I have X11DPH-T-P motherboard and 384Gb of DDR4 3933MHz memory. I wondering what would be the best solution for me?
Which way would work better you think?
Mad max plotter with two ram drives.
I don’t know about the plotting performance of these series CPU, but they seem rather expensive.
I would check around to see how they perform before spending on it.
If you don;t have many cores, keep to 1 madmax plot at a time, this is what it is designed to do. I believe you will only see good results from running more than 1 madmaxplot at a time if you have a lot of CPU power to spare.
So I don’t know why you would want to run the official plotter when you have more cores, Madmax (or Bladebit if you upgrade memory) is still the way to go imo.
For example, my 2x E5-2680v2 (20 cores, 40 thread total) runs a madmax plot in under 30 minutes, CPU utilization 90%.
I believe madmax can use all cores of the processors with hyperthreading. Is this correct?
yes that’s correct.
Some people do see better total results of running madmax plots in parallel, you can find the topics on the forum.
I think it’s up to the specific system, where it is bottlenecked if that will be beneficial or not. Generally, just run one plot with madmax, it will use full cpu power
Plotting fast is one thing. But I think you should invest more in farming. That’s where the money is.
However, to answer your question. With 384GB of RAM, I would go with MadMax and set -t to RAM (-2 is -t by default). You can plot entirely on RAM since -t and -2 peak disk usage is less than 256 GiB.
You can go with any CPU that is supported by your motherboard. Going faster than you can transfer your plot to the farming HDD would be pointless.
I think the cost of ram is way too expensive.
You can buy nvme/ssd and burn a couple of them, and have plots for farming earlier.
Here’s an alternative to consider >
You have the opportunity to do this right. Don’t waste it being constrained by that motherboard you happen to have. With the outlay for those Intel CPUs alone, you could buy a system or DIY parts that performs plotting/farming, easily, quickly, low running cost, updated support, etc., etc… and add some plot storage. For example, with MadMax, a 16 core or better AMD Ryzen or Threadripper system, w/min 16GB memory you could be pumping out up to 60 plots a day with only a couple good PCI-E 4.0 nvmes. Get more cores/memory and do even more.
The right tools make plots more efficiently to earn and keep more XCH faster.
Could you expand on your setup?
I have 2x E5-2985 (about the same performance, but 12 cores/24 logical) and 256GB RAM (8x32GB). However, when I install the second processor, everything slows down.
With just one CPU, I am able to get 40-41 minutes per plot. When the second CPU is installed, it is pushing an hour.
I use 110GB RAM drive for tmp2 (ImDisk), and Samsung 970 NVMe for tmp1. It is on Win10 Pro.
I first tried SuperMicro mb, but it was really bad - much slower. Right now, I am on Dell t7610 (kind of also bad, as the exhaust of CPU1 is 1" in front of the CPU2 intake (they are perfectly aligned 
so the second CPU runs about 20C hotter (pushing 90C.
Looking at the board diagram, NVMe is on CPU1 PCIe lines. Also, each CPU has its own 128GB. So, my understanding was that reaching across those CPUs for either RAM drive or NVMes slows everything down.
Honestly I can’t help you too much there, I really don’t know much about server system. I bought this system secondhand from another guy. I only replace the CPU’s for the current ones.
What I do know is that many people reported bad performance from Windows ramdisk vs Ubuntu.
But a second CPU should not slow it down thought. There are some ppl around here that know about this stuff though, Numa nodes and such
This was the original setup:
So you just run Ubuntu as is and just one instance of MM spanning all 40 logical cores?
Yeah, I started to read about NUMA as well, but am still in the woods with that.
Yes just that.
Made ramdisk with the command that is in the madmax description and thats it.
Thank you @Voodoo!!
I have just installed Ubuntu, and the first run is 30:06 (no tweaking, so there may be some room for improvements).
While plotting, I also used the box to make some tee, as it was drawing 400-450W 