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Comment by fassssst | Hacker News Reader

Excited to see massive performance improvements in desktop hardware again. 7950X3D + an RTX 4090 + a PCIe 5 SSD will be quite the system for programming, machine learning, video editing, music production, gaming...

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> 7950X3D + an RTX 4090 + a PCIe 5 SSD will be quite the system for programming

Agreed, but not for testing, please. Too much stuff out there already seems to be designed for or tested on what might as well be supercomputers like the above, and then get shipped out to run on Grandma's 7 year old <Misc Manufacturer> laptop.

This is an odd take. Why shouldn't software benchmarks be showcased with the best available hardware? How am I supposed to reason about MySQL performance results taken from a run-of-the-mill dual-core machine from 2015?

Replace MySQL with any client-side app

I'm not talking about benchmarks, I'm talking about average end user experience.

I think they intended to refer to software development QA, not benchmarking. I do agree with the sentiment that consumer software should generally be usable on 10 year old hardware. "Generally" carries a lot of weight here, because intensive applications like CAD will always be laggy on old hardware.

it's meant for the multitude of electron crapware that's being shoveled down our throat.

The same thing happens with displays. Designers and devs are using things like high-end Dell Ultrasharps, LG UltraFines, the integrated screens in MacBook Pros, iMac 27" displays/Studio Displays, Pro Display XDRs, etc but in reality a huge number of the screens in use are things like those terrible 1366x766 TN panels that dominated budget 10"-17" laptops for over a decade. I'm fairly confident the low-contrast flat design trend that's been going for a while now wouldn't have been a thing if it were a requirement for UIs to be usable and reasonably good looking on a crappy $250 Walmart special Dell Inspiron from 2012.

The wonderful thing about webpage design is your user don't give a f**k about color correction. Monitors nowadays are almost shipped with a default configuration of high saturation, high contrast, high color temperature. To the point that I think standard srgb 'paper white' is pointless for webpages. Because virtually nobody except designer themselves will enable it on their monitor.

Maybe some group should get consensus about modern monitor 'paper white' so at least everybody has a daily monitor in same setting no matter how good/bad his monitor is.

Web devs should be getting 10 years old netbooks, then we might have web that's not dog slow and fat

I have a 6-months old laptop with the latest intel processor and many of these web 3.0 websites (including alchmey own website) are too damn slow to be operable.

I'm on a 3970x, 3090 and nvme-pcie-4 x 4 (raid 0), 256gb ram... I haven't found a need to upgrade, or have reached this systems potential by any stretch. especially for video editing, music production and photography and compiling...

I dunno the only direction I care for at the moment is TDP

When fully utilizing NVMe storage raid array are you maxing out CPU?

Not even close!

I'm on a 5800X with a 3080ti and 64GB, also PCIe 4.0 SSDs. I built in in 2019 then upgraded the CPU a year ago from a 3600x to the 5800x and it's so insanely fast for everything I do, including VMs, compiles, transcodes, etc. Nutty performance. The past few years have had amazing performance boosts.

AMD sticking to one socket (AM4) for multiple generations was a great move for end users. I am also on 3600x and just yesterday was looking to order a 5800x since the prices have dropped a lot and the performance gain is around 50% just by upgrading one component.

That is my main reason to upgrade, even from 5950x (which is still selling very well). "Future-proof" for 4-5 years, with easy upgrades. Only problem is, Intel is also now claiming LGA 1700 will be here for a couple more years. But nothing compared to what AMD offers.

Individual cores on the 7950x are roughly twice as fast as what you have. If your work isn't massively multithreaded, then a 7950x will likely perform quite a bit better than a Threadripper 3970x. (Though of course you won't be able to get more than 128GB RAM.)

This is with clamping down TDP on the 7950x to roughly 110W. It's an absolute beast.

Besides more RAM, 3970x also has proper ECC support.

And more PCIe lanes, compared to the consumer platforms with a measly 20/24 (which is basically one GPU and one NVMe full bandwidth).

How is the ECC support deficient on later CPUs? I checked the docs, it does seem to be supported on the 7000x series.

The CPU is alright, but the motherboards are lacking. You can install ECC memory modules on them and the system will boot, but you don't know for sure if ECC is really working unless the motherboard reports memory status like how many errors were correct.

Keep in mind that 128 GB barely works on AM5 (basically, EXPO/XMP doesn't, only regular JEDEC speeds, i.e. 4800 MT/s) [1] 2 sticks of RAM up to 64 GB is the fully functional maximum.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/xzj69v/is_anyone_runni...

Are you saying that 2x32GB is the max that allows for EXPO/XMP? I'm thinking about building a system like that and this is critical. Do you have any better resources that explore this more and test out different configurations?

That's my understanding, yes. All my knowledge is from random Reddit threads however.

Since I was scared off 128 GB by all those complaints, I built a 7950X system with 2*32GB memory, and it runs well/stable at its rated 6000 MT/s with EXPO on (also, AMD says 6000 MT/s is the sweet spot for AM5 memory interface, so I am happy).

Motherboard: ASRock X670E Steel Legend

RAM: G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR5-6000 CL30

Here is another thread I remember reading: https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/za0x0q/level1tech...

That's what I got (7950x steel legend), except that I'm running 128GB memory at 4800.

Here's my stream results (with the cpu in 105watt "eco" mode):

  $ wget https://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream/FTP/Code/stream.c
  $ gcc -O3 -fopenmp stream.c
  $ a.out

  Number of Threads counted = 32

  Copy:           45571.7
  Scale:          40672.0
  Add:            45317.3
  Triad:          42759.0

With array size 8,000,000

  Copy:           31551.3
  Scale:          30983.7
  Add:            34403.6
  Triad:          34484.1

Interesting, didn't think memory speed will make so much difference but it did.

7950x X670E Steel Legend, standard mode, 2*32 GB = 64 GB RAM at 6000, CL 30.

    Array size = 1,000,0000

    Copy:           61488.8
    Scale:          55905.4
    Add:            61320.2
    Triad:          57706.5

    Array size = 8,000,0000

    Copy:           43631.0
    Scale:          43062.7
    Add:            46782.6
    Triad:          46966.8

Wow, that's significant. I may have to look into that.

Running with two DIMMs per channel is more challenging for the CPU's memory controller than one DIMM per channel, and it's much worse if they're dual-rank DIMMs—which current 32GB DDR5 modules are. I believe the EXPO/XMP profiles are all based on using only two DIMMs total, because those modules are sold in kits of two. At some point in the next year, there should be 24GB single-rank modules hitting the market, allowing for 48GB at top speed or 96GB with less of a performance penalty than 128GB from 4x32GB currently causes.

I can't max out my PCI slots and run 256gb in quad channel, though.

I'm on an 8+ year old workstation with an i5-4460 (quad core, no HT) 3.2ghz, 16gb memory, first gen SSD and I also don't feel the need to upgrade.

All of the web apps I build inside of Docker with WSL 2 reload in a few dozen milliseconds at most. I can edit 1080p video without any delay and raw rendering speed doesn't matter because for batch jobs I do them overnight.

Writing to disk is fast and my internet is fast. Things feel super snappy. I've been building computers from parts since about 1998, I think this is the longest I ever went without an upgrade.

> Writing to disk is fast and my internet is fast. Things feel super snappy. I've been building computers from parts since about 1998, I think this is the longest I ever went without an upgrade.

I did like you: rocking a Core i7-6700 from, what, 2015 up until early 2022. 16 GB of RAM, NVMe PCI 3.0 x4 SSD, the first Samsung ones. I basically build that machine around one of the first Asus mobo to offer a NVMe M.2 slot.

It was and still is an amazing machine. I gave it to my wife and I'm now using an AMD 3700X since about a year and... I'll be changing it for a 7700X in the coming weeks (hopefully).

The 3700X is definitely faster than my trusty old 6th gen core i7 but Zen 4 is too good to be true so I'm upgrading.

All this to say: you can stay with the same system for seven years then upgrade twice in less than 12 months!

I understand the first 2, but where does a PCIe 5 SSD make a difference? Video editing?

We are already seeing SSDs with over double the read speed and ~70% more write speed. You don't see how that could make a difference? Even with 128GB of RAM on a workstation there are a lot of data sets that do not fit.

For training neural networks faster? I doubt SSD->RAM speeds are a bottleneck there. Are you reading training data faster than 6GB/s during training?

You don't even need to get to that complex of a scenario. Just running simple database queries would benefit from this.

Sure, I can see it being useful for servers, just not for 99% of home users.

moving from spinning rust to SSD was a huge improvement in day to day life. i still see lag (on my very fast machines) opening programs or loading data on my laptop that would be highly improved by doubling the speed of the hard drive. and i’m not even counting compiling or things that we might do that is different than other users.

That's because SSDs had way lower latency. Upping the pcie gen will speed up sequential reads which were already really fast, but won't speed up random reads (or reduce latency) at all.

It could allow for more parallelism (deeper queue depth) with those reads though

Right but nvme are at the level of speed where you need to optimize apps for it else they get CPU-bound. Difference between mid and high-end NVMe for most user stuff ought to be minuscule

Full-access database queries? Indexed queries are going to randomly read blocks and PCIe 5 doesn't help. The only way I've perceived improvements from SSD linear access > 4GB/s is when doing gigantic ETL jobs that were not CPU-limited. Unfortunately a lot of ETL jobs are CPU limited and some of the formats I work with are too intensive on the compute side to benefit from faster storage (like GeoJSON, ugh). Formats that are more CPU-friendly also tend to be smaller, making the storage less relevant.

I think for general use most desktop and workstation users are going to get more benefits from faster random access and won't notice very high linear access speeds. I have two recent SSDs and one of them has a median access time of 12µs and the other has a median of 30µs. Even though the latter has gaudy benchmark numbers, can stream at many GB/s and can ultimately hit almost a million IOPS, higher-level application benchmarks lead me to prefer the former because random access waiting time is more important.

I was mainly talking about my usage patterns, not every desktop or workstation user. I work with a lot of data daily.

Something more general might be game asset load speed. Those are often sequential reads. They put a ton of engineering effort into the latest consoles simply to improve that one thing.

> They put a ton of engineering effort into the latest consoles simply to improve that one thing.

Most of that effort was to ensure the processors could actually ingest data at the speeds that off the shelf SSDs could deliver it. The Xbox Series X shipped with what was a low-end NVMe SSD at the time, and the PS5 used a custom SSD controller primarily so they could hit their performance targets using older, slower flash memory rather than being constrained by the supply of the faster flash that was just reaching the market at that time.

And there are still hardly any games that even make a serious attempt to use the available storage performance.

PCIe 5 isn't what helps here. it's that nvme/ssd use very few lanes of PCIe (usually 2/4). they could have achieved these speeds already, but now it's just easier with a smaller slot.

Not only not fitting in RAM but also initial loads. Loading times could be reduced even further.

Quite tempted to make that exact upgrade myself, I'm still on a 3770k + 1070 gtx (which was an upgrade from a gtx 670).

I've been holding out for a long time.

Can't wait for my code to compile 10x faster and game at 10x the fps.

I’m on a 5950X and AMD 6600 and getting stutters on Fedora 37 with my two 4K displays. The weirdest thing is this wasn’t an issue with my Intel NUC with measly 6th gen Iris graphics :(

Xorg or Wayland? I've got a RX6400 that runs 2 4k displays just fine - Ubuntu + Wayland

Gnome Wayland, unless I made a mistake somewhere. It’s so random it’s difficult to determine more than “the desktop stutters sometimes especially when opening the overview.” I was having issues with my 5700g iGPU with 2x4K monitors as well - that required a kernel patch to fix.

Kind of disappointed an Intel NUC from 2015 handled the displays better.

Yeah, I want to upgrade to this, but the with the RX 7900 XTX as GPU. Nvidia drivers suck on Linux.

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