Kreyren
commented
4 months ago According to the discussion with Dasharo the motherboard MSI MEG Z690i UNIFY would be perfect for my usecase for portable gaming server in a ~3L case with RTX4060 LP and CPU capable of Linux Compilation in a reasonable time due to it's power management to not be a major bottleneck in this form factor.
All LGA 1700 Chipsets 600 and 700 series should pretty much work under the same codebase. Same silicon. MSI tends to use the same Super IO across the generation. You have things that were discovered later like the TPM Header pinout (Chip Select on a pin marked reserved) for easy access to the SPI Flash ROM. Those are most likely also standarized
Motivation: The software development of Teres-1 is slower than expected due to my infrastructure being unable to compile one huge thing (e.g. aarch64 linux) in a reasonable time (currently takes 5 h) to mitigate that i want to get a workstation to offload the processing to + utilize it as a gaming server and for offloading of blender rendering.
It's impossible to get a non-proprietary microcode on AMD64 platform and other platforms (aarch64 and riscv64) are as of 05.03.2024 insufficiently efficient for the required processing so the AMD64 microcode is the only tolerated in the ideal world where closest we can get on the platform is to use the MSI PRO Z790-P/Z690-A based on https://github.com/Dasharo/Openness-Score/blob/main/examples/msi_ms7d25_v1.1.1_ddr4.rom_openness_score.md as for reasons mentioned in https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/subaro/how_many_people_are_interesed_in_seeing_coreboot/ AMD failed to release needed software to implement coreboot in a reasonable time thus intel is used and is therefor recognized as the least terrible option for the platform.
Once a better platform to AMD64 (riscv64 expected to reach such maturity by 2026), then this system is expected to be deprecated and replaced unless AMD64 releases it's firmware as open-source.
MSI on the product website https://cz.msi.com/Motherboard/PRO-Z690-A-DDR4/Specification says that the board supports only 12th gen CPUs, but on the compatibility list https://cz.msi.com/Motherboard/PRO-Z690-A-DDR4/support#cpu it lists 14th gen CPUs so Z690-A is preferred as it's significantly more economical due to the cost of the motherboard and the RAM that doesn't appear to add any significant benefit in comparison to DDR4.
Expected Motherboard: Preferred MSI PRO Z690-A, MSI PRO Z790-P depending on economy of DDR5 RAM and the motherboard itself.
Ideally MSI PRO Z690-A, worse MSI PRO Z790-P or Z690-A depending on what is more economical
Expected CPU is only expected to be compatible with the motherboard and being able to cross-compile aarch64-linux in a reasonable time without bottlenecking games.
This will likely involve a CPU which gets a single core frequency to around 5 GHz and has at least 12 cores.
Expected CPU: TBD, depends on economy
For GPU:
Expected GPU: Ideally Intel ARC770A or any other Intel ARC GPU, AMD GPU tolerated
The system is expected to run NixOS with impermenance placing it's files in a root filesystem that runs on RAM so when the system is powered off the non-nix-defined state is lost for that we ideally need more RAM ~64 GB, but can use symlinks which take few kb in the meanwhile.. the use of RAM is mainly to speedup the system as the speed of RAM is significantly faster than any SSD and ti reduce the stress on the hot storage (SSD).
DDR4 is preferred as DDR5 doesn't offer significant enough advantage and at a significantly worse economy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIN8lLhSqmg), but relevant platform with Z690-A supports only 12th gen intel CPUs while the Z790-P support up to 14th gen
Expected RAM: Ideally DDR5 undecided frequency of 64GB Capacity
Expected Hot Storage: Any reasonably fast SSD?
Due to the system being a gaming server it's expected to have all of it's games available on a cold storage at all time, tbd on how to manage
Expected Cold Storage: TBD
Additional cost: The motherboard requires a contact frame for the CPU ~5 USD to manage issues with cooling (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYU1OskbY-Q)
Expected cost: