I don't need another system...I don't need another system...I don't need another system...

[IEC]

I told myself I didn't need another system, and that I could wait until the fall to expand my farm. I told myself that as recently as yesterday.

Then a $269.99 Ryzen 1700 appeared:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113428

I think if I retire a few of my older Intel rigs and consolidate/rebuild my GPU farm into my Ryzen rigs I should be able to dedicate a third Ryzen to run BOINC sprints for the TeAm while leaving room for a few more down the road...

 

[Aurum]

I've been building my latest rigs with Gigabyte GA-X99-UD3P MBs:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128772R
I like the way they use all 40 PCIe lanes straight from the CPU to support graphics cards in either x8x8x16x8 or x16x8x16. There's a block diagram in the manual and description on the overview page:
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-X99-UD3P-rev-10#ov
Penny for your thoughts as to whether this approach is better than sharing 8 lanes with the Northbridge switch???

 

[StefanR5R]

I like the way they use all 40 PCIe lanes straight from the CPU to support graphics cards in either x8x8x16x8 or x16x8x16. [...]
Penny for your thoughts as to whether this approach is better than sharing 8 lanes with the Northbridge switch???

For Folding@Home, PCIe v2 x8 or better is recommended:

Regarding the PCIe bus, I have personally found that maximum performance requires PCIe v2.0 @8x or better. Performance drops off sharply at 4x, and nearly dies at 1x.

I think several other GPU based Distributed Computing applications have similar requirements on the bus. My guess from this, and from the bus utilization which I have seen with PCIe v3 x16 and x8, is that one could get away with PCIe v3 x4 without too much of a hit too.

But if a PCIe v3 x4 or PCIe v2 x8 slot would be used which is supplied by the PCH instead of the CPU, than this slot would suffer from sharing the bandwidth of the DMI interface with everything else which is attached to the PCH, such as SATA, networking, USB, and more. And DMI 2.0 of Z68...X99 only has the bandwidth of PCIe v2 x4 and would therefore cause a big hit to performance of a GPU attached through the PCH.

DMI 3.0 of Z170...X299 is like PCIe v3 x4, hence there should be only a smaller hit to GPU performance compared to PCIe v3 x4 directly from the CPU --- in theory.

 

[VirtualLarry]

It's an Asus RT-AC87U.

I think that I saw those, refurbished, on Newegg's ebay store for a pretty fair price.

I'm currently running an AC68R (same HW as the U), running Shibby Tomato. Works fairly well for me, but I've been wondering lately about some network intrusions, and now I'm starting to wonder about my NAS units and my router.