With TR 2950x becoming more affordable recently( only $599) is it worth considering vs purchasing a 3900x? VFIO is one of the main usages along with scientific calculations for astronomy. I would appreciate any thoughts on the subject.
thx
B450 board + 3900 = $580
x299 board + 2950x = $900
Overall performance will be similar though MT performance will generally favor the 2950x and the 2950x has more DIMM slots and IO.
I personally don’t think it’s worth the ~50% price premium though.
The 2950x is available now though; can you buy a 3900x even if you wanted right now?
Looks like it’s out of stock on a number of places.
I got mine a while back off amazon after someone posted there was stock… there WAS stock. It was sold out within 5 minutes.
Ultimately check benchmarks for your workload. One big benefit of Ryzen 3000 is native support for AVX2 256, which was a weak point on previous Ryzens. For scientific or machine learning computing that use linear algebra libraries, that could matter a lot. It’s one reason that dedicated scientific computing builds often still favor Intel.
3900X is a gamer CPU. If you want to do serious work you need a serious CPU.
2 Likes
thanks for the comments…3900x is out of stock while the 2950x is available. I can wait until they are back in. I typically run 1-2 vm’s along with the host. Gaming is one of the main reasons for the purchase. I’ll likely wait for the 3900x to be available. The $599 price for the 2950x is intriguing, who wouldn’t want 16 cores 
If the 3950x is actually available at the end of September for $750, I wonder if the 2950x will get an even bigger discount?
My guess is it will be September 7th. Why you ask? Cause it is my mother f’ing birthday minus one month. 9th month for ryzen 9 and 7th day for 7nm.
Possibly, that’s why i started the thread. If 2950x performs well in comparison to the 3900x for a vfio environment it might be worth going that route as the prices continue to fall.
Let the doxing process begin…
1 Like
I would get the 3900x personally (or wait for 3950x) since you don’t have to deal with NUMA with these chips. 3900x will outperform 2950x for gaming also, and even in some productivity tasks I’ve seen it pull ahead despite the core disadvantage.
Good luck with that. My birthday has come and past already.