AMD Threadripper Pro Questions

Flame Hardware Questions
1

Hey guys,
Pretty close to pulling the trigger on a Lenovo P620.

I’m buying this as a work from home machine and something to play with.

I had a few questions.

The price differences between a USED bare bones Lenovo P620 AMD Threadripper Pro 5WX series starts at about $1,500, and goes up around $600 each model(12core,16core, 24core, 32core and 64core)

So a few questions.

  1. I know Flame isn’t really as heavy on CPU usage anymore, so at what point am I just wasting money?

  2. Will Flame even use all 64cores?

  3. Would it be wiser to just buy the 12core 5945WX and buy some raid cards and an Nvidia RTX6000 with the savings?

  4. Should I even consider the AMD Threadripper pro 3series?

  5. From my research the 16 core AMD Threadripper pro 5955WX, is kind of the sweet spot price/speed wise. But Autodesk system specs for flame 2025.1 is the 32core 5975WX model. Is it worth the extra cash to go from 16-32?

FYI these prices are from what I’ve found online as of September 2024.
Thanks guys,
Fegan
Flamer.

2

For a remote and play box the 5955 is great paired with a 5000 or greater GPU. For production (where it’s not your money) XX75 makes sense unless you need XX95’s core count paired with a 6000.

I’m hardly a hardware expert but that’s my two cents.

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3

I have a 5955WX and been very happy with it…but I came from a trash can/iMac so my bar was pretty low.

Mine has a 3090 and highpoint nvme raid. From what I remember it was around 4minutes on the old benchmark test.

Sure, bigger CPU is rarely a bad thing but I would prioritize GPU and raid first.

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4

GPU is more important than CPU for Flame.

We’re running the P620 with 5955x 16core with A5000 & 128GB RAM in production and they’re great. Can’t say I wish for more grunt power very often. You can also get a much better price on th 12 and 16 cores than the 24 and up.

Here’s another thing to consider. When you do spec up, you can almost get 2x of the above config for the same price. So you buy two, turn one into a burn node, and when you’re rendering you can be working on something else. Or pre-rendering is art of big batches in the background. Probably doesn’t matter in your home use scenario but seriously, pocket the change and go on a small holiday.

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5

@AdamArcher - sage advice

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Did it!
Ended up buying a 5955WX barebones!

Thanks so much guys for your advice!
Next up GPU

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@feganflamer - there’s a fella in Texas that just bought 100,000 H100s and will soon run out of things to do with them - wait until January?

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The xx55s are definitely good enough.

The xx65s are better if you can afford em.

The xx75s are likely the best performance in most flame situations.

The xx95s are unbelievably pricey, but likely not worth the additional cost and can perform worse in some flame tasks than its xx75wx counterpart.

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