[geeks] Cheap Processing Threads

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Sat, 16 Mar 2019, Lionel Peterson wrote:

> AMD Ryzen 5 1600 6 core, 12 thread, 3 GHz processor and cooler ($79.95)
>
> Gigabyte B450 mATX mb w/ 4x DDR4 memory slots, 4x SATA III ports, an M.2
> slot and more ($69.95 - less $30 when bought with CPU)
>
> They had Crucial DDR4 RAM at $37.50/8 Gig DIMM.

Though not widely advertised, Ryzen supports ECC memory on most
motherboards.  Most of the times I've used non-ECC memory on a machine
that I hit hard, I've regretted it.

> And finally, an off-brand M.2 Gen3 x4 SSD board (which will fit nicely
> on the above MB), 256 Gig for $45

Does your motherboard support PCI bifurcation, or is this interposer using
a PCIe switch?  At $45, I'd expect it to be a mostly-passive device that
requires bifurcation support.

> Should be a nice little box for trivial VMs and other work - that CPU is a bit
> long in the tooth, but at that price I'm not complaining.

You'll probably be able to upgrade all the way to a Ryzen 3 later, if you
need.

> I've got a small Antec case, 650W PS, and 4x SATA III drives (250G ea) to
> round out the build with a small RAID 10 array using chipset RAID.

Pfft.  FreeBSD, ZFS, and bhyve.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke
Austin, TX
USA