Off-Topic Thread V3.0

So I feel the need for a bit of rant/moan on the HEDT segment.

I'm a power user, I have need for a big machine, and I get my money's worth out of them by running them 24/7, often doing science work for the likes of Primegrid (my last discovery, a 1.07m digit prime), when not gaming. As a result, I've gone for the Intel HEDT platforms, the X99 and X299 based ones. With the last of those being 6 years ago, it's showing its age now, clock frequency falls behind, IPC is anaemic, only PCI 3.0 etc.

So I've been thinking it's time to upgrade, and given that Intel just launched it's new Xeon W9 series as their HEDT offering, I've been looking at what options there are.

And the options suck.

AMD made a mess of their Threadripper Pro offering. What they have now is older tech only, PCIe 4.0 and DDR4 only. Their follow-up stemming from Zen3 is a year away, maybe making it out in Q1 2024, lagging heavily behind their desktop 7xxx equivalents. If I'm looking for a costly machine to last half a decade, I'm not buying into something already outdated.

From Intel, there's been no new platform in the six years since until the W790 and Xeon W9 24xx/34xx series. But it at least has current level tech, with PCIe 5 and DDR5.

So what choices are there in W790 land?

So far there's only boards from three manufacturers, namely Supermicro, Asrock and Asus. Supermicro aren't that widely available, and aren't consumer friendly. Asrock have a poor reputation, and are hit and miss with their boards, and given one of these boards is €1k, I'm not risking that on a roll of the dice with them.

That leaves Asus. They have two boards, the Ace and the Sage. The Ace is the lighter one, but it already has compromises, such as only 4 SATA ports, and only two m.2 slots. That only leaves the Sage as a properly specc'd out option.

Except, that only occurs with the right CPU choice. Putting in a W9 2400 means have the PCIe slots and 2 of the 3 m.2 slots don't work, due to PCIe lane count, half the RAM slots don't work due to reduce channels.

Not that you can get many of either the 24xx or 34xx options any way, the lower core count CPUs are OEM only.

So there's nothing that slots in above a normal desktop part, and unless you go overboard on the price and specs, you risk an only half functional system.

What I need is proper AVX support, 8 RAM slots, a high core count, and a larger number of drive options. In the past the X99/X299 platforms did provide those options. But Intel mangled the AVX support in their newer cores as they want to push people to their enterprise/workstation options. Neither Intel or AMD have more than 4 RAM slots on their desktop offerings. I don't need overkill elements like 8 channels, but there's no middle ground. I guess I'm just a small market segment that isn't really served any more, even if it was in the past.