New Desktop PC

[Ed P]

Because of all the overheads caused by the ‘fixes’ to counter the various CPU exploits I’m starting to get dissatisfied with my current four year old PC.  It used to run VMs like stink but thanks to the double-whammy from both host and guest systems (including those of Linux) performance is now definitely average. I’m also aware that with the forthcoming ray tracing improvements in games I’m going to need an RTX capable box, as a result I’m soon going to have to take a hammer to the piggy bank!

If anyone else is in a similar position and is looking at the Intel versus Ryzen option then this performance comparison may be of interest.

[Dave Rice]

Interesting.

What about the disk i/o? Have you found a solution for that yet or do the latest NVMe have the brute force to get over the bottleneck?

I’ve been playing around with iSCSI LUN targets on the Synology and (more for security) implemented it as remote storage on the last MoD CCTV project. I don’t know if that would just move the bottleneck elsewhere with regards a VM?

[Ed P]

Frankly I am guessing, but the latest NVMes have a lot of i/o channels and act like block devices:

“All I/O submission functions are asynchronous and non-blocking. They will not block or stall the thread for any reason.  . . .”

Provided the OS/CPU and mobo makes full use of the device then I’d guess that it would be good to go and not provide bottlenecks, I think however that I’d need one NVMe for the OS and one for the VMs unless I can get sneaky with RAM drives . . .

I would hazard a guess that careful mobo selection would be a key step.. From my reading Win10 fully supports NVMe (I do not know about Linux), as do mobos supporting Intel 9 series and X99 chipsets. (The Ryzen has four lanes that connect directly to  NVMe and supposedly all AM4 mobos have two NV?Me slots). As I said some research will be required to confirm all this as I move closer towards the Autumn and ceremonial Piggy smashing!

[Tippon]

Ed P wrote:

supposedly all AM4 mobos have two NVMe slots

Unless I’ve misunderstood, mine only has one slot:

https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/B450M-PRO-VDH-MAX/Specification

 

[Ed P]

Tippon wrote:

Ed P wrote:

supposedly all AM4 mobos have two NVMe slots

Unless I’ve misunderstood, mine only has one slot: https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/B450M-PRO-VDH-MAX/Specification

Hence my ‘supposedly’ comment. I picked up the original M2 quote from a Reddit thread:

“Most AM4 Motherboards shown at CES (at least the ones using X370 and B350 chipsets) were configured with 2 M.2 Slots:”

My guess is that the AM4 spec allows for two slots but of course the mobo manufacturers can pare down the peripherals to save money.

The MSI X370 has two slots for example.  However the devil is in the detail as some M2 slots only support the slower PCIe2 storage devices.

I think I am going to have to read a lot of detailed spec sheets!

 

[Ed P]

In theory the latest X570 chipset for the Ryzen 3000 series allows up to four NVMe devices. But again that would be down to the mobo manufacturer.

[keith with the teef]

Rumer has it that 2020 zen 3 is postponed until 2021. Ouch.

But then zen 4 is the Man.

I have the 3600 with a 3600x cooler, efectivley truning it into the 3600x.

Stunning CPU.

I recently got me a 4TB seagte HDD. Stunning performace for 5k+rpm spinner. I did a 250+GB transfer from ssd to the drive the other day and I kid you not it did not fall below 150MB/s.

[Dave Rice]

For B450 two NVMe slots are only really found on higher end ATX motherboards and even then the second slot is limited to Gen3 x2 rather than x4. No idea about X470, never needed to use one.

[Ed P]

The X570 mobos tend to be gamer models but the Asus ROG Tuf has dual PCIe4.0 NVMe sockets. It would be interesting to know if these could be configured as Raid Zero to debottleneck i/o even further.

A lot of quiet reading will be required over the next three months or so as the NVMe spec seems to be tightly coupled to the Ryzen gen number.

[Dave Rice]

For AM4 CPUs and pre X570, PCIe 4.0 will be turned off in the near future Toms Hardware

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