Been lurking a while, looking for advice on upgrade routes

General Introductions
1

Good day gents. I have two NASkiller builds so far. My main rig which is a GA-7TESM with dual Xeon X5670s and 64GB RAM. This rig runs my Unraid NAS, Plex Docker, and 3 VMs (Management VM and 2 Game Servers) currently. It’s done incredibly well.

My second NASKiller is a X9SRH-7F with a Xeon E5-2650v2 with 64GB Ram. This rig hosts a single high up-time heavy load game server with lots of players so it’s essentially a dedicated rig with its own UPS, etc.

Anyways, my primary purpose here is I’m looking to build a newer server to replace my Unraid rig that leverages a lot higher core count, higher efficiency (stronger per-core performance per watt) and more RAM because our community is looking to expand to running more active game servers. Essentially something more efficient with more headroom.

I’m thinking at least 32 Core/64 thread which heavily limits the choices on a single CPU, but there are dual CPU options. RAM capacity should be in the 128-256 GB range. Have any of you ran any EPYC servers? Their costs have come down a bit in recent years but I don’t know if their cost/performance is worth it over comparable Xeons?

If you were in my situation, what route would you go?

2

I’ve looked into the EPYC realm. Unless your going to utilize all the available pcie lanes, you’d probably be better with xeon. Have you decided what your budget is and weather you want ddr3 or DDR4? Those probably the two biggest decisions to make that will get you on a track to building a new system.

3

Definitely don’t need a bunch of PCIE lanes and I’m not particular on DDR4 or DDR3. If the move to DDR4 just makes sense for my end-goal I’m in. Core-count, core-performance, and efficiency being my main focus with this. Budget isn’t really a limiter but of course I’d like to be reasonable (not being top of the line gold xeons for instance lol).

I’d be replacing my current Unraid rig so it will take over those duties (NAS + Plex + Management VM) which honestly take up very little of the overall utilization (maybe 8 threads and 16GB RAM). The rest of the machine is devoted to VMs.