Hey y’all.

I’ve been running a eBay special server with a pair of Xeon E5-2687W v2 and 64gb of cheap RAM. It’s been working pretty great (other than a little bit of instability that randomly went away after a while, but I expect to come back at some point). I’ve had this setup for a couple years now, and have been eyeballing a couple different upgrade paths.

The reason I want to switch is that the eBay special motherboard does not have enough pci-e slots for what I’m planning in the near future.

The reason I want to upgrade is that I like having nice server hardware.

So I have been looking at alternatives. Is anyone else amazed at how cheap a CPU is, but how expensive a socket SP3 motherboard is? The cheapest sp3 board I’ve found is more than 500$, used. The cpus which will outperform my setup in every metric cost less than 200$.

This had me looking at new/used gaming hardware instead, which is cheaper, but misses out on ecc and also has a more limited amount of pci-e slots as well, (which is the primary motivation for changing my setup).

I’m trying to find a 16core/32 thread setup with the best single core performance available in that class. My current setup is 8core/16thread x2, and i’d like to avoid ‘downgrading’ to fewer cores. But the things I run usually run do better with more single thread performance than multi thread performance.

I found the epyc 7371, and the ryzen 5950x which meet my core requirements, but both have downsides I’m trying to mitigate. (Mobo price and ECC ram, respectively)

Do y’all have any alternative options I might’ve missed?