Lets continue, “with what?”
I was torn between 3950x and 3960x.
Here is my pros/cons that applies to my needs:
3950x, actually it simply applies to AM4 platform
- All the mobos, including ASUS WS mobo (https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Pro-WS-X570-ACE/) have very low PCIe connectivity. Basically 1 GPU, 1-2 NVME, and 1-3 other mixed sizes PCI slots. Not for me. Not after ASUS X99-E WS
- LSI controller x8, Intel NVMe 750 x8, 2 GPUs x8 is the minimum I needed.
- Very, very uninteresting configurations of NIC interfaces, I do not think I found any mobo that had 2x Intel LAN.
- Some fancy 2.5-10GB configurations are there, main characteristics of those are:
- cheap chip of cheap-chip company
- most common cheap 10G NIC driver support description I found: “garbage”
- for me it is important because if I would like to to something other than Windows 10 workstation then driver support and simple NIC support becomes a thing that many other NICs lack (e.g. BSD and ESXi support for ther NICs)
- RAM only 4 slots enough for 128GB but then again: all slots occupied and that has impact on extensibility and OC.
- At least compared to TRX40 platform, its cheaper
- Most importantly, if PCIe connectivity was better, then it was at some costs, e.g worse NICs (mainly probably due to the PCIe lanes limitation and price).
TRX40 platform (at least for current state of the market).
- More lanes, more cores, bigger money black hole
- None of the mobos, except one, has 2x Intel NICs
- Most of the boards have somewhat good PCIe slot configuration (placement, size), but none of them is even close to that X99-E WS
- for me it is important after mobo with PLX chips - everything except 1GB NICs that I have in VM hosts requres at least 4x/8x slot.
- most of the missing PCIe connectivity went into M.2 slots.
- PCIe 4.0 is new and more requiring, so this probably at least for the first wave of TRX40 boards has huge impact.
I have chosen:
- Threadripper 3960x
- Gigabyte TRX40 Arous Extreme
- At first I missed this board, but thanks to @ahowell (New workstation build), I’ve finally found board with not just 2x 1G Intel NICs, but 2x 10G (future proofing), and also Intel’s WIFI6 (I do not need it, but sometimes I use WIFI dongle in WS), and 4 PCIE 4.0 slots of size 16x (16x, 16x, 8x, 8x electronically).
- founding this mobo (or more precisely its configuration - PCIe/LAN) was the tripping point in the decision making).
- 128GB ram 3200 (4x32GB)
- Sansung 970 Pro 1T - system
- Optane 480GB 900p - projects volume
- Moving from old WS:
- 1080Ti
- Samsung 970 EVO 1T (system drive from old - it actually is only 3 months since I purchased it )
- LSI SAS 16 ports.
- 400Gb Intel 750 NVMe or Quadro K1200 - both will not fit - I will need to compromise, but I can live with it.
Fun fact #2 - I think now every board has RGB. The only difference is, if it is RGB vomit or just small burp.