me I'm old and dusty and I should take my one GPU and one SSD and be happy with them ;-).
This means you can get a motherboard like the "Asus Pro WS WRX90E-SAGE SE" which dedicates 104 lanes to seven PCIe slots and 16 lanes to four M.2 slots.
For more like $3000 you can get a non-Pro Threadripper; the "Asus Pro WS TRX50-SAGE" has a more restrained 48 PCIe 5.0 and 32 PCIe 4.0 lanes, meaning the board's five PCIe slots and three M.2 slots have a mixture of speeds and lanes.
The rest of the market seems to think you just want to plug in one huge four-slot GPU and perhaps one other card.
(ps. I don't suppose they make a "supersized" version of that board with a gap beside the first one or two GPU slots? So you can install a couple double-width cards without losing the underlying slots? Or a good source for a single-width, high-end GPU like the Inno3D RTX 5090 iChill Frostbite Pro?)
Beyond that point you're probably looking at getting a server. Boards like the X9DRG-OF have eight dual-width slots, and you can get them in a quadruple-power-supply configuration - which you'll want when you add up the power consumption of a bunch of GPUs. Anything rack-mount will be very noisy though.
Another options is a cryptocurrency mining style 'open frame' system with PCIe risers. Google that and you'll find some crazy setups enthusiasts have posted to reddit.
Or you can just run something in the cloud - you can buy a lot of cloud time for $6000.
Let's Encrypt documented their early 2021 whitebox that used 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes, mainly for storage: https://letsencrypt.org/2021/01/21/next-gen-database-servers...
Troy Hunt (HaveIBeenPwned) recently solicited upgrade advice from the internet and settled on an Asus Pro WS TRX50-SAGE WIFI (which doesn't appear to be in the MoboMaps database yet): https://gist.github.com/troyhunt/a6e565981e4769976e9cffb705f...