[youseppe]

Dear all,


For my thesis, my lab has given me a budget to set up a workstation for my work (and for them for the future)


The budget allows me to go for a 14-core CPU (we can afford a ~1000-1300 $ CPU), and I am a bit lost in the choice to be honest.


For now I foresee an Intel Xeon w-2275, but I was wondering if going for a Xeon, instead of an i9 for example, or maybe a similar price AMD (Epyc 7302p?) is worth it.
The only advantage I see in the Xeon (and the Epyc) for the moment is the ECC option, does it really make a difference ?


Thank you very much for your help

[flotus1]

So Ansys Fluent it is... how many parallel licenses do you have access to, i.e. how many cores does your workstation need?
Is there really just a budget for the CPU? Does that mean there is no budget for the rest of the workstation, or that there is no limit?

[youseppe]

We have access to the HPC license with a max of 512 cores

For our budget (around 3400 Swiss francs which is around 3700$), and given the price of the rest of the components, we estimated the budget for the CPU

Thank you

[flotus1]

Then I would highly recommend an Epyc 7402P (24 cores, ~1280€).
It will outclass any CPU for socket 2066 in parallel CFD, while still being fast enough for pre- and post-processing tasks.
Pair it with at least 8x8GB DDR4-3200 reg ECC to make use of all 8 memory channels.
Don't buy UDIMM, Epyc CPUs only work with RDIMM.

If that's too expensive, you could step down to a 7302P at around 900€. But if you asked me, those 400€ extra are money well spent for 50% more cores.