Need help deciding: 9950x3d or Threadripper?

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I am happy this place exists. Really, there is nothing like it. So please, if you have a minute, tell me what you think.

In Short:

I am trying to decide between starting a build of either x870e system with 9950X3D, or going the workstation route and building a Threadripper system.

If you run Threadripper, do you game on it? Has it impacted your FPS in a significant way?

In Long:

I am running 11900k system, all under custom loop, its been working flawlessly for 4 years. But with tariffs on the horizon, I want to get the components that are available now before price potentially increases. Also Rust compiler is not getting any faster, and I need more cache and cores so I don’t have to sit there staring at console instead of editing code.

I am often switching between two m.2 drives, one running Debian (for web dev and custom AI stuff), and other Windows, for more general windows dev/ui design and games. The selection of x870e motherboards is a bit underwhelming… I want to add another m.2 drive (resulting in total of 4) to move gaming OS (W11) to a dedicated drive. And here is the problem…

With exception of x870e Taichi board (which is out of stock everywhere atm), and MEG Godlike (which is $1k USD), the lane allocation seems to be borderline silly. Installing a 3rd drive on some of these boards (i.e. Aorus Master), seems to downgrade x16 bandwith on primary PCIE slot. The variations of this behavior are present on pretty much every board I’ve looked at. Its a compromise after compromise. Some of these boards make you choose between having functional USB slots, m.2 drive or a secondary PCIE.

After days of looking at these specs and reading mobo manuals… I am seriously considering biting the bullet and getting 7960x and a real motherboard that has no such limitations (because Threadripper has no shortage of lanes).

But looking at gaming benchmarks, its not looking great. Seems like the hit is as bad as 30% in some games. But on the other hand I don’t have to worry about ever running out of device capacity, and can add hardware as needed (like keeping my 3090 when 5090 comes out).

I run 5000 series Threadripper at work, and its been an amazing workstation.

What do you think? Is gaming on Threadripper that bad?

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If you’re spending your own money and this is primarily for gaming - don’t go thread ripper.

You’re going to be burning more power, you’re going to be generating more internal heat in the machine which will potentially impact clocks on everything else in the box, you’re going to likely not get 3d v-cache. You’re going to be on an older CPU architecture as well, even without the 3d v-cache considerations.

There’s no getting around it - thread ripper has more cores, but they’re not the most recent cores and the product is aimed at workstation tasks where core count is king.

If it’s a workstation as well, or primarily … fine. But given the usage you’re mentioning here I very much suspect it will be a case of spending a lot more money for a worse result on the things you’re actually using the machine for which sounds like gaming/low-ish thread count work in a home environment.

tldr: I’d save the money and go consumer platform. Spend the money you would have spent on a thread ripper at massively more system cost on replacing SSDs with larger ones instead of adding more SSDs (to reduce lane count consumption).

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I don’t do anything nearly as high-end as you’re talking here, so with that qualifier let me ask the obvious question…

Why not use two separate systems? Can a threadripper handle your AI stuff? You can get a lot more ram on a threadripper than on a 3090, and I wonder if it’ll rip through your machine learning better anyway. I know this is a workstation/gaming system which is doable, but recent considerations mean you have to make compromises somewhere to do both. In your case two boxes and a KVM sounds like a nice solution. And when you buy the 5090, you’ll have two cards anyway.

My own experience is only tangentially related. I had a gaming machine / home server in one setup for a while, and it annoyed me enough that they are now two systems. Much happier. I don’t use the gaming machine AT ALL for workstation stuff and it now stays nice and clean - I just fire up an X session on the server and remote in if it’s something I need a GUI for.

Just for thought.

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Obv. these newer gen Threadrippers, can [comfortably] handle gaming, compared to older Zens
This system would be severely underutilized, if isn’t doing other things, on the backend

Would doing two distinct X3D systems, be up your alley? [KVM up, if wanting 1 set of peripherals]
Having gamer stack bias to L3/cores [9800-3D] and work-centric heavy on cores [7950/9950-3D]

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Hard to tell the 9950X3D isn´t released yet.

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Is your main issue with an AM5 platform just the NVMe slots available?

If so, look into x670e options, one of those should allow you to use more NVMes without having to sacrifice something else.

With x870 AMD made USB4 mandatory, and most (if not all) manufacturers are using 4 lanes out of the CPU to implement it, instead of wiring it through the chipset. x670e doesn’t have such limitation, and those 4 lanes can be used for another PCIe 5.0 NVMe without issues.

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I actually game on a current gen threadripper 7000, and I would say it all comes down to whether you need the PCIE lanes of Threadripper or not. To me, its just not practical to have more than a video card and a single NVME drive on the consumer products from AMD and Intel. Having said this, Threadripper is very expensive (comparatively) if you really cant take advantage of the extra PCIE lanes, cores, memory bandwidth.

Additionally, I also have an Intel Sapphire Rapids 2495x, 14900k, in addition to the 7970X system.

I have hundreds of youtube videos posted of me playing The Finals and Battlefield 2042 on all the systems mentioned above. All the ones within the last 2 months have been on the 7970x:

Channel:

Video using 7970x:

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Thanks guys. Appreciate your thoughts.

Upgrading to 9950x3d first seems like the wiser choice. Will try to snipe that taichi lite board or as @igormp suggesting x670e.

The unfortunate USB choice AMD made seems to be forcing every manufacturer to go with ALC408# for sound, and those chipsets are notoriously bad in Linux, if supported at all. This is another thing that is giving me second thoughts.

I’ve never had 2 system setup, it seems annoying to have to switch. But if it really bugs me I’ll upgrade again when Shimada Peak comes out and sell off 9000 series componentry.

Thanks again for your advice… I’ll chill for now, and research x670e boards.

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I’m in a similar boat as you, but instead I’m more interested in having 2 GPUs running at max bandwidth, rather than stuffing a system with nvme drives. Threadripper would be the best choice in theory, but like the rest of the people here said, if your primary (or one of the primary) use cases is gaming, you might not want to go that route. Also the platform costs as much as a used car to invest into, which is a huge bummer at least for me. I myself don’t know what platform will I go with one I’m ready to build a new system, but I think you should have a good experience with a 7950x3d. Sadly I don’t think we’ll see threadrippers with 3D v-cache anytime soon.

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Sadly I don’t think we’ll see threadrippers with 3D v-cache anytime soon.

TechPowerUp apparently predicts otherwise.

Pretty sure this is the result of leaked BIOS manual pages referencing 3Dvcache configuration options:

It makes a measure of sense considering EPYC’s existing 3Dvcache SKU’s.

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Thats a very valid consideration.

Another is spending less on consumer platform and with the money saved, upgrade sooner. Today’s thread ripper is likely going to be outperformed by consumer platform inside 3 years or so, especially so at lower thread count.

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While I agree with your argument that the mandatory USB4 is a con for going with x870, I think another consideration is how well an x670 board could handle faster and denser memory with a 9000 chip plugged into it. I can tell you that I still can’t get faster than 3600 speed with 4x32GB sticks on my 7950x in an x670e board. People have been saying that a 9000 chip in an x870 board can get 6000+ with that memory. Is an x870 board necessary for that? Or can a 9000 CPU in a x670 board get that memory speed?

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I’m scared at the thought of the price they’d have…

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Seems mostly about IO die luck in the silicon lottery. Mobos appear to be of little importance until 7000+ and the chipset’s functionally irrelevant as it’s not on the DDR bus. Quad 6000 M-die’s been happening on entry level boards since Raphael.

X870(E) might improve the odds a bit but probably the main factors Granite Ridge benefits from are N6 process maturity on the IO die and AGESA maturation. Both should apply also to current Raphael production, though I suspect Granite might get higher bin IO dies.

In benching up Zen 4 the workloads I look at (all core scalar, AVX, and AVX-512 varying from mostly in cache to DDR bound) are pretty responsive through 3600, 4000, 4400, and 4800 with diminishing return at 5200. Zen 5 shows some benefit at 5600 but the real world DDR bound workload gain to 6000 I’m getting’s only like ~1.5%.

So I wouldn’t get too hung up on 6000 per se.

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Just to be clear, I don’t necessarily think it’s a con. I prefer USB4, and my current mobo does have it, so an x870 mobo would suit me fine since I don’t require a 2nd NVMe running at 5.0 speeds.
I just tried to make the lane usage clear on the different chipsets.

With that said, in theory the memory controller in both 7000 and 9000 series is the same. Maybe some extra node maturity could give this extra stability, go figure.
As for the mobo, I’m not aware of many differences other than maybe improved trace layout? That wouldn’t have much relation with the chipset itself anyway, since its only job is the extra peripherals of the mobo.

I haven’t found many reports of 9000+x870e managing to run at 128gb@6000+ anyway, would you mind linking where did you find those?

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Layout’s an X870 marketing bullet, yeah, but the changes may benefit 1DPC 1R at 2DPC 2R’s expense. While ASRock, Gigabyte, and Asus provide only 1DPC 1R headline specs, MSI’s much more transparent.

DIMMs 670 board spec 870 board spec
1DPC 1R Pro X670-P 7800+ Pro X870-P 8200+
1DPC 1R X670 Gaming Plus 7800+ X870 Gaming Plus 8400+
1DPC 1R X670 Tomahawk 7800+ X870 Tomahawk 8400+
1DPC 1R X670E Carbon 7800+ X870E Carbon 8400+
1DPC 1R X670E Godlike 8000+ X870E Godlike 8400+
1DPC 2R { all 5 } 6400 { all 5 } 6400
2DPC 1R { all 5 } 6400 { all 5 } 6400
2DPC 2R { all 5 } 5400 { all 5 } 4800
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So in theory a 9000 CPU with a x670 mobo (at least from MSI) should manage to achieve higher memory clocks compared to x870? Interesting.

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There are x670e motherboards with USB4 available too. Off the top of my head the Asus Proart and Crosshair hero, and the Taichi. They might get bandwith limited a bit due to the controller being connected to the chipset but it shouldn’t be noticeable unless you’re using both ports heavily at the sime time, like copying onto two external SSDs at the same time.

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Yep. Or maybe MSI was getting too many support cases on 2DPC 2R not reaching 5400 and decided to quietly reset expectations even though the 870s boards are still good for 5400.

Hard to tell on this one, unless you happen to know the right people at MSI (or one of the other mobo manufacturers), I think.

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This forum is continually amazing, there is no one in my life that thinks about these things deeper than “I’ve always used AsRock/Asus/* take my money”. And here are angles I haven’t thought about.

Shimada Peak having gaming performance of 9000 series would be great, and would be worth the wait, but its an imaginary bird in the sky at the moment. Might be waiting for nothing.

The other issue is, have you tried shopping for ASRock X870E Taichi Lite AM5? Its not in stock anywhere. You can get it from scalpers for just under double its MSRP, but nothing on any major stores. MicroCenter lists its RGB brother, which is +$50, which would be ok I guess… (I turn it all off anyway), but it hasn’t been in stock for over a month. Other brands for this chipset are in stock everywhere.

Hope I find it before tariffs arrive.

@Dank_Vader why do you need 2 full speed GPUs?

@Qwinn huh… ok, another topic to dive into… memory speeds on 650’s. Thanks man.