Reddit mentions of Supermicro MBD-H11SSL-I-O Socket SP3/ System on Chip/ DDR4/ SATA3&USB3.0/ V&2GbE/ ATX Motherboard

Hokay. First, you're focused on core count, but have you actually run a significant number of VMs before? I'm doing quite a few on a pair of E5-2640s, and I literally had to give a VM 6 cores to see any real usage, and that was during game-world generation for 7 Days to Die (which is a voxel-style game). Note, I've only got 12 cores, and ESXi turned off hyperthreading due to Spectre/Meltdown bugs.

What I do tend to use the heck out of though, is RAM. I've got 128GB of RAM and the 2x6 cores at 2.5GHz. I'm running 8 VMs right now, including three seriously overspec'd VMs for gaming (left over from troubleshooting Minecraft issues) with 4 cores and 8GB each. Current CPU usage is showing 2.84 out of 30GHz used, and 54.19 out of 127.97GB of RAM usage.

Lesson: Get lots of memory slots. Also PCIe support.

All that said, if you have the means to pull it off, yes, go with Epyc. Between the PCIe lanes and the core counts, plus the standard server memory options, you are going to be well placed for quite a long time. I'm a Supermicro fan, so that would be my preference, though Asrock Rack is supposedly not terrible. For Supermicro, you'd want H11DSi or H11DSi-NT. Note, if you're willing to skip on the 2nd CPU (which won't change your PCIe availability because of the way Epyc communicates between CPUs), you'd be able to get a much cheaper motherboard (H11SSL and variant, for around $380 on Amazon it opens the door for much more capable CPUs - Like the 7351P or 7401P - for far cheaper than you might otherwise get. It would also let you get an ATX form factor motherboard, which means the Chenbro is an option again.

Otherwise, go with E5-26xx v3/v4 CPUs and Supermicro LGA2011-3 boards (usually X10DRi or X10DRH variants). That means going with a larger case than the Chenbro, but in my mind it's worth it - the X10DRL-i is an ATX board, but it's only got 4 RAM slots per CPU instead of 8 (or 12 in some cases) like the X10DRi/X10DRH boards. It might be worth it to look at the X11 boards as well, but given the cost of Intel CPUs, you may be rather limited.

I would generally ignore Threadripper just because of airflow issues with the RAM orientation, though if you don't think it's an issue (which it might not be with a tower cooler) then an X399 motherboard and a 2950X is a pretty good option as well. Also, if you can get a Ryzen 3950X, you can pair it with an Asrock Rack X470D4U and have a server-grade AM4 board.

Hello folks, I've decided to switch from Intel platform to AMD and assemble a powerful workstation. But I have a problem with it, maybe you can help me.

I've got AMD PS740PBEAFWOF, Supermicro MBD-H11SSL-I-O (and the vendor specs), NEMIX RAM MEM-DR464L-SL01-ER32, EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 FTW graphics, 1000W power supply.

I followed the assembly instructions and i've god non-booting hardware. The display say "No signal", VGA LEDs are flashing, the motherboard BMC heartbeat LED is flashing green (it means OK), CPU fan goes on low speed for a while and then goes speedup/slowdown oscillation.

I followed the motherboard manual and reset the BIOS setting. No luck...

I've changed memory to another set of ECC (2666MHz), I tested another power supply, graphics is good as I used for a year at my other computer, I replaced the motherboard and situation is still the same.

I am looking for any advise on why my system behaves this way. I ordered a POST code card to make debugging easier, it is on the way but ebay shipping is painfully slow.

For now I have a few ideas:

• CPU is bad, it is the only major component that I did not change yet. Solution is to buy another EPYC cpu and try it.
  
• some of my components are incompatible. I checked the memory and it seems in MB spec. PCIe graphics should also just work.
  
• some cabling is not properly connected. I read through MB manual and checked/replugged all the cabling but it did not help.