Its like we have all collectively forgotten that the first release of a hardware or software project is just an expensive beta. I don't buy 1st gen microarches because i'm not interested in paying top dollar to be a tester. What I find odd, is that apparently both intel and AMD have also forgotten this, as Intel seems to be moving toward making their enterprise customers the beta testers, while AMD seems so desperate for marketshare as to have released zen as a volume product before releasing it as a high end one. Meaning that if they have to do a recall, they are both losing their entire margin, as well as having to replace a large number of devices.
I got used to the idea of staying away from the cutting edge in the early 2000's. The original Athlon and Thunderbird processors were groundbreaking in performance, but consumer cooling and PSU design had not caught up with their power and heat output demands - the result was uncomfortably noisy and hot at best. The high end parts really are like Ferraris in that they do take more of your time and care to deal with issues like that.
Now when I look at new machines and components I look for something slightly middle-of-the-road, mainstream-leaning, with low power output but quality components, and later revisions of an architecture, since system performance is a more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts game. I actually priced out a Ryzen 3 build today, but I might be better served with the last gen APUs.
I'm not really all that big a fan of APUs, their niche is decent integrated graphics cheap, but for low-end serveresque or office-box usage I'd go with the Pentium G4560. It has ECC too if that's your thing. Rumors are that 4C8T i3s may be coming with Coffee Lake too - obviously no efficiency step up but it'll be price competitive with Ryzen (right now the i3s and locked i5s usually aren't good value).
You can sometimes still find X99 stuff on clearance too - the 5820K and 6800K are essentially power- and performance-competitive with Ryzen 5 in all respects, plus you also get quad-channel RAM and more lanes, the caveat being they're usually more expensive than Ryzen 5. But, they're also mature at this point, and v3 Xeons should even be starting to come out from server farms within a year or two.
The bigger Coffee Lake parts will be tinkerer's specials. You'll need to delid for sure, I totally bet Intel isn't going to do shit about the TIM problem on SKL-X. It's probably going to be nearly as big a die as X99 was anyway, if they could possibly manage to solder it they really need to do it. Either way it's going to eat a lot of power, but they should be fast. Kaby with more cores is a pretty potent formula.
Of course there's no guarantees, SKL-X turned out to be shit for gaming.
Normally Ryzen 5 and 7 dominate the value charts here of course. Intel's products are really only compelling for people who game at the moment. X99 is good, the 7700K is good, the 7600K is good (really guys, hyperthread only gets you roughly ~10% average speedup in games). The 7350K can be OK for ricer low-end builds - if your game of choice is single-threaded (virtually any Source game) it really cooks, and Microcenter has it for $130 (minus a $30 bundle discount if you want a mobo). The G4560 (2C4T) was a value changer for Intel in the low-end market, it's a good office box and it has ECC support for light server usage too. There are rumors Intel is choking down on production because it's eating up i3 sales, which is hilarious, because a price cut is exactly what 2C4T needs.
But really, if you count out Ryzen and Threadripper that leaves Bulldozer, Fusion processors, and Intel products. Bulldozer is mature but slow and hot and really only works well on things like video encoding. Fusion is a laptop processor, and the Pentium beats it. Intel has nothing worthwhile in the "boring office box" category between the G4560 and the X99 range, their consumer stack is almost only relevant in gaming otherwise.
Yeah, I was super bummed when I heard Threadripper was going to be on the older stepping. Otherwise I'd be really interested in it (especially with official ECC support). That would be a sick little server box. I'm thinking about doing a NAS build on X99 instead - I can build something basically the size of a DS1817+ but with 2x16 lane single slots free for NVMe sleds/infiniband.
The other thing is I'd love to see more done with Kabini. There definitely is a place for very cheap shitbox computers - you used to be able to get a AM1 mobo + Athlon 5350 CPU for $40 together, you could do a full low-end build for $200. I was really disappointed to see it go. The CPU supports ECC but none of the motherboards do, give me an ECC mITX server board with an onboard SAS controller! It would be very competitive with the Avoton C2550/C2750 line (which are randomly shitting themselves nowadays unfortunately...) and could be used for NAS appliances. DDR3 is dead now... but Kabini can support DDR3L.
If you don't need good single thread performance and don't care about Performance/Watt that much you can get used servers for very little money with lot's of DDR3 memory (128GB+) and these X5670 als dual cpu systems. If you don't do anything fancy you get 80% of performance for 20% of the price of a new system.
You can also buy used Xeon workstations and put in a new GPU card. The main problem is that the cooling isn't especially quiet, and they have proprietary motherboards and power supplies.
Not necessarily. I have a HP Z400 workstation with what appears to be an ATX PSU... but some of the pins are swapped and it won't actually boot with a non-OEM PSU. You can make an adapter, but in general it's not a safe assumption that this class of systems are compatible with off-the-shelf PSUs. These are OEM systems and the only thing that is guaranteed to work is OEM parts.
> Of course there's no guarantees, SKL-X turned out to be shit for gaming.
Only relatively. The performance is good, it just does not beat the i7-7700K. Which is not surprise given current games reliance on fast cores. But you can absolutely game with Skylake-X, and get high FPS.
I'd also stay away from last generation APUs. They are slow, as it's basically bulldozer with a gpu on top. Zen APUs coming out early 2018 might be a different story, and maybe they fixed some bugs till then.
It really is a pity the Pentium G4560 is getting so expensive. Whether that's a production reduction or miners buying it for their boxes, in any case it is with the higher price not really competitive against the Ryzen 3 1200.
AMD's not doing a recall, it works decently enough for most applications. Their response is going to be "if it crashes your application, turn SMT off".
Consider they didn't even do a recall when Phenom had a showstopping TLB bug, they shipped a BIOS patch that disabled TLB entirely.
And remember, Epyc is on a new stepping of the silicon, it's possible this is already fixed on it. (Threadripper is not, however)
