Good sirs,
I’m looking for a homelab server with a lot of cores. Mainly need virtual machines for testing/dev/replicating of customer issues with K8s. Since I’m spending my own cash I would like to keep it as cheap as possible.
In 2025, is the 3960x still worth buying for a home server? Should I instead get a 5950x? or lastly should I get Zen 5 cpu. Any advice is appreciated.
Unless you need the PCIe lanes probably not. The 24 zen2 cores in the 3960x are for most purposes less powerful than 16 zen4 or 5 cores. Is it 1k for the CPU or is it a bundle with motherboard and RAM? If you find a good price for a bundle it may still be worth it. If it’s just the CPU I’d probably go for a 9950X with however much RAM you need (try to get 2 high density sticks if you can make do with 128GB).
Getting a 5950X may make sense if you have an AM4 board laying around, otherwise I’d go straight for an AM5 platform.
Thanks for the reply! I should have been more detailed. The 3960x 1K price is for a used bundle; cpu, mobo, ram, psu, case and a crap gpu. Would need some cleanup/maintenance.
On the 5950x front, I have 2 am4 motherboards lying around. I guess I could do 2 5950x cpus and get more ram. Each mobo has 16gb only.
If you just need cores and medium amounts of RAM, go Ryzen desktop.
If you need some cores and lots or PCIe, 8004-series Epyc starts at 450€ for the 8 core part (with mobo, 1200-ish).
So complete system in need of an afternoon worth of maintenance? Not a bad deal, I’d say.
That seems like a decent deal (depending on where you live?). To get similar capacity for VMs you’d need a 16 core AM5 system I think. 16 core AM4 would have a lot less memory bandwidth.
Not sure where you live but you could look at what a basic AM5 system would cost you (not sure about the amount of memory?) Assuming you don’t need the PCIe connectivity that might make more sense. It might only be 100-200 more for a 7950x + a decent B650(E) motherboard… Depends maybe on how much ram the kit has/you need. If it’s only a couple hundred more I’d tend to go new or maybe negotiate the threadripper’s price down a bit.
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