I believe this is best alternative at the moment for my next Proxmox build, threadripper is out reach for me and Ryzen doesn’t have the PCI lanes or memory channels. So I guess my best option is a 7542 + Supermicro MB + 128G for about $1,000.
Yeah, I’ve got my eye on a 7452 (seems like a good balance for core count and TDP) and a H12SSL (PCIe 4, and an upgrade path to Gen3 - although the power draw doesn’t make that super attractive)
I bought a Naples (Gen 1) Epyc CPU and mobo from eBay back in 2021. My understanding is that it was from Chinese data centers clearing out to make room for Rome (Gen 2), since they would have been running Naples for a while and it probably made sense to upgrade.
Overall, the experience was fine, although I will note the CPU was rather lightly packaged and the description didn’t make it clear if it came with the plastic alignment piece to install the CPU – it did.