Leaderboard

Over the decades I've always strived to have the fastest servers I can afford to host TestMy.net. My journey with hosting has taken me into a colocated datacenter where I pay for cabinet space, power & internet connection and bring in my own equipment. When I first started using colo I built everything out with brand new, current generation servers and networking gear. Over the years I added servers and built up a High Availability Proxmox cluster. Adding servers I found that eBay was definitely my friend. Now I could afford servers that only a few years earlier often went for nearly 10X what I was able to get them for "off lease". Each time I added a new server, it was more powerful than the previous. Over this time I'm adding more resources, things are getting faster. Even my first servers were full solid state, employing arrays of 4 Samsung 850 Pro SSDs. But things really started flying with the advent of Optane storage. A game changer... really, it was too good. (and now it's gone.) Fast forward to 2024. I get a generous donation of servers, the person doesn't care what I do with them, they're just happy to give them to me. They're newer than my servers, 2nd version into the next generation of CPU. So quite a bit newer. I get one of them setup with the same Optane storage I run in my current master server and start benchmarking. It's not really faster and doesn't justify switching servers. Sometimes it was slower. I assume because my servers are higher clock speed, highest end of the CPU SKU. Scratching my head, I really thought being so much newer I'd get a much better result. I take the storage out and pop it in a gaming rig... another machine recently donated to me by a friend. This PC happens to have hardware from the same year as the server I just tested. I run the same tests and had to do a double take. Not only was it faster on the gaming rig, it was WAY faster. This made me reimagine my server topology. Maybe it was time to build with consumer hardware. Here I had a setup that was a fraction of the cost that was out performing in real world scenarios. The better single thread performance and higher clock speed, faster memory... it all makes sense. There's more competition in the consumer market, things cost less. So I sold those servers to someone who can better utilize their resources. Extremely nice servers but for my use case here, they had too much of everything. As soon as they were sold I ordered parts for my next build. Promptly put it together and got to testing. Minimum, 2.5x faster at everything. Average is 3x faster and in some cases I've seen over 6x faster. It has completely blown me away. What is the magical setup? Nothing much really, minus storage I think it cost my about $900, including a piKVM setup to remotely control the machine. Much less than any of my used enterprise servers cost me. Here's my build. AMD Ryzen 7 9700X 8-Core, 16-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor G.SKILL Ripjaws S5 Series (Intel XMP 3.0) DDR5 RAM 64GB (2x32GB) 5600MT/s CL28-34-34-89 Optane 905p (zpool) and Samsung 960 Pro (OS) ASUS Prime B650-PLUS WiFi ID-COOLING IS-40-XT Black - 47mm Height Low Profile CPU Cooler EVGA 750 BP, 80+ Bronze 750W PSU Rosewill 2U Server Chassis RSV-Z2900U BTF-LIGHTING WS2812B 2PCs 19in Individually Addressable 2GB Raspberry pi4 Geekworm KVM-A8 (kit for building a piKVM) 10G network card It's only a 65 watt TDP CPU! very easy to cool in a constrained (or SFF) build like this. A single half dollar sized CPU out performs all of my dual Xeon systems. Yes, I can't run a terabyte of RAM with this setup but I don't need to. My current systems are 128GB, I figure I only really really need 64GB with this CPU backing the system. Especially in single thread performance the new Ryzen system blows all my other systems away. This type of gain will be felt everywhere, especially in mysql queries and responsiveness. It still excels in multithread and even has a larger cache than my Xeons. It really wins for me on every level. And yes, RGB was a requirement. I never put RGB in a computer, not really my thing. But I figure this is a gaming PC at its core so for $13, why not. I can control them in linux but it adds a bunch of unnecessary packages, I like my base PVE to be as simple as possible. So default rainbow it is. lambo-2025-lq2.mp4 I haven't been necessarily doing it wrong all these years. Without the low TDP and high performance of the 9700X this build would be more challenging. These are recent developments. There's basically zero redundancy in this server. So, it also helps having a PVE cluster that has a bunch of reliable machines, to back up this consumer grade hardware. I can't wait to bring Lambo into production!

@CA3LE what are you running for a GPU in that rig? or AGPU...> My setup is pretty dated.. i just dont use the pc much anymore so I haven't really sunk any money into upgrades (especially the platform) in many years.. ASUS Prime X370-Pro AM4 ATX Motherboard AMD RYZEN 7 1700 8-Core Base Clock 3.0GHz OC @ 4.1 GHz NZXT KRAKEN X73 RGB 360MM AIO LIQUID COOLER W/LCD DISPLAY G.SKILL TridentZ RGB 32GB 288 Pin DDR4 SDRAM 3200 MHz XFX QICK 319 AMD Radeon RX 6800 16GB CORSAIR HXi Series HX1200i 1200W 80 PLUS PLATINUM Full Modular Thermaltake Core P5 ATX Open Frame Panoramic Viewing Tt LCS Certified Gaming Computer Case

On a lage city, tower with more bandwidth the speeds goes up to 1000/150 Mbps.

Just the integrated GPU. It's a virtual machine server with no need for GPU. I only need graphics to get into the bios, set up the machine and remotely manage at the base machine level. If I ever have a need for GPU I run it on one of my local machines. This puppy is built for a very specific workload. Will be racked at the datacenter in a few days. Just waiting on one more network card...