Threadripper & Ryzen only builds (3rd Gen starts on page 50)

[philipbonum]

Hi guys, I'm looking for some help setting up a new computer.
The one I'm currently on has a 2990wx that has a bunch of problems with crashes etc.

The place I bought it from is now helping me to set up a new computer as a replacement. They suggested 3960.
When looking at cpubenchmark.net this looks like a very good deal with a major performance gain.

But with further research on other sites - for instance corona's own benchmark site - scores these as almost the same in performance.

What is the easiest way to compare these you think? Is it ok to compare the first result from each of the cpu's on the corona benchmark site, or should I take something else into consideration when comparing?

I also need to keep in mind the price of the 2990wx when I bought it VS what the 3960 costs now. In my country I'm pretty sure you should get a new product at the same price as the one you bought back then. (I bought the 2990wx Sept/Oct 2019, yikes, I know)

[Juraj]

Rendering performance is not everything. Corona speed will be similar, everything else will be massively better.

Due to 3rd gen price increase 3960X is good swap offer. You could try haggling for 3970X with your pay addition.

[philipbonum]

That is a good point, I do appreciate everything else being faster as well! Hoping for 3970X :)

What is the reason it's going to be "massively better" btw? More of a technical question, but interesting nonetheless

[Juraj]

In this specific scenario it's two things:

1) 3rd gen brings large (20+ perc.) IPC increase, and also clock-speed increase. So you get much faster single-core performance, and everything is still mainly single-thread operated, including 3dsMax. Even during IR, you will be doing single-thread operations while the PC is rendering. The overall experience will be much smoother.

2) 2970WX and 2990WX had very specific, compromise-born architecture with multiple NUMA (memory access), and also only two our of four dies had direct access to memory controller, the other dies had to first go through their "siblings". Depending on workload, there was serious performance penalty. And also it took quite long until Windows Scheduler learned to use the correct cores and I doubt it works well even now.

Looking back, 2990WX as chip was largely a mistake. The rendering performance was fantastic, and the price-value was something phenomenal, but it had way too many issues because of its design. 3rd-gen Threadrippers, feature absolutely zero such compromises, all dies have direct access to memory controller with centralized IO, and they use UMA (effectively single NUMA node).

With that said, people who experience crashes with 2990WX probably have wrong motherboard, wrong memory or sometimes both. 2990WX had only two good boards, and it was very selective in memory speed/timings.
Again, no such issues with 3rd-gen, all the boards are great, and you can run almost any memory.

[lupaz]

In this specific scenario it's two things:

1) 3rd gen brings large (20+ perc.) IPC increase, and also clock-speed increase. So you get much faster single-core performance, and everything is still mainly single-thread operated, including 3dsMax. Even during IR, you will be doing single-thread operations while the PC is rendering. The overall experience will be much smoother.

2) 2970WX and 2990WX had very specific, compromise-born architecture with multiple NUMA (memory access), and also only two our of four dies had direct access to memory controller, the other dies had to first go through their "siblings". Depending on workload, there was serious performance penalty. And also it took quite long until Windows Scheduler learned to use the correct cores and I doubt it works well even now.

Looking back, 2990WX as chip was largely a mistake. The rendering performance was fantastic, and the price-value was something phenomenal, but it had way too many issues because of its design. 3rd-gen Threadrippers, feature absolutely zero such compromises, all dies have direct access to memory controller with centralized IO, and they use UMA (effectively single NUMA node).

With that said, people who experience crashes with 2990WX probably have wrong motherboard, wrong memory or sometimes both. 2990WX had only two good boards, and it was very selective in memory speed/timings.
Again, no such issues with 3rd-gen, all the boards are great, and you can run almost any memory.

Great to know. Thanks Juraj. As usual, amazing knowledge.

[tewe]

Hello guys,
i need to buy a good and cheap computer for 3dsmax +corona/vray, revit, audio and games.
I am thinking to buy a Ryzen 7 2700x even if it is this old because i dont find a good benchmark(for rendering) for Ryzen 7 3700X vs  Intel 9700k/ 10700k vs 2700x
It was very easy back in time to chose between Ryzen 1700 and Intel at the same price but this was 5 years ago. Right now i feel like AMD increased the prices and Intel is more discounted even in EU.

[INgenia]

What do you think about new Lenovo ThinkStation P620 (AMD Threadripper Pro 3975WX)?

[Juraj]

Can you get it for a crazy deal? (One that is even better than the 40perc. discount on their website lol) Because otherwise I wouldn't bother at all.

In general, Integrated Workstations from big brands (Dell, Lenovo, IBM) only make sense for corporate world who buys them in bulk, needs someone else to warranty and service them. And can get much better B2B price.
They're not for consumers (which we are).

There is just one review on Anandtech effectively but this is my takeaway:

The price is absurd of course, which is on par with enterprise integrators. There is 2-3X price multiplier for every part. 3995WX has market price of 6000 Dollars (Though not yet for retail), while Lenovo charges 12k as upgrade for it!. Not even Apple does this...
The whole build is not using the full potential of the platform. Max 512GB is ok, but other motherboards can support up to 2TB. The platform can have up to 7x PCI4.0 x16 slots (like the Asus SAGE WX80 and Gigabyte WX80 boards do!). The custom lenovo board can not even fit 2x tripple slot GPUs... so forget about 3090FE, this really is only for dual-slot GPUs. Why such poor layout for such grandiose platform? This is cheap motherboard.

The air-cooling is "sufficient", which means it sucks when compared to bigger tower with Noctua. They don't compare it directly but seeing the noise measurement and temps their own solution is at least 30 perc. worse than you can do yourself.

Lastly, the whole platform doesn't seem to bring any tangible benefits in the end according to benchmark. Not one of them (including Corona) benefitted from the 8-channels. Could be good platform for water-cooling 7-GPUs ;- ). But by itself, it's not really upgrade.

And most important, I wouldn't buy it right now. I would wait few months to see if next Threadrippers (5xxx) will arrive or not. This is fully in air, no one knows. They have little reason to bring them, and then there's the whole TSMC capacity overload..

[INgenia]

Yeah, impeccable.
Thanks for the info.
From what you say, they still have a good run for the current Threadripper........

[nefertum]

Hello gentlemen,
I'm set to get myself a new wokrstation. It's now 5+ years since I got the current one and I've lost all track of a progress in hardware world (i'm aware of a last years big releases of 3xxx graphic cards and 3xxx amd cpus but thats about it).
I intend to educate myself before making any purchase, but i'd like to ask you for some starting points. Where to look at with cca 4000EUR budget, used primarily for archviz in 3dsMax + corona. For some time now i'm hitting the maximum capabilities of my current machine, most visibly (corona warning popups during render) in RAM department (currently 32GB). Additionaly, more GPU-wise, i'd like to delve in the near future into Unreal engine and Lumion and explore their options in animated archviz and VR. My current setup has Quadro K2200, and that was, in retrospect, a dumb move that prevented me from any playing with gpu-based engines.

Again, the primary goal is to have minimal performance limitations during creation of the scene in cpu based Corona though. One of you mentioned few pages back having no HW bottleneck even with quick 8K previews since the release of last generetion of CPUs and that sounds heavenly to me. Thank You for any advice.

[Kuky]

Hello,

I have the following situation: I know somebody who wants to cash out his Threadripper 3960X rig and is willing to sell it for about 60% of the new value. But for some strange reason this rig has only 32GB RAM installed.

I am just starting out with Corona and I have 32GB on my current ancient rig (i7-3770k 4 cores from 2012). For the moment being for learning Corona I did not have memory problems with the typical scenes I am working.

Now I know that everybody will tell me to just sell the RAM and buy a 128GB kit but that's 800 EUR which I am willing to spend when (and if) I am starting to make money with this rig.

What I am interested to know is if technically when rendering/IR the exact same scene on a 4 cores/8 threads or a 24cores/48 threads Corona needs more RAM. It's not clear for me how Corona is doing the memory management.

Thank you,
Cristian

[Juraj]

32GB is very limiting these days. Memory wise management, there shouldn't be too much difference between IR and Regular rendering (Performance wise there is).

Just checked memory prices because 800 sounds like too much..and oh man... they are rising again. I bought two 64GB kits (Total 128) of Patriot Viper 3600/18 3 days ago..and they are already 30 Euro more expensive. And selling for 280 Euro each...I bought them for 220 sometimes last year, around summer.

[Kuky]

Thank you for your answer. Yes, indeed 32 Gb is limiting in production but for the moment I am learning so it will do for a while.

The problem with memory management was more regarding if 24 cores will use the same amount of memory as 4 cores when rendering the exact same scene ?

[romullus]

I'm not an expert, but i don't think there's significant (if any at all) correlation between number of cores and RAM consumption in rendering with Corona.

Edit: you may want to read this FAQ about RAM: https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=17892.0

[Juraj]

The problem with memory management was more regarding if 24 cores will use the same amount of memory as 4 cores when rendering the exact same scene ?

It's a good question actually because I've seen this mentioned many times by reviewers (esp. the popular "tech" reviewers on youtuber,etc..) "that you need lot of memory to feed these cores".

It sounded interesting in theory but I've never seen it replicated in any benchmark at all. As long as there were enough channels for the platform (four for Threadripper) there was never any performance issue or larger memory consumption between different tiers of Threadrippers (24 vs 32 vs 64).