First post, be gentle? 🙂
Debated writing this at all because on one hand I view it as free tech support and thus reward for bad behavior. On the other, people should really be warned.
First, to be clear I'm not an electrical engineer, nor do I follow the myriad of forms online surrounding hardware in general. Quite frankly I find many of them to be filled with more trolls / marketing people ready to pounce on newbs, then actually helpful. On with it though...
I bought into Threadripper not to necessarily be the fastest, but on par with Intel for quite a bit less. The workloads I throw at it scales for the most part already and I'm quite aware of NUMA, scheduling, etc... I needed more cores, pure and simple. Since it was an entirely new platform I expected some churn and costs. What I wasn't expecting was feeling like a beta test drone for hardware that costs several thousand between CPU, Memory, Board, etc. In the end, I ended up with:
- Swapping 3 power supplies
Currently on using a fraction of a 1.5kW EVGA PSU as it got rid of coil whine on the 1080s
- Swapping 2 montherboards, owning two
By far the biggest headaches came from this. Replaced two Gaming 7 boards before giving up/in to the Zenith Extreme.
Getting bit by what I'm finding are bugs other people have noticed like the HPET timer (seriously, wtf?) - that alone wasted about a week of testing as it was randomly affecting VMs. Latest issue is the board doesn't appear to support two 1080TI's. When I try both of them it throws up an error 82 - VGA BIOS Load Fail? Individually both cards work!
The other major issue with both boards (Aorus and Asus), are pcie errors. Reported by others as well but again point to more hardware problems then software. Interestingly enough in the process of trying to find out what was going on with the 1080s, I found disabling (dip switches) the first PCIE slot on at least the Zenith, completely eliminated the PCIE errors!
I'm now at a point where I have to rip the Asus board apart so I can RMA the damn thing (eta from Asus is 1 month)
- 4 video cards replaced due to faulty hardware
Technically EVGA boards but still, what a nightmare. Talking $1k+ hardware alone, for each.
- RAM swapped, twice due to not being detected
Drove two and a half hours to get RAM. Crazy. Only other option was waiting a week + for shipping.
- 2 failed 10TB drives, DOA
Segate Ironwolfs . Never again (ZFS rocks)
- Many km wasted driving to different Canada Computers locations for parts
Boggles my mind how centralized hardware has become. There are literally only a few vendors I can buy from and only one has physical locations. Down sides is several of their locations are quite racist but I won't get into that here.
- Many, many hours wasted tinkering
At one point I disconnected any storage and even GPUs to save on their constant power cycling because especially when it came to the RAM, good god was there a lot. At least Asus is addressing some of the random rebooting in BIOS updates (thought it was related to the auto overclocking).
Either I got very unlucky with hardware or the platform simply is unstable / rushed. I'd expect and hope those issues are ironed out but this little experience will forever be in the back of my head when buying hardware again. Hardware vendors should not be patting themselves on the back over this. Had it not been for a few youtube channels like Level1techs doing the grunt work testing, it's unlikely you'd have those sales.
tl;DR - Is or was anyone bitten by the quirk with running two 1080TI's in this board?