44 THREADS XEON WORKSTATION AND 32 THREADS OPTERON SERVER RETRO BUILDS
As you already know i fed up using [modern Ryzen/Radeon hardware] and decided to go a bit retro. Cheap Chinese clone mobos and second-hand high-performance cpu’s of previous generations induced me to rebuild my workstation and also fool around with Opteron-based server.
Here is [very detailed spreadsheet comparision] of almost all available Chinese x79/x89/x99 boards on the market.
BROADWELL WORKSTATION [Windows7 SP2+]
| PART | MODEL |
|---|---|
| CPU | Xeon E5-2696v4 22c/44t |
| COOLER | Noctua NH-D15 SE-AM4 |
| MOBO | Huananzhi X99 F8 [Asrock X99 Extreme 4 spare mobo] |
| RAM | 64Gb [16Gbx4] DDR4 2400Mhz ECC Reg Quad channel |
| NVME | 1Tb Samsung 980 Pro |
| SSD | 860Gb Samsung SSD |
| HDD | 2Tb Seagate Blue |
| VIDEO | 4Gb Palit Geforce 1650 Kalmx [24Gb 3090Ti planned in ~2024] |
| AUDIO | ESI Maya 44EX |
| CASE | Fractal Design Define S2 |
| PSU | Seasonic X-400 Fanless |
| MON | 30" Nec PA301 |
| KEYS | Vortex Tab90M |
As a matter of fact I am pretty satisfied with Broadwell Xeon build. Any applications run silky smooth without any hiccup.
OPTERON SERVER [Windows XP SP4+]
| PART | MODEL |
|---|---|
| CPU | Opteron 6386SE 16c/32t |
| COOLER | Noctua NH-U12DO A3 Socket G34 |
| MOBO | Jingsha X89 |
| RAM | 32Gb [16Gbx2] DDR3 1600 ECC Reg Dual channel |
| SSD | 480Gb Kingston A400 |
| HDD | 2Tb Seagate Ironwolf Pro |
| VIDEO | 2Gb Asus Geforce 1030 Silent |
| CASE | Some unbranded one |
| PSU | Seasonic PX-400 Fanless 400W |
| MON | 19" Eizo M1900 |
| KEYS | IBM KB-8926 / Topre RealForce RGB |
| UPS | APC Back-UPS CS 500 |
Cheap mobo doesn’t support quad channel, so dual is used.
I’m not counting it as an issue because server is used for light NAS/FTP workloads.
So, who cares about quad channel for anyway?