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AMD Ryzen 9 3950X or similar AMD platform for forensics

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(@arforensic)
Posts: 5
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Hi,
Maybe someone has tried and has some experience.
How does AMD Ryzen 9 3950X or similar AMD platform processors work with forensic applications eg. X-Ways, Magnet Forensics IEF, UFED 4PC, FTK, Autopsy.
Are there any nuances? Maybe there are some troubles with virtualizing with VirtualBox?
E.g. - If the computer under investigation were INTEL platform and virtualization is attempted on AMD platform.
We've always worked with Intel processors, but we're going to upgrade hardware and buy the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X system.
Thank you for your thoughts and observations.

 
Posted : 04/02/2020 8:17 pm
Passmark
(@passmark)
Posts: 376
Reputable Member
 

I'm using a AMD 3970X at the moment (32 physical cores, 64 virtual cores). 128GB RAM.

There really aren't many tasks that can benefit from 64 cores. Either the disk becomes a bottleneck, single threaded code becomes a bottleneck, network becomes a bottleneck or RAM throughput becomes a bottleneck.

There is a lot of deep low level single threaded code in databases and 3rd party libraries that is hard to fix. Nearly no code is NUMA optimised either. And nearly no code scales to 16+ cores (as up until now, nearly no one had more than 16 cores).

Password cracking can use all the cores, but you are probably still better off doing this on the GPU.

Only use case I can see at the moment is when you need to run up 8+ VMs at a time. And how often does that happen?
Great machine for bragging rights however.

 
Posted : 04/02/2020 11:14 pm
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