AMD vs Intel

[dwchan69]

I am new to the forum and currently planning on a new TrusNAS core. Use case would be file services (home use), Plex (mainly to internal Apple TV with maybe one or two external streams when this COVID thing is over while I am on the road), and iSCSI storage for a few VMware VM (a dozen or so, maybe more). I have most of what I needed to be planned out but somewhat stump in terms of CPU / Motherboard. I plan on a system initially with the following but with room to expand

case - Fractal Design Define 7 XL (look at the Node 804, but the microATX somewhat limited as to what I can do)
CPU - something with 8cores and hyperthreading
memory - 64 GB (2 x 32 or 4 x 16 DIMM depend on final motherboard selection)
disk - 8 x 8TB Seagate IronWolf (not sure if I go with IronWolf Pro but open with the right justification), I can double this again in the future
considering 1 pool - 2 raidz1 vdev to start or 1 pool - 4 mirror vdev
L2ARC - not sure if need it to start, no plan yet
SLOG - once again, depend on CPU/motherboard selection. I heard a lot of good things about Intel Optane, but if I understood correctly, this will only work well with an intel CPU/MB combo. As a more universal approach, some form of PLP SSD
Boot - SSD (either SATA or m.2)
Network - Dual 10GB Intel, I think is the T550 or X550 (RJ45)
HBA - LSI 9207 or 9211, consider 9300 series as it also supports SATA12 and future proof. (much like the future option for disk, I can technically add a second HBD in the future when I am ready to expand)

So the questions I have are
1. What is a reasonable power supply size? 650? 750? 850?
2. I am looking at the following options, feel free to common with new ideas. My concerns are a solution that provides me enough PCIe slots to grow (NIC, HBA, more HBA, video (depend on CPU)). Also, try to find a solution where there is enough PCIe lanes for everything, and this has been extremely confusing to understand between vendors and various chipsets. So my thoughts are
a. AMD 1950x with a X399 motherboard. Very familiar with this setup as this is what I am using with my ESX setup. 60 PCIe lanes and sufficient expansion slots. Of course the bad is the cost and overall power requirement (180W on CPU)
b. AMD 3700x or 4750g with a B550 motherboard, totally new for me, main concern if there is enough PCIe lanes to ensure no bottleneck. I think most B550 chipset motherboard has at least 3 PCIe x16 slots (NIC and 2HBA). This is why I am looking into a 4750g to mitigate the video card requirement
c. Intel gen 10 CPU (e.g. 10700) with the latest chipset motherboard. Same concern as AMD, what's the limitation with my PCIe lanes? I can't remember if intel has more or AMD has more? Also, would Optane work as SLOG in this use case?

ANy feedback and comment would be strong appreciated

 

[ThreeDee]

I'm an AMD whore with my Windows setup .. I went Intel on my TrueNAS box just because it was so much cheaper... DDR3 ECC RDIMM's are pretty cheap and my non-recommended Chinese knock-off x79T has 40 pcie lanes with an M.2 slot, quad channel memory, 12 cores/24 threads CPU .. Plus TrueNAS/FreeNAS seems to run great and stable on older Intel stuff .. way overkill for my needs as just a home user running Plex mainly with a few SMB shares...

AMD has PCIe 4.0 .. if you might want x570 chipset as it generally has more lanes available at 4.0 over the B550 if you go with the 3700x or 4750g

650 platinum would more than suffice ..but whatever you end up getting, I'd at least make sure it's 80+ Gold rated from a reputable company.

Don't forget the battery back up

 

[Constantin]

Good morning,
My 8 HDD + 4 SSD drive system is clocking in at 145W but that's with a Win 10 VM running a blueIris NVR. So the 650W PS should do it, as long as your CPU isn't too power hungry.
Re: the processor / motherboard, I'd figure out pronto how many cores you need to dedicate to all the VMs. For example, I'm in the process of removing blueiris from a VM / Jail on my FreeNAS due to buggy performance. From there, it's either a NUC or a dedicated NVR.

For example, my motherboard which features a slow D-series processor has never run above 50% capacity due to my use case. It only has two PCI 3.0x8 slots but onboard SFP+, a 16-drive HBA (20 SATA total, including two SATADOM slots), etc. limiting what I might need to add later.

 

[Yorick]

Consider AMD with AsRock Rack X470D4U or X570D4U. The advantage is that you have good ECC support (no IPMI reporting of ECC errors but otherwise solid) and IPMI for that remote management.

 

[dwchan69]

I am just worried I am not getting a bottleneck related to PCIe lanes. With the latest CPU / MB release by AMD and Intel, what are the PCIe lanes limit?
I can go down the path of AMD threadripper but it seems a bit overkill and power ungry

 

[Yorick]

Take a look at the review here: ASRock Rack X570D4U-2L2T Review an AMD Ryzen Server Motherboard (servethehome.com) . Intel 10G built-in, PCIe 4.0 support for that SLOG. No reason Optane would have an issue, it's just an NVMe drive as far as the UEFI is concerned. Comes with 8xSATA, which means you don't need an additional HBA. You can leave that for when/if you ever get past 8 drives.

 

[banshee28]

Take a look at the review here: ASRock Rack X570D4U-2L2T Review an AMD Ryzen Server Motherboard (servethehome.com) . Intel 10G built-in, PCIe 4.0 support for that SLOG. No reason Optane would have an issue, it's just an NVMe drive as far as the UEFI is concerned. Comes with 8xSATA, which means you don't need an additional HBA. You can leave that for when/if you ever get past 8 drives.

Nice, I just looked at this and I think this may be the board for me! Seems like a really nice new board with everything I may need. I will continue to check this one out, thanks!

 

[Constantin]

I'd read the servethehome article Yorick mentioned carefully to ensure the few issues they encountered won't bother you. It's a great read.

 

[dwchan69]

OK, Just bid and won a gigabyte x399 ATX motherboard, So I am going down the route of AMD threadripper. With that being say, would the 1950x (16cores) be overkill) versus just the 1900x (8 cores). I can't imagine what I will be running on the TrueNAS other than file services and PLEX. Perhaps backup and sync to S3 for backup. I have no plan to run de-dup, will enable compression. I know raidZ1/Z2 does use CPU time, not sure if I really need the extra 8 cores at this time or future with 16 disks)

 

[Constantin]

I doubt you will need more than 8 Cores for that use case but I’d pose the question in a separate thread with a description of the system and your intended use.

 

[dwchan69]

Given I am still a newbie to True/FreeNAS, what are some of the plug-in True/FreeNAS have? Use case / etc? Other than Plex and Backup, can't think of anything else

 

[Constantin]

For example, you could decide to run a jail with windows 10 and BlueIris like I do. That eats cores and memory.

transcoding also requires a lot of cpu capacity (more on that at plex) I personally prefer transcoding at the point of use rather than rhe server but tomato tomatoe.

 

[banshee28]

I'd read the servethehome article Yorick mentioned carefully to ensure the few issues they encountered won't bother you. It's a great read.

Yea just re-read them again and from what I can tell here are the issues I see: BIOS not accessible from BMC, which to me is a pretty much core function which should be available and work. I would hope a simple BIOS update would fix this going forward, but I guess we don't know yet. Also ECC errors are not reported properly! I think these are the 2 main issues and yea I think these should be functioning properly before I consider it. I do like to have the latest gen stuff, so will prob wait vs getting something older.

 

[dwchan69]

Got it, so far I got the Motherboard, CPU (AMD 1900x) and Power Supply 650W down ;) Thank you for all the feedback. Next would be trying to figure out how many drives and raid configuration to see for starter

 

[Constantin]

Hard drive pricing can be wildly all over the place. During Black Friday in the USA, 12TB drives were selling for less than 10TB drives, etc.

use case really matters re pool layout. In general, I’d consider something along the lines of a 6-drive Z2 as a good balance of redundancy, power, and available space. A 2-VDEV HDD pool buys you a lot of performance that you’ll only enjoy if you have a 10GbE connection, for example. My single VDEV Z3 can write at up to 350MB/s with sync on and a good SLOG.

As for the HDDs, i would consider going the shuck route with helium drives, which is pretty much the domain of 10TB+ (Depends on the series). Or buy used (I happen to like gohardrive.com for that purpose) with a warranty from the vendor. But helium makes a big difference re power consumption, heat, and these drives will be on all the time.

Avoid SMR-based drives at all cost.

 

[jayecin]

So i just recently went down the same road as you. I ended up going with an Intel 10700, see my signature for full build. The reason being 2 big points; first Intel is a far better CPU to virtualize on, they just have more experience, more patents etc. AMD does virtualize just fine, i just feel Intel has less quirks or missing features/performance. 2ndly, AMD CPUs dont come with an integrated GPU, so you need to buy a discrete GPU for your build, which will consume space, power, heat and most importantly money. And then a final reason is that Intel igpus support hardware transcoding for x265/x264 using its QuickSync (or something similar named technology). While right now, you cant use the igpu on the 10th gen cpus for plex with TrueNAS/FreeNAS, it is coming down the pipeline.

 

[dwchan69]

Thank you for the feedback Jayecin, I end up using the AMD 1920X and x399 chipset motherboard. This gives me 12 cores, max memory of 128GB, and 40 PCIe lanes to play with. I end up circling back to AMD for my TrueNAS build are based on many factors, one being we been adopting the AMD ThreadRipper for our Lab environment for the last couple of years (1950 and above) based on $/core. We are biased between Asus and Gigabyte motherboard, but it ends up with how many different variants we want to keep in the house in terms of support and troubleshoot. So far, most of the parts between all of our builds using either identical or similar in terms of drivers to minimize support and been rock solid so far.

p.s. We scale our workload pretty linearly using the AMD CPU in a nested ESX environment (3 - node , ESX, 128GB of memory, $40 video card, and an Intel Quad NIC, with build-in VSAN) all within a mid tower chassis and less than $2000. When we started this three years ago, Intel didn't have the core density we needed to pull this off.

 

[Arwen]

That's one of the complaints I have about Intel. They seemed to artificially limit the number of cores at the lower end to 2 or 4, sometimes even without hyper-threading. Yes, AMD does make 2 core, 2 thread processors. But, they are likely dirt cheap. Intel just did not work to make 2 core, 4 thread or 4 core, 8 thread more main stream. (Unless they could profit from it... well, AMD is hopefully profiting from it!)

And don't get me started on Intel's high end processors' number of cores. Sometimes you would have to have a 4 socket server to get a reasonable number of cores. I work with SPARC processors that have 32 cores & 8 threads per core, for a total of 256 threads. And we have some 4 socket servers, so 1024 threads. AMD is catching up, Epyc, Threadripper and even the high end Ryzen now can have an insane number of cores compared to 4 years ago.

 

[jayecin]

Thank you for the feedback Jayecin, I end up using the AMD 1920X and x399 chipset motherboard. This gives me 12 cores, max memory of 128GB, and 40 PCIe lanes to play with. I end up circling back to AMD for my TrueNAS build are based on many factors, one being we been adopting the AMD ThreadRipper for our Lab environment for the last couple of years (1950 and above) based on $/core. We are biased between Asus and Gigabyte motherboard, but it ends up with how many different variants we want to keep in the house in terms of support and troubleshoot. So far, most of the parts between all of our builds using either identical or similar in terms of drivers to minimize support and been rock solid so far.

p.s. We scale our workload pretty linearly using the AMD CPU in a nested ESX environment (3 - node , ESX, 128GB of memory, $40 video card, and an Intel Quad NIC, with build-in VSAN) all within a mid tower chassis and less than $2000. When we started this three years ago, Intel didn't have the core density we needed to pull this off.

AMD is still a great choice, i really wanted to build an AMD Server at first just for the raw processing power they are capable of. My desktop is a 5800x. But thats good to hear that AMD virtualization is working better, i remember when the Ryzen series first came out, it was littered with virtualization issues.

 

[dwchan69]

Don't get me wrong, there were hurdles to jump through, a good example of this is the number of BIOS updates from the motherboard manufacture. But given its current 3rd gen for the threadripper, it is more predictable