News Miss The HEDT Glory Days? Build a 96-core 12-Channel DDR5 Beast with AMD EPYC

[Admin]

With single-socket SP5 motherboards available, 96-core machines with up to 12-channel DDR5 memory are possible.

Miss The HEDT Glory Days? Build a 96-core 12-Channel DDR5 Beast with AMD EPYC : Read more

 

[emike09]

I do miss the HEDT days. Still rocking X299 with an i9-10920X @ 4.8GHz all-core. For me though, it's less about the core count and more about the PCI-e lanes, quad-channel memory, 8 DIMM slots, an overclockable CPU, and near-Xeon stability. My Tuf X299 Mk1 board has been a beast and runs my 64GB kit of DDR4-3600 CL16 at DDR4-4000, CL16 without sweating.

My dreams for the next HEDT platform would be similar, but right now, I care more about frequency than core count. I game, run the full Adobe suite, do heavy encoding, run a few Hyper-V VMs and an NVR, all on one system. Since I game a lot, frequency is important, and all other applications can benefit from that. I don't need 64 or 96 slower cores if applications aren't going to use those cores.

Having 16-24 cores that can run 5.2+GHz stable all-core (none of those efficiency cores), non-stop, would be awesome. With the 5 NVMe drives I run (don't forget at least 4 SATA ports for HDD storage), dual 3090 GPUs, USB and audio expansion boards, capture card, I need more PCI-e lanes than Intel's puny 20 lanes. What a joke - 16+4 lanes. I know PCI-e v5 has double the bandwidth of v4 and running a GPU at x8 on v5 is totally fine, but I run my systems for 6-7 years before upgrading, and that doesn't leave much room for future upgrades or other expansion cards. I'm also not in a rush to move to 128GB RAM yet, 64GB of higher-bandwidth memory is fine for now.

Bring back enthusiast HEDT! Give us those lanes and memory bandwidth! Give us high-frequency CPU options as well as high core-count options! The way Intel has been failing, I'm likely to move to AMD, even though they aren't king in gaming, and I personally don't find AMD as stable as Intel.

One rig to rule them all, and in the darkness, bind them.

 

[TechieTwo]

If I were to build a 96 core PC I'd be able to download my e-mail Spam in record time. 😉

 

[drajitsh]

I do miss the HEDT days. Still rocking X299 with an i9-10920X @ 4.8GHz all-core. For me though, it's less about the core count and more about the PCI-e lanes, quad-channel memory, 8 DIMM slots, an overclockable CPU, and near-Xeon stability. My Tuf X299 Mk1 board has been a beast and runs my 64GB kit of DDR4-3600 CL16 at DDR4-4000, CL16 without sweating.

My dreams for the next HEDT platform would be similar, but right now, I care more about frequency than core count. I game, run the full Adobe suite, do heavy encoding, run a few Hyper-V VMs and an NVR, all on one system. Since I game a lot, frequency is important, and all other applications can benefit from that. I don't need 64 or 96 slower cores if applications aren't going to use those cores.

Having 16-24 cores that can run 5.2+GHz stable all-core (none of those efficiency cores), non-stop, would be awesome. With the 5 NVMe drives I run (don't forget at least 4 SATA ports for HDD storage), dual 3090 GPUs, USB and audio expansion boards, capture card, I need more PCI-e lanes than Intel's puny 20 lanes. What a joke - 16+4 lanes. I know PCI-e v5 has double the bandwidth of v4 and running a GPU at x8 on v5 is totally fine, but I run my systems for 6-7 years before upgrading, and that doesn't leave much room for future upgrades or other expansion cards. I'm also not in a rush to move to 128GB RAM yet, 64GB of higher-bandwidth memory is fine for now.

Bring back enthusiast HEDT! Give us those lanes and memory bandwidth! Give us high-frequency CPU options as well as high core-count options! The way Intel has been failing, I'm likely to move to AMD, even though they aren't king in gaming, and I personally don't find AMD as stable as Intel.

One rig to rule them all, and in the darkness, bind them.

That's one sweet system. Perhaps you can post a review

 

[rafradek]

I do miss the HEDT days. Still rocking X299 with an i9-10920X @ 4.8GHz all-core. For me though, it's less about the core count and more about the PCI-e lanes, quad-channel memory, 8 DIMM slots, an overclockable CPU, and near-Xeon stability. My Tuf X299 Mk1 board has been a beast and runs my 64GB kit of DDR4-3600 CL16 at DDR4-4000, CL16 without sweating.

My dreams for the next HEDT platform would be similar, but right now, I care more about frequency than core count. I game, run the full Adobe suite, do heavy encoding, run a few Hyper-V VMs and an NVR, all on one system. Since I game a lot, frequency is important, and all other applications can benefit from that. I don't need 64 or 96 slower cores if applications aren't going to use those cores.

Having 16-24 cores that can run 5.2+GHz stable all-core (none of those efficiency cores), non-stop, would be awesome. With the 5 NVMe drives I run (don't forget at least 4 SATA ports for HDD storage), dual 3090 GPUs, USB and audio expansion boards, capture card, I need more PCI-e lanes than Intel's puny 20 lanes. What a joke - 16+4 lanes. I know PCI-e v5 has double the bandwidth of v4 and running a GPU at x8 on v5 is totally fine, but I run my systems for 6-7 years before upgrading, and that doesn't leave much room for future upgrades or other expansion cards. I'm also not in a rush to move to 128GB RAM yet, 64GB of higher-bandwidth memory is fine for now.

Bring back enthusiast HEDT! Give us those lanes and memory bandwidth! Give us high-frequency CPU options as well as high core-count options! The way Intel has been failing, I'm likely to move to AMD, even though they aren't king in gaming, and I personally don't find AMD as stable as Intel.

One rig to rule them all, and in the darkness, bind them.

Even the newest rtx 4000 does not support pcie 5.0, keep that in mind

 

[thestryker]

I miss HEDT being a real thing, but AMD put an axe through it with the TR 3000 series processors. Intel couldn't really compete and AMD didn't care about anyone who needed memory bandwidth/pcie lanes unless they also needed core count. Prices ballooned and clocks couldn't match desktop so HEDT effectively ceased to exist. I still hope there is enough of a market for Intel to bring it back, but with the way both companies are pushing desktop products to the edge of efficiency I'm not holding my breath.

Even the newest rtx 4000 does not support pcie 5.0, keep that in mind

This is the inherent problem with the extra bandwidth in newer pcie revisions. Your addin cards have to support it and/or your board has to properly support bifurcation or your benefit is zero.