44 THREADS XEON WORKSTATION AND 32 THREADS OPTERON SERVER RETRO BUILDS

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?