What is the better for chess: building a PC with 2 x RTX 3080 or with a Threadripper 3970x ?

[corres]

The price and the power consumption of both PC would be near the same.

[MikeB]

The price and the power consumption of both PC would be near the same.

They do not have have to be mutually exclusive items in your build.
Right click and Select Open in New Window to see readable version

[corres]

The price and the power consumption of both PC would be near the same.

They do not have have to be mutually exclusive items in your build.
Right click and Select Open in New Window to see readable version

Sorry, but the "subtotal" says nothing about the price of every each item. I think about Threadripper 3970x (32 physical core) only. Its price is about the same as the price of 2 x RTX 3080. Other items are common parts of every PC. The power consumption of a Threadripper 3970x OC-ed to 32 X 4.0 GHz is about 700 Watts. It is also the same as 2 x RTX 3080 OC-ed GPUs what needs a cheap "base" PC with 4-8 physical cores and 1200 Watts power supply.
Seeing the CCC competition I can assume the chess power of Leela on 2 x RTX 2080 OC is also the same as SF+NNUE on Threadripper 3970x OC-ed to 32 x 4.0 GHz.
Or you have other opinion?

[MikeB]

The price and the power consumption of both PC would be near the same.

They do not have have to be mutually exclusive items in your build.
Right click and Select Open in New Window to see readable version

Sorry, but the "subtotal" says nothing about the price of every each item. I think about Threadripper 3970x (32 physical core) only. Its price is about the same as the price of 2 x RTX 3080. Other items are common parts of every PC. The power consumption of a Threadripper 3970x OC-ed to 32 X 4.0 GHz is about 700 Watts. It is also the same as 2 x RTX 3080 OC-ed GPUs what needs a cheap "base" PC with 4-8 physical cores and 1200 Watts power supply.
Seeing the CCC competition I can assume the chess power of Leela on 2 x RTX 2080 OC is also the same as SF+NNUE on Threadripper 3970x OC-ed to 32 x 4.0 GHz.
Or you have other opinion?

The site is typical system builder site and you can add or delete items as you choose and it will be reflected in the price and you can also see the plus or minus. You posed an interesting question. I would probably go with the 3970x and then hopefully be able to add a 3080 later. The 3080 caters to one type of engine LcO whereas the 3970x caters to many engines. Good luck!

[OneTrickPony]

Right now ThreadRipper would be stronger but you never know in a few years.
You should also account for cooling. If you plan to run it for an extended period you might need liquid cooling + good fans and that will cost quite a bit.

My setup is ThreadRipper 3970x slightly OC'ed and 3090 GPU. liquid cooling (not for GPU though). I can run both CPU and GPU at max for a long time although it's quite loud then. I have 1200W power supply but it sucks because it's unreasonably loud even when the system isn't very loaded (it's Seasonic and I won't buy another one from them, I plan to swap it to BeQuiet Dark Power soon).

[corres]

The price and the power consumption of both PC would be near the same.

They do not have have to be mutually exclusive items in your build.
Right click and Select Open in New Window to see readable version

Sorry, but the "subtotal" says nothing about the price of every each item. I think about Threadripper 3970x (32 physical core) only. Its price is about the same as the price of 2 x RTX 3080. Other items are common parts of every PC. The power consumption of a Threadripper 3970x OC-ed to 32 X 4.0 GHz is about 700 Watts. It is also the same as 2 x RTX 3080 OC-ed GPUs what needs a cheap "base" PC with 4-8 physical cores and 1200 Watts power supply.
Seeing the CCC competition I can assume the chess power of Leela on 2 x RTX 2080 OC is also the same as SF+NNUE on Threadripper 3970x OC-ed to 32 x 4.0 GHz.
Or you have other opinion?

The site is typical system builder site and you can add or delete items as you choose and it will be reflected in the price and you can also see the plus or minus. You posed an interesting question. I would probably go with the 3970x and then hopefully be able to add a 3080 later. The 3080 caters to one type of engine LcO whereas the 3970x caters to many engines. Good luck!

As a PC builder of my own I need to know the price of every items to make a calculation. It is pity but from many engines there is only one important: the Stockfish with or without NNUE! For weaker engines it is good a weaker (average, gamer) PC also.

[corres]

Right now ThreadRipper would be stronger but you never know in a few years.
You should also account for cooling. If you plan to run it for an extended period you might need liquid cooling + good fans and that will cost quite a bit.

My setup is ThreadRipper 3970x slightly OC'ed and 3090 GPU. liquid cooling (not for GPU though). I can run both CPU and GPU at max for a long time although it's quite loud then. I have 1200W power supply but it sucks because it's unreasonably loud even when the system isn't very loaded (it's Seasonic and I won't buy another one from them, I plan to swap it to BeQuiet Dark Power soon).

I am (and maybe others also) interested to know if you run against each other the SF+NNUE on the Threadripper 32 cores and the Leela ver.0.26.3 with cuda-fp16 backendoptions on your RTX 3090 GPU with the present NET of Leela (J92-330) what will be the result?
The price of an RTX 3090 is about two times of the price of an RTX 3080 but the power of RTX 3090 is only ~20 % higher than the RTX 3080 meanwhile the power of 2 x RTX 2080 is about 1.5 times higher than an RTX 2090.
Obviously the two card power consumption and heat production is about 2 times higher than one card.

[OneTrickPony]

I am (and maybe others also) interested to know if you run against each other the SF+NNUE on the Threadripper 32 cores and the Leela ver.0.26.3 with cuda-fp16 backendoptions on your RTX 3090 GPU with the present NET of Leela (J92-330) what will be the result?

Intuitively SF would win as I run a lot of analysis and SF on 3970x is a beast. That being said if you point me to easy instructions of how to run such match (I mainly run long analysis, not engine matches) I can run that experiment.

I went for 3090 because I wanted a nice GPU and I have some cash on hand. I realize it's bad value for chess (and probably just bad value in general) I am considering adding 2nd one at some point but at least for now one 3090 is plenty. Maybe if next winter is harsh I will add it to heat my work cabinet

[corres]

I have reported a lot of test maiden on my system (16 x 4.0 GHz CPU and 1 x RTX 2080 Ti + 2 x RTX 2060 GPUs)
For engine-engine tests you need
1,the last NVIDIA driver for RTX 3090
2,the fastest Leela .exe and its .DLL file from https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lc0/r ... a-cuda.zip (cuda is the fastest one!)
3, the present Leela-net from https://github.com/JHorthos/lczero-trai ... a-training (the J92-330 net)
4, a good Opening book
My Minibook contains 100 opening positions what puts over practically the whole chess opening repertoir, opposite to the specialized opening book, like Armageddon, Elo-hunter book, TCEC-books, etc. To let the GUI to choose randomly the opening positions from a general book is a bad thing because the results strongly depends on the used openings!
5, to set the tournament time 1min + 2 sec / move
6, engines start games from the opening book playing the opening positions with alternated colors.
Running down the full (200 games) test it consumes about ~ 2 days.

[OneTrickPony]

Thanks, I know how to configure the engines. What I don't know is what is a convenient GUI to run the matches with which doesn't take hours to learn the interface, is possible to pause mid match and preferably isn't just huge pain to deal with (like anything Chessbase or Aquarium for example).