Need more grunt for machine learning

[JamV]

Hi

Please check this spec & see if you think it is balanced. My use case is development and home machine learning experiments. In particular, I'm not sure what to do about cooling. I'll be maxing out all cores for hours at a time. Would you have any improvements to suggest?

I have a 1440 75Hz monitor, and once I have a decent machine, will do also do bit of FPS gaming.

Best regards,
James

Case
CORSAIR iCUE 220T RGB AIRFLOW MID TOWER GAMING CASE
Processor (CPU)
AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Six Core CPU (3.6GHz-4.2GHz/36MB CACHE/AM4)
Motherboard
ASUS® PRIME B450-PLUS (DDR4, USB 3.1, 6Gb/s) - RGB Ready!
Memory (RAM)
16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3600MHz (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
8GB NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2060 SUPER - HDMI, DP - VR Ready!
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NOT REQUIRED
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1TB PCS PCIe M.2 SSD (2000 MB/R, 1100 MB/W)
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CORSAIR 550W CV SERIES™ CV-550 POWER SUPPLY
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PCS FrostFlow 100 V2 Series High Performance CPU Cooler (AMD)
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STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING
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50cm RGB LED Strip
Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
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USB/Thunderbolt Options
MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 2 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS
Operating System
Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - inc. Single Licence

 

[TomBerry]

I'd personally add another storage but this is completely up to you. File sizes are larger these days and normally 1TB of storage can fill quickly especially if you're going to have some games on there too

Also I'd maybe bump it up to 32GB RAM for the occasions you're buying your PC for, but I'm not the smartest on this part so don't count me on this

 

[debiruman665]

If you know how to set it up correctly you may want to consider an optane drive and using it as a small capactiy ssd and utilise it for its superior speeds and set it as your windows cache drive to shadow the RAM.

 

[ubuysa]

If you know how to set it up correctly you may want to consider an optane drive and using it as a small capactiy ssd and utilise it for its superior speeds and set it as your windows cache drive to shadow the RAM.

You mean put the pagefile on it? That's a neat idea but it would be infinitely more sensible to ensure you don't run out of RAM.

 

[Tony1044]

You mean put the pagefile on it? That's a neat idea but it would be infinitely more sensible to ensure you don't run out of RAM.

Would a pagefile fit? Aren't Optane drives tiny? Also do they work to accelerate SSD's? I seem to recall some postings on here where they actually harmed performance?

 

[debiruman665]

Would a pagefile fit? Aren't Optane drives tiny? Also do they work to accelerate SSD's? I seem to recall some postings on here where they actually harmed performance?

I use one to boost a 2TB disk drive and I can really say my experience with it is that the first time loading a game is slow and if you turn the game off and reload it the second time will be much faster.

If you don't install the optane software it will default to an ssd drive, they are apparantly fast enough to be used as ram so thats why I suggested having the page file on there. I think any humongous datasets would probably be limited by I/O on the disk in any situation but I have no experience in it so it's likely I could be wrong.

Optane drives go up to 64GB now, and as far as I can find only PCS sell them, simply cannot find them elsewhere.

 

[SpyderTracks]

I use one to boost a 2TB disk drive and I can really say my experience with it is that the first time loading a game is slow and if you turn the game off and reload it the second time will be much faster.

If you don't install the optane software it will default to an ssd drive, they are apparantly fast enough to be used as ram so thats why I suggested having the page file on there. I think any humongous datasets would probably be limited by I/O on the disk in any situation but I have no experience in it so it's likely I could be wrong.

Optane drives go up to 64GB now, and as far as I can find only PCS sell them, simply cannot find them elsewhere.

But they’re slower than a normal m2, and very expensive. Just doesn’t make sense imho. Just have an m2 scratch drive if you feel the need for something like that.

 

[Scott]

Pretty sure Optane modules are Intel only anyway.

Personally wouldn't touch one with a barge pole. When getting into silly RAM requirements a really fast M2 drive is always going to make for the second best cache option. When it comes to high end video editing, a fast scratch drive is pretty much a necessity. 64GB of RAM can be taken up a lot quicker than you would think when throwing the effects on 4K previews

 

[DanIsBuyingAPC]

It may also be worth looking at how well parallelised the code is. That will tell you whether or not to prioritise single/multicore performance when choosing a CPUI. You can do this pretty easily using performance monitor.

Another thing that may be worth looking at is how much memory the application is currently using, if it's more than about 10GB then it's probably going to start sending stuff to and from the swapfile and 32GB may be a worthwhile investment.

If truly large amounts of data are being generated/processed then it may be worth looking into a RAID SSD setup (this adds complexity and a slight risk of failure, you may also need to check if the motherboard can support the bandwidth of RAIDed SSDs/need a PCI-e RAID controller).

 

[Scott]

I don't think there's any point to RAID now. I think the actual bandwidth is maximised with the 5GB M2 drives.

 

[Tony1044]

It may also be worth looking at how well parallelised the code is. That will tell you whether or not to prioritise single/multicore performance when choosing a CPUI. You can do this pretty easily using performance monitor.

Another thing that may be worth looking at is how much memory the application is currently using, if it's more than about 10GB then it's probably going to start sending stuff to and from the swapfile and 32GB may be a worthwhile investment.

If truly large amounts of data are being generated/processed then it may be worth looking into a RAID SSD setup (this adds complexity and a slight risk of failure, you may also need to check if the motherboard can support the bandwidth of RAIDed SSDs/need a PCI-e RAID controller).

Traditonally:

RAID in general = Good for protecting data from a faulty drive, no good whatsoever for protecting against e.g. accidental deletion.

RAID 5 = Good for reading performance (e.g. databases) as the data is split across multiple spindles. Not so good for writing as the algorithm to calculate distributaion, striping and parity are an overhead. Also, really needs flash or battery backed up cache in case of power failure

RAID 1 = Compromise between performance and security but wasteful as you lose 50% of the drives (they're a mirror)

RAID 0 = Fast due to no data mirroring or parity. No protection whatsoever from a drive failure.

RAID 6, RAID 10 etc - traditionally the best of all worlds from a performance and data protection perspective but hideously expensive and wasteful (entire mirrored arrays, for example - e.g. two RAID 5 arrays that you then mirror in a RAID 1. You lose 1 of the disks in each RAID 5 aray then all of the disks effectively in the second RAID 5 array become a mirror of the first RAID 5 array...costly as).

In most use cases, RAID 1 or 5 is still a valid option when it comes to data protection. You mostly see RAID 5 in e.g. a NAS or SAN these days.

However, SSD's have killed off the performance benefits - especially so with high speed m2, nVME and even enterprise SAS drives.

Two independent drives with no RAID tends to be optimal for most desktops and laptops - one with the OS and the other with applications as you can read and write simultaneously then.

A third, fast disk, for scratch is also an option in some use cases, if the second drive becomes a bottleneck.

One of the things I did with my server was to use Windows Storage Spaces. No RAID arrays, all single disks. By tagging each type of disk so they are tiered, it automatically moves data around as required between the tiers - the more often you access something, the more likely it is to be on the nVME SSD's.

It is also available in Windows 10 now, but it's not something I've had a need to play with at a desktop level.

 

[ubuysa]

Another thing that may be worth looking at is how much memory the application is currently using, if it's more than about 10GB then it's probably going to start sending stuff to and from the swapfile and 32GB may be a worthwhile investment.

With Windows 10 its quite easy to see whether you have more than enough RAM. Just look to see whether there is any Standby RAM, this is RAM that is holding pages that are no longer needed but which need not be paged out because RAM is definitely not under pressure.

The only reliable way to tell whether you are actually short of RAM is to monitor the Hard Page Fault Rate. Consistently largish values here is a clear indicator of insufficient RAM.

BTW. the pagefile is used by normal memory management to hold stolen pages. The swap file is used to swap out suspended UWP apps (Metro apps) to prevent them being impacted by normal memory management. [emoji846]

 

[DanIsBuyingAPC]

I don't think there's any point to RAID now. I think the actual bandwidth is maximised with the 5GB M2 drives.

By RAID I should have said RAID 0. I investigated this when I bought my new PC, if you just use a standard RAID controller then you'll see about a 50% speed increase due to bandwidth constraints on the motherboard. If you go down the PCI-e RAID route you'll be able to get over the bandwidth limitations. For gaming the performance benefit would be zero. For a program with large quantities of data it may be worthwhile and I found a few speed tests in my research, if I come across the articles again I'll post them.

The good things about SSDs in RAID is that the risk of failure is very small compared to traditional HDs so provided you backup to the cloud every now and then the risk is minimal. And when they do fail it tends to just be one NAND gate and you don't lose all the data.

I completely agree it's a niche use, I only brought it up as he said AI learning that's notorious for being a data hog, the new PC I have ordered is the first I've ever had that doesn't use RAID. There's just not much point anymore for the average user.

 

[Tony1044]

By RAID I should have said RAID 0. I investigated this when I bought my new PC, if you just use a standard RAID controller then you'll see about a 50% speed increase due to bandwidth constraints on the motherboard. If you go down the PCI-e RAID route you'll be able to get over the bandwidth limitations. For gaming the performance benefit would be zero. For a program with large quantities of data it may be worthwhile and I found a few speed tests in my research, if I come across the articles again I'll post them.

The good things about SSDs in RAID is that the risk of failure is very small compared to traditional HDs so provided you backup to the cloud every now and then the risk is minimal. And when they do fail it tends to just be one NAND gate and you don't lose all the data.

I completely agree it's a niche use, I only brought it up as he said AI learning that's notorious for being a data hog, the new PC I have ordered is the first I've ever had that doesn't use RAID. There's just not much point anymore for the average user.

However it is worth pointing out that if you lose a disk with RAID 0 you have effectively lost them both as it's just striping. You get the benefit of one drive appearing to the OS that is the same as the two disks combined sizes (so if you had 2 x 512GB disks, the OS would see 1 x 1TB) and there are some performance gains (though I am not sure how much when you come to talking about m2 SSD's and nVME SSD's - it'd need some research).

It's also worth saying that % performance will obviously vary from drive to drive and interface-to-interface and that >50% performance gains can be had depending on the factors.

This was one comparison from last year:

RAID 0 gives definite performance gains for sure - just be sure to back up any critical data as though it was a single disk and you'll be fine.

RAID is old technology now - it was designed to allow companies to sling a load of relatively cheap spinning HDD's into a server and gain performance from it (hence the name: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks).

I remember the first time I encountered a RAID controller on a Compaq server - years before HP bought them. They were SCSI disks the size of a house brick. But...they were hot-swappable. You could really feel the things interial energy when you pulled a running one out. And, the controllers had to start each disk in turn, with a slight delay, otherwise the motors would draw more current then the PSU could deliver.

Edit: I agree that for most ordinary users these days, a single fast m2 or nVME SSD is more than sufficient.

 

[Scott]

You've got to chuckle at that graph when you consider the Firecuda at 5x the speed of the fastest RAID 0 in that graph.

A PCIe4.0 system with a couple of M2 Firecudas on there is highly unlikely to benefit from any RAID 0 configuration at all. I just can't imagine a PCIe bridge making any odds over what the motherboard has on-board anyway.

I would love to see some graphs on it, especially with actual real world usage instead of benchmarking.

 

[SpyderTracks]

You've got to chuckle at that graph when you consider the Firecuda at 5x the speed of the fastest RAID 0 in that graph.

A PCIe4.0 system with a couple of M2 Firecudas on there is highly unlikely to benefit from any RAID 0 configuration at all. I just can't imagine a PCIe bridge making any odds over what the motherboard has on-board anyway.

I would love to see some graphs on it, especially with actual real world usage instead of benchmarking.

That’s my assumption also, with a good M2, the benefits of RAID or Optane are kind of moot.

 

[Scott]

As if by magic....

One scenario sees it make sense, it doesn't do anything for most uses... it actually hurts it.

11 mins 9 seconds, he has it covered.

I can't stop looking at his teeth though!

 

[DanIsBuyingAPC]

This has been a fascinating chat!

 

[JamV]

Wow, I greatly appreciate the effort you've all put in to this. There's some great suggestions here that I'll take on board, particularly around boosting the number of cores, possibly adding memory. I'm ok for storage - and enjoying the info! To contain the costs a bit I'm considering replacing the RTX 2060S with a GTX 1660S (~£150 saving), as I can much more easily make use of the extra CPU cores rather than the GPU.

If I went for the 16GB 3600Mhz memory, would there be any reason I couldn't add more at a later date? ie. is it just not on the configurator or is there actually a fundamental limitation? 16GB is certainly enough for now.

It turns out my PCSpecialist laptop has a Retail Windows 10 licence on it. If I deactivate it, can PCSpecialist move this to the new machine for me?

Case
CORSAIR iCUE 220T RGB AIRFLOW MID TOWER GAMING CASE
Processor (CPU)
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12 Core CPU (3.8GHz-4.6GHz/70MB CACHE/AM4)
Motherboard
ASUS® PRIME B450-PLUS (DDR4, USB 3.1, 6Gb/s) - RGB Ready!
Memory (RAM)
16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3600MHz (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
6GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1660 SUPER - HDMI, DP - GeForce GTX VR Ready!
1st Storage Drive
NOT REQUIRED
1st M.2 SSD Drive
1TB PCS PCIe M.2 SSD (2000 MB/R, 1100 MB/W)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
NOT REQUIRED
Power Supply
CORSAIR 550W CV SERIES™ CV-550 POWER SUPPLY
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling
Corsair H100i RGB PLATINUM Hydro Series High Performance CPU Cooler
Thermal Paste
STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING
LED Lighting
50cm RGB LED Strip
Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Wireless/Wired Networking
WIRELESS INTEL® Wi-Fi 6 AX200 2,400Mbps/5GHz, 300Mbps/2.4GHz PCI-E CARD + BT 5.0
USB/Thunderbolt Options
MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 2 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS
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[Scott]

That's not a good motherboard for that chip unfortunately. I wouldn't really recommend the B450 going forward now as it's going to be ropey for next generation chips (it'll work.... but not by design).

Has the budget changed? What is your upper budget?