Pages: 1 2 3 [4] 5 6   Go Down

Author Topic: Ryzen 3rd Gen  (Read 9689 times)

geneo

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 152
Re: Ryzen 3rd Gen
« Reply #60 on: February 06, 2020, 03:30:46 pm »

Upon further reading it looks like the write performance of Storage Pool with parity in Win10 is pretty bad so for fast SSDs you are probably better with simple storage pools (similar to JBOD), you lose some read speed but gain a lot more write speed. Not too mention that if a drive fails with the first option it will take much longer to recover in comparison to restoring from a backup.

Any software based raid with parity will perform badly on writes because of the parity calculation, including Intel RST. For raid with parity, you need a dedicated RAID card in order to get decent performance.
« Last Edit: February 06, 2020, 03:34:01 pm by geneo »
Logged
Walk softly and carry a big lens

JaapD

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 303
Re: Ryzen 3rd Gen
« Reply #61 on: February 07, 2020, 04:10:25 am »

Indeed, software based raid performs badly and should be omitted. However, many motherboards have on-board hardware raid controllers, configurable from the BIOS, not drawing performance from the CPU, supporting raid-5 with parity.

Regards,
Jaap.

Logged

geneo

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 152
Re: Ryzen 3rd Gen
« Reply #62 on: February 07, 2020, 11:59:36 am »

Indeed, software based raid performs badly and should be omitted. However, many motherboards have on-board hardware raid controllers, configurable from the BIOS, not drawing performance from the CPU, supporting raid-5 with parity.

Regards,
Jaap.

Those aren't hardware based - they are software based. They merely let you recognize the software RAID in BIOS, so you can boot from it (unlike Microsoft software raid, which you can't boot from). They are still software based even though you configure it in BIOS. They have been dubbed "fake raid". Parity is still calculated in software by drivers.

Software RAID 0 performs very well, but doesn't provide any redundancy.
« Last Edit: February 07, 2020, 12:03:03 pm by geneo »
Logged
Walk softly and carry a big lens

Joe Towner

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1365
Re: Ryzen 3rd Gen
« Reply #63 on: February 07, 2020, 12:47:28 pm »

Any software based raid with parity will perform badly on writes because of the parity calculation, including Intel RST. For raid with parity, you need a dedicated RAID card in order to get decent performance.

Indeed, software based raid performs badly and should be omitted. However, many motherboards have on-board hardware raid controllers, configurable from the BIOS, not drawing performance from the CPU, supporting raid-5 with parity.

False, the world runs on software RAID.  NetApp, Dell/EMC/EqualLogic, HP, IBM, Oracle/Sun - every enterprise storage vendor uses software RAID extensively, and exclusively once you get into larger systems (for which they charge millions of dollars).  Hardware RAID chips are still around, but they're not used heavily anymore.  Things like thin provisioning, data deduplication & data tiering require software, not some Adaptec or LSI chip.  Hardware RAID is only used when software RAID can't - like boot volumes.  Yes, a lot of the 'RAID' in BIOS chips is fake software RAID.  Look at things like ZFS and mdam - software RAID that requires direct access to the disks, not an abstracted hardware controller.  Every cloud provider runs on software RAID - AWS, Azure, Google, etc...  YouTube learned early on that disk I/O is much better when it knows there's 10 disks to talk to, rather than the 1 disk that a RAID controller would present.

Microsoft had to architect the Storage Pools to work in a way that's safe enough for consumers who don't do things like have UPS'es & are prone to accidently unplugging something.

I would be interested to see if adding 1/2 NVMe drives to the pool would improve the write performance, but there are limits built in to handle consumer level issues.
Logged
t: @PNWMF

geneo

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 152
Re: Ryzen 3rd Gen
« Reply #64 on: February 07, 2020, 01:31:31 pm »

False, the world runs on software RAID.  NetApp, Dell/EMC/EqualLogic, HP, IBM, Oracle/Sun - every enterprise storage vendor uses software RAID extensively, and exclusively once you get into larger systems (for which they charge millions of dollars).  Hardware RAID chips are still around, but they're not used heavily anymore.  Things like thin provisioning, data deduplication & data tiering require software, not some Adaptec or LSI chip.  Hardware RAID is only used when software RAID can't - lie boot volumeks.  Yes, a lot of the 'RAID' in BIOS chips is fake software RAID.  Look at things like ZFS and mdam - software RAID that requires direct access to the disks, not an abstracted hardware controller.  Every cloud provider runs on software RAID - AWS, Azure, Google, etc...  YouTube learned early on that disk I/O is much better when it knows there's 10 disks to talk to, rather than the 1 disk that a RAID controller would present.

Microsoft had to architect the Storage Pools to work in a way that's safe enough for consumers who don't do things like have UPS'es & are prone to accidently unplugging something.

I would be interested to see if adding 1/2 NVMe drives to the pool would improve the write performance, but there are limits built in to handle consumer level issues.

I am referring to software raid that runs on host computers, not dedicated external raid. And software raid can run on boot volumes - like Intel RST, which has a BIOS component (driver) in addition to OS driver.

Data Deduplication, thin provisioning  and tiering aren't what we are talking about here. They are not  low latency high performance systems.

ZFS is about the only mature local software storage system with redundancy that does perform well. It's write speeds are still slow compared to a dedicated external arrays.
Logged
Walk softly and carry a big lens

FabienP

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 192
Re: Ryzen 3rd Gen
« Reply #65 on: February 07, 2020, 04:36:25 pm »

ZFS is about the only mature local software storage system with redundancy that does perform well. It's write speeds are still slow compared to a dedicated external arrays.

Wrong. ZFS caches write transactions to RAM or to a SLOG (Separate Intent Log) for high end systems. So as long as these aren't full, your underlying RAID storage performance will not impact write performance. This is the reason why write performance is typically higher on ZFS systems than read performance (if the data is not in read cache). When a zfs system reports write completed, data may not have yet been copied to its final destination on disks. This aggressive caching masks the latency of the actual write operation.

Aggressive caching is also what hardware RAID cards perform behind the scene to avoid async write penalties to spinning rust arrays. This is the reason why such hardware might increase write performance, not offloaded RAID parity calculation. The latter is no longer an issue with a modern multicore CPU, as pointed by Joe above. A typical HW RAID card processor (such as a PPC 440 @ 800 MHz on Avago/LSI cards) is not that powerful compared to a modern CPU, which often has idle cores which could be put to use for software RAID.

Aggressive write caching can be done on a Windows client as well: just tick that box to turn off write-cache buffer flushing on the disk. Don't do this unless the PC is backed by an UPS, otherwise some transactions might get lost in case power loss occurs.

Cheers,

Fabien
Logged

geneo

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 152
Re: Ryzen 3rd Gen
« Reply #66 on: February 07, 2020, 05:11:36 pm »

Wrong. ZFS caches write transactions to RAM or to a SLOG (Separate Intent Log) for high end systems. So as long as these aren't full, your underlying RAID storage performance will not impact write performance. This is the reason why write performance is typically higher on ZFS systems than read performance (if the data is not in read cache). When a zfs system reports write completed, data may not have yet been copied to its final destination on disks. This aggressive caching masks the latency of the actual write operation.

Aggressive caching is also what hardware RAID cards perform behind the scene to avoid async write penalties to spinning rust arrays. This is the reason why such hardware might increase write performance, not offloaded RAID parity calculation. The latter is no longer an issue with a modern multicore CPU, as pointed by Joe above. A typical HW RAID card processor (such as a PPC 440 @ 800 MHz on Avago/LSI cards) is not that powerful compared to a modern CPU, which often has idle cores which could be put to use for software RAID.

Aggressive write caching can be done on a Windows client as well: just tick that box to turn off write-cache buffer flushing on the disk. Don't do this unless the PC is backed by an UPS, otherwise some transactions might get lost in case power loss occurs.

Cheers,

Fabien

Well my experience with ZFS  has been with a large global file system consisting of hundreds of Linux file servers each running local files systems. For XFS + RAID6 hardware raid vs. ZFS RAID Z2, and the raid servers won in both performance and price/performance. Writing to RAM or to the ZIL/SLOG catches up in this use case (always full).  And, as you say, for this performance the data has not yet been moved to its final location from RAM or from the ZIL/SLOG. This only benefits you if  the SLOG faster storage and if I recollect, will be a detriment if not significantly so (having to make a second copy in case of larger files). But that may have been a bug - it's been a while.

I have no idea how well ZFS performs on Windows or Mac OS. I expect not as well as Linux.

Yes, I agree both hardware raid arrays and dedicated raid arrays benefit mostly from caching. That also helps in performing the parity calculation.  Good raid-array controllers also use FPGA for faster processing.

But this is far astray of the topic which was local file systems and software raid (thanks to my loosely generalizing). I don't think anyone had in mind ZFS etc, but Windows pools  (or MAC OS equivalent) and BIOS based software RAID, neither of which perform well with parity.  And that performance has nothing to do with caching/buffering.  I will admit I haven't looked at this in a while, but I expect it is still the case.

Cheers
« Last Edit: February 07, 2020, 05:14:50 pm by geneo »
Logged
Walk softly and carry a big lens

JaapD

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 303
Re: Ryzen 3rd Gen
« Reply #67 on: February 08, 2020, 12:21:21 pm »

With reference to my previous email my motherboard has a IHCR8/IHCR9 Raid Controller, configurable in the BIOS. This very much looks like a hardware controller to me, not software.

I don’t like software RAID, bus this is my opinion, not a fact  ;)

Regards,
Jaap.
Logged

alatreille

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 428
    • Between the Buildings
Re: Ryzen 3rd Gen
« Reply #68 on: February 08, 2020, 12:42:40 pm »

I just want to swing this back on topic.

Ryzen 3 - RAM options.

I am looking at 128 gb.  (Probably the MSI creation mb but may go a Gigabyte board)

Having never done a build before, how do I determine which Ram kits I should use?

Can I buy 2 x 64 gb kits?

I saw the other posts above but they just had answers, not a process for determining.

Thanks everyone.
Logged
Architectural Photographer
http://www.andrewlatreille.com

geneo

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 152
Re: Ryzen 3rd Gen
« Reply #69 on: February 08, 2020, 01:14:02 pm »

With reference to my previous email my motherboard has a IHCR8/IHCR9 Raid Controller, configurable in the BIOS. This very much looks like a hardware controller to me, not software.

I don’t like software RAID, bus this is my opinion, not a fact  ;)

Regards,
Jaap.

It is Intel software raid with a BIOS support so you can boot from the RAID. Striping and parity are performed by software running on the host (device driver).
Logged
Walk softly and carry a big lens

geneo

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 152
Re: Ryzen 3rd Gen
« Reply #70 on: February 08, 2020, 01:34:48 pm »

I just want to swing this back on topic.

Ryzen 3 - RAM options.

I am looking at 128 gb.  (Probably the MSI creation mb but may go a Gigabyte board)

Having never done a build before, how do I determine which Ram kits I should use?

Can I buy 2 x 64 gb kits?

I saw the other posts above but they just had answers, not a process for determining.

Thanks everyone.

You can buy two kits but it is generally better to get 1 kit as the DIMM may be better matched.

Motherboard vendors generally have QVL lists (qualified vendor lists) which list RAM kits they have verified to be compatible with the motherboard. If a kit is not on the list, that doesn't mean its not compatible, but just that the motherboard vendor hasn't verified it (and probably won't support it if it doesn't work).  You can find the QVL memory list on the motherboard's support page as a start.

You can work the opposite way with some memory vendors which have their own QVL lists for motherboards that they support their RAM on. g,skill does this for instance. The memory vendors I would recommend are g.skill, Corsair, Kingston, and Crucial.
Logged
Walk softly and carry a big lens

armand

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 5540
    • Photos
Re: Ryzen 3rd Gen
« Reply #71 on: February 08, 2020, 04:39:53 pm »

I just want to swing this back on topic.

Ryzen 3 - RAM options.

I am looking at 128 gb.  (Probably the MSI creation mb but may go a Gigabyte board)

Having never done a build before, how do I determine which Ram kits I should use?

Can I buy 2 x 64 gb kits?

I saw the other posts above but they just had answers, not a process for determining.

Thanks everyone.

The process is there even if it might not be apparent.
I did a lot of reading these days, motherboards and memory qvl included. The qvl isn't that helpful, most are not up to date.

The conclusions that I have so far:
- on the better motherboards chances are you will be able to get 128 GB at 2666 MHz. Corsair LPX/RGB Pro or GSkill Trident Z Neo or the Ripjaws V are the best bets. The timings are slower on the more compatible ones.
- if you want to get the faster RAM things get trickier. On ASRock I saw a response from them that they will work at 2933 if you want 128 GB and some reports about 3000.

I've only seen one build with 128GB that used a slower 3200 MHz 18-20-20-38 I think, likely a Corsair LPX (was called Gigabyte LPX which doesn't exist).

PS. There are no 64 GB sticks, only 32 GB

armand

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 5540
    • Photos
Re: Ryzen 3rd Gen
« Reply #72 on: February 08, 2020, 10:03:50 pm »

I forgot to add, if you go with "only" 64 GB RAM I've seen numerous builds using 3600 MHz RAM on mainstream to high end X570 boards.

As for the 2x 64 GB, in which the 64 is 32x2, the option is better if you are happy with 64 GB. If 128 GB won't then you can send back just one of the kits. The problem, as said above and which makes me a little reluctant to go this route, is that the RAM producers use various sources (I think there are 3 or 4) even for the same type of memory, so 2 kits might be different enough to cause problems.
« Last Edit: February 08, 2020, 10:11:21 pm by armand »
Logged

geneo

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 152
Re: Ryzen 3rd Gen
« Reply #73 on: February 08, 2020, 11:10:10 pm »

I forgot to add, if you go with "only" 64 GB RAM I've seen numerous builds using 3600 MHz RAM on mainstream to high end X570 boards.

As for the 2x 64 GB, in which the 64 is 32x2, the option is better if you are happy with 64 GB. If 128 GB won't then you can send back just one of the kits. The problem, as said above and which makes me a little reluctant to go this route, is that the RAM producers use various sources (I think there are 3 or 4) even for the same type of memory, so 2 kits might be different enough to cause problems.

^This is good advice. 3600MHz  is a sweet spot in performance for DDR4. 3200 is good too. I am running 64 GB 3600 CL16 g.skill (on Intel). I would say for the safest bet, first look at g.skill and their QVL list of motherboards, which is kept up-to-date. If you then have problems, you can then go to g.skill support.
Logged
Walk softly and carry a big lens

alatreille

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 428
    • Between the Buildings
Re: Ryzen 3rd Gen
« Reply #74 on: February 09, 2020, 12:21:14 am »

Thanks Armand.

I wasn't meaning 64gb sticks...2x 64gb KITS  so 4 32gb modules.

You've answered my question though so I appreciate that!

Logged
Architectural Photographer
http://www.andrewlatreille.com

FabienP

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 192
Re: Ryzen 3rd Gen
« Reply #75 on: February 09, 2020, 11:28:22 am »

^This is good advice. 3600MHz  is a sweet spot in performance for DDR4. 3200 is good too. I am running 64 GB 3600 CL16 g.skill (on Intel). I would say for the safest bet, first look at g.skill and their QVL list of motherboards, which is kept up-to-date. If you then have problems, you can then go to g.skill support.

More than 3600 MHz would likely lower performance on Ryzen 3000 CPUs. This is due to the fact that the internal bus between memory I/O chip and processor chiplets caps at 3600 MHz and has to operate at half the memory speed when the latter is clocked above 3600 MHz. Anything above 3200 MHz is considered overclocking by AMD and is not guaranteed to work.

To put things into perspective: all memory sticks operating at speeds above the JEDEC standard (currently 2666 MHz for DDR4 UDIMM, with 2933 coming next) are in fact factory overclocked and are mostly operated in systems using two memory sticks (max. 64 GB memory, more commonly gamers with 32 GB memory). Trying to operate them at their advertised overclocked speed with four populated slots to reach 128 GB memory is tough since they were not meant to be used in this configuration. That explains why almost no such OC memory sticks are advertised as compatible with 4 slots use in the QVL of motherboad manufacturers.

I would be curious to see if non OC memory at speeds higher than 2666 MHz will be made available in the near future or if manufacturers will go straight to DDR5. The former would be ideal for people wanting 128 GB in Ryzen 3000 systems, since the performance of this architecture scales well with higher memory speeds.

Cheers,

Fabien
Logged

geneo

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 152
Re: Ryzen 3rd Gen
« Reply #76 on: February 09, 2020, 12:34:43 pm »

There has been only one company I am aware of that has announced native DDR4-3200 - last summer I think. They are not a major player IIRC and it has yet to materialize, so I would expect the major memory companies to move on to DDR5. In any case I expect the minor differences in RAM frequency don't have much effect on Photoshop performance. It is mostly processor speed and instructions per cycle and to a lesser extent, the number of cores.
Logged
Walk softly and carry a big lens

kers

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 4388
    • Pieter Kers
Re: Ryzen 3rd Gen
« Reply #77 on: February 09, 2020, 12:49:20 pm »

... In any case I expect the minor differences in RAM frequency don't have much effect on Photoshop performance. It is mostly processor speed and instructions per cycle and to a lesser extent, the number of cores.
I agree about small effect of the speed of ram, but see a trend that software uare getting to use more cores , even Photoshop, not to forget plugins like topaz denoise, helicon focus and panorama programs like ptgui that use all cores...
Lightroom9 uses all cores - it also uses the hyperthreading ; on my 10 core going to 1800% of use.
Logged
Pieter Kers
www.beeld.nu/la

geneo

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 152
Re: Ryzen 3rd Gen
« Reply #78 on: February 09, 2020, 01:18:42 pm »

I agree about small effect of the speed of ram, but see a trend that software uare getting to use more cores , even Photoshop, not to forget plugins like topaz denoise, helicon focus and panorama programs like ptgui that use all cores...
Lightroom9 uses all cores - it also uses the hyperthreading ; on my 10 core going to 1800% of use.

If you look at the PugetBench results for different core count Intel or AMD processors, the individual scores aren't really much different from  each (e.g. AMD 8 vs 12 vs 16  core  https://www.pugetsystems.com/pic_disp.php?id=58263). Maybe it is just the operations this specific benchmark does are mostly single threaded.
« Last Edit: February 09, 2020, 01:24:27 pm by geneo »
Logged
Walk softly and carry a big lens

armand

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 5540
    • Photos
Re: Ryzen 3rd Gen
« Reply #79 on: February 09, 2020, 05:43:24 pm »

More than 3600 MHz would likely lower performance on Ryzen 3000 CPUs. This is due to the fact that the internal bus between memory I/O chip and processor chiplets caps at 3600 MHz and has to operate at half the memory speed when the latter is clocked above 3600 MHz. Anything above 3200 MHz is considered overclocking by AMD and is not guaranteed to work.

To put things into perspective: all memory sticks operating at speeds above the JEDEC standard (currently 2666 MHz for DDR4 UDIMM, with 2933 coming next) are in fact factory overclocked and are mostly operated in systems using two memory sticks (max. 64 GB memory, more commonly gamers with 32 GB memory). Trying to operate them at their advertised overclocked speed with four populated slots to reach 128 GB memory is tough since they were not meant to be used in this configuration. That explains why almost no such OC memory sticks are advertised as compatible with 4 slots use in the QVL of motherboad manufacturers.

I would be curious to see if non OC memory at speeds higher than 2666 MHz will be made available in the near future or if manufacturers will go straight to DDR5. The former would be ideal for people wanting 128 GB in Ryzen 3000 systems, since the performance of this architecture scales well with higher memory speeds.

Cheers,

Fabien

Puget only uses 2666 for their Lightroom system.

My target is 128GB RAM @ 3200 MHz and the GSkill QVL for the 128GB kit says it's compatible with most higher end boards (both Trident Neo Z and Ripjaws V). Then I still be happy enough with 2933.
If the above won't work then I'll settle for 64GB @ 3600 MHz.
Pages: 1 2 3 [4] 5 6   Go Up