The Scottish Boinc Team

CPU: 32 core threadripper, watercooled
Mobo: Asus or Asrock, ATX form factor
Ram: 128Gb
Boot disk: M.2 ssd

GPU: twin 1080Ti (since 20-series seems to be hitting problems)
PSU: 1200W

OS: Linux Mint

Any suggestions / corrections? Interesting to see how this will change over time

I'd settle for this wee beastie drooly click button and perhaps a small personal nuclear power station

Naw, it still wouldn't manage some of these LHC tasks

... plus I intend to live my fantasy ... Gimme 6 months

A couple of things but the main one is heat. You need to use water cooled 1080Ti. Each of them dumps 300W of heat inside the case unless they are water cooled. The 2990WX produces 250W which is going to be ducted by the radiator. That means if you have 600W of heat from the GPUs the CPU cooler will be using hot air to cool itself.

Secondly, if I were going to wait 6 months I'd wait to see what the TR3 is going to be. AMD recently said it would be available next year and the FP math would be 2X faster and the AVX2 implementation would be much better. Also all cores will have direct access to memory (the 2990WX doesn't). Earlier this year the rumor mill said it wuold have 48 cores/ 96 threads.

Thank you, sir. This is exactly why I posted.

As it happens, I already got a sweet deal on a couple of used 1080 so couldn't resist that - £325 each

My fantasy build would have twin Titan V GPUs. The 1080 Ti does ~11791 SP/368 DP while the Titan V does ~12288 SP/6144 DP. They should smoke on Einstein, Milkyway and everything else. They are rather pricey at $3k US each though. It's a fantasy build right?

A new model threadrippper will also reduce the price of the 2990WX of course

Yup, fantasy build, scole

No-one has commented on the newer Intel Platinum series yet. I've not got above the E5-2600 v4 series and the current cost on anything bigger (by Intel) are huge

Of course there is also the E7 series of Xeons that would do a pretty good job ... 4 of them on a single MB.

Yup - I have some twin CPU E5 systems. Do you get twin socket mobo for threadripper?

No, dual socket MB are servers and they typically don't allow overclocking even if the CPU allows it. I'm also not sure the 2990WX supports multiple CPUs. That's the benefit of the E7 Xeons they allow up to 8 CPUs to be used together. The E5 only allow 2 CPUs.

I haven't done any overclocking as I mainly run Xeons. My understanding - and it could be totally wrong - is that a Xeon can only overclock on one care (if at all) ??

E5 V3s had a bug in them and you could change the microcode on a machine and get all cores to run at max turbo. That was fixed in the V4s. I don't have any V3s but that was something that could be done fairly easily.

Thanks - I've got mostly v2 sadly (unless same applies) Other than that, it is v4 and it doesn't seem worth the hassle for 2 fast threads

It's my understanding that that bug was specific to the V3s. If you have good cooling it makes a huge difference.

I'd up the PSU to 1400W or higher. The 2990WX draws about 380W at stock ... then plus the 1080ti x2 ... it's gonna be very close to 1200W.

Damn - the PSU is the only bit I've got so far

Might be sensible to stick to only 1080s then

looking at the specs the 1070's are better value for money than the 1080's. My 1070 was half the price of a 1080 and is in no way half the card.
less power draw to.

Thanks - I know a guy getting out of Bitcoin mining who has a dozen 1070 coming up for sale - eBay would suggest on or above the £250 mark? I only paid £325 for the 1080 though which I thought was a good deal.

Just missed it

Unfortunately I need new race chassis etc. for next year

On most projects the 2990WX does about 1.5X my dual Xeons E5 V4s. However I ran some SRBase this week and the Intels blow the doors off the 2990WX. AMD did a crappy job of AVX implementation.

Next summer the TR3 will come out (rumor 96-128 threads) and AMD is saying they are going to fix AVX and also double the FP processing speed. If that is true it will be an absolute monster!

which e5 v4 though? Even one Xeon 2696 / 2699 is more expensive than the 2990WX - and that one at auction went for close to 40% off of the usual price

I have dual 2695 V4 ES (72t) and dual 2683 V4 production (64t).

The point was that the shortcomings of the TR2 will be rectified with next summer's release. I'm happy with my 2 2990WX however I won't build a 3rd one ... I'm waiting for the next generation.

Yes - I do appreciate what you are saying. I'll be hoping for price on the 2990WX to drop sharply when next gen comes out & will look at the bang-for-buck, and bang-for-watt figures then

Do you think, if I asked nicely, they'd join TSBT and crunch for us overnight?

davidBAM wrote: ↑Tue Dec 18, 2018 7:10 am Do you think, if I asked nicely, they'd join TSBT and crunch for us overnight?

I thought exactly the same. If this happened I would suspect it could exhaust all projects within hours.

Well based on Intel's latest leaked info, my build would have a W-3175X CPU (28c/56t, 3.1 ghz/3.7 all/guess, 6 channel DDR4 and plenty PCIe lanes for 2 Titan Vs and a couple M.2 drives)

Based upon AMD's last leaked info, my dream build would have a Ryzen Threadripper from the 3000 'Castlepeak' series, rumoured to have 64 cores for the top model.
Rumour also have it that this generation will allow dual socket mobo's for them Threadrippers, which would mean a possible 128 real cores/256 threads on one mobo.
It could turn out to be however that the 64 cores come from the dual mobo and that the platform will -for the time being- max out at 128 threads.
I hope that there will be 64GB ECC UDIMMs at decent speed and price too at the launch date...and dito 128Gb ECC UDIMMS when the 64-core CPU becomes reality

What will be the next step? Four threads per core, eight perhaps?
Still more cores seems to create serious heat problems -those 64-core Threadrippers 3990WX Black Editions are rumoured to require a 360mm AIO cooler, and the most expensive option comes with a bundled 480mm AIO cooler, and a NZXT case.

I hope they finally fix the AVX capability. The 2990WX flat sucks in comparison to Intel Xeons on SRBase or PG. On projects that aren't AVX intensive the 2990WX kick butt.

Bryan wrote: ↑Wed Dec 19, 2018 10:05 pm I hope they finally fix the AVX capability. The 2990WX flat sucks in comparison to Intel Xeons on SRBase or PG. On projects that aren't AVX intensive the 2990WX kick butt.

Threadripper, Threadripper 2 and Threadripper 3 might benefit from optimized AMD applications, preferably built on a non-Intel compiler. And from libraries that do not have lines in them as

If vendor_string equals Intel then ...
else goto ...

They would also benefit if the AVX registers could do both multiplication and division like the Intel architecture. AMD has said they will fix it in TR3 because they have a piss poor implementation that hobbles their CPUs versus the Intel's. They also said they wouldn't support AVX 512 yet. They said they will double FP processing speed. The TR3 is going to be a monster!