I don't see any reason to pick a first-gen Threadripper over one of the latest gen Ryzens. Except maybe if you're going to replace it with another TR4 CPU in the near future. I'd go for the 3700X personally. Again. ;)

When I look for a new CPU, I look for its power consumption and TDP. The 3700X hits the sweet spot there for me: outstanding performance but comparatively moderate power consumption and only a TDP of 65 watt.

Unless you need the extra treads you could save a little and get the ryzen 5 3600x. In the UK they are just under £200 now, and should have comparable performance to the more expensive 3700x, particularly for gaming. Another saving you could make is to get an older generation motherboard, just check with the sellers that it has the latest uefi/bios so that the system will post.
I am currently running an 2700 on a asus prime x370, performance is very close to that of the later motherboards (but in my case the memory can't get higher than 3000Mhz). I picked up the motherboard for £80 from cclonline they flashed the board for free. The main advantage for the latest x570 motherboards is the pci 4, if this is of no interest to you then I suggest you consider the x470 motherboards.
I plan on upgrading in small steps now when budget allows :)
Hope you find this useful.

Before selecting a CPU, think about use cases you'll need it for. And depending on that, decide how many cores you need and how much you are willing to spend on that.

Personally, I wouldn't go to Threadripper, because it bumps the price on motherboards too. If you need something high end, get Ryzen 9 3900X or 3950X.

Last edited by Shmerl on 30 Jan 2020 at 4:09 am UTC

Quoting: ShmerlBefore selecting a CPU, think about use cases you'll need it for. And depending on that, decide how many cores you need and how much you are willing to spend on that.

Personally, I wouldn't go to Threadripper, because it bumps the price on motherboards too. If you need something high end, get Ryzen 9 3900X or 3950X.

Thanks Shmerl! My use cases are primarily gaming at 1080p (on a plasma TV, mind), video streaming/watching, and a bit of (Inkscape, My Paint, Krita) artwork. My fave games are big, open world, graphic intensive ones, more and more of which have been opened up with Proton lately.

More investigation has convinced me that the Threadripper series is just a bit too beyond my sense of what's reasonable to pay, but I will focus on third gen Ryzen, mayhaps 3600 - 3900.

Quoting: tuubiI don't see any reason to pick a first-gen Threadripper over one of the latest gen Ryzens. Except maybe if you're going to replace it with another TR4 CPU in the near future. I'd go for the 3700X personally. Again. ;)

Thanks tuubi! That's exactly what I wanted to hear, and pretty much the way I was leaning. I guess I was dazzled by the name "Threadripper" enough to consider something two gens back. But the thing is that the cost of a more recent generation Threadripper is so high that I wouldn't be able to replace it with anything remotely "new."

I think I'll end up getting the best I can afford in the Ryzen 3600 - 3900 series (and I AM liking the 3700x :) )

Quoting: PlintslîchoWhen I look for a new CPU, I look for its power consumption and TDP. The 3700X hits the sweet spot there for me: outstanding performance but comparatively moderate power consumption and only a TDP of 65 watt.

Thanks Plintslîcho for introducing me to the concept of TDP! Concern about thermal output and avoiding worrying about it or accounting for it with fancy cooling systems is precisely why I've always avoided overclocking.

A few folks have praised the 3700x, so I'll be using that as my point of comparison with other AMD CPUs I'll be looking at. :)

Quoting: buonoUnless you need the extra treads you could save a little and get the ryzen 5 3600x. In the UK they are just under £200 now, and should have comparable performance to the more expensive 3700x, particularly for gaming. Another saving you could make is to get an older generation motherboard, just check with the sellers that it has the latest uefi/bios so that the system will post.

I am currently running an 2700 on a asus prime x370, performance is very close to that of the later motherboards (but in my case the memory can't get higher than 3000Mhz). I picked up the motherboard for £80 from cclonline they flashed the board for free. The main advantage for the latest x570 motherboards is the pci 4, if this is of no interest to you then I suggest you consider the x470 motherboards.

I plan on upgrading in small steps now when budget allows :)
Hope you find this useful.

I have indeed found it useful, Buono! Thank you for taking the time to respond. :)

As it happens, as much as I can afford to, I'd like to get a pretty powerful motherboard, if only because I've been using a pretty outdated (though good) LGA 1050 board for my Intels. Like you, I've been slowly upgrading over the years ;) , so I'd like PCIe4, USB 3 (gen 2 if I can get it), etc. In particular I want a NVMe M2 socket, I have one in my laptop and whooooaaaa boy is it fast.

Quoting: The_Aquabatsome b350/370 motherboards like mine can run pcie 4. but for what it's worth you'll only gain 2 or 3 fps, so it's not really important. If I were you I'll save those bucks for a better gpu instead. Or maybe for better ram, ram frequency matters a lot in AMD. Ram frequency in some cases can give better fps if the game is reliant on memory rather on gpu chip/core speed..

I suppose if you plan to keep your 1070 even with a 2600x you'll notice a lot of improvement I'm just guessestimating maybe 50%/40%, (at least) . When I switched from my old fx 6300 my FPS almost doubled (with the same gpu) but again a fx 6300 it's lot less powerful than your current intel.

I'll probs be getting an x570 mobo, not just for the PCIe4, but for all the little speed improvements likely to be on board: improved RAM frequency, USB3, NVMe M2, etc.

Your comment about how RAM frequency matters with AMD really jumped out at me. That's exactly the sort of insight I was hoping to get by posting this subject. I've got some decent Corsair sticks in there now, but I've no idea what their frequency is. I'll be taking a closer look now, so I'm glad you mentioned that.

I'm pleased, too, to hear your comment about how I might see a jump in FPS from my 1070. I just bought that last year and will be keeping it for the foreseeable future, so it's very exciting to think it'll see new life with my decision to get an AMD CPU! Thanks again! :)

Last edited by Nanobang on 31 Jan 2020 at 1:15 pm UTC

A little off-topic here, but does anyone have links to some reliable tests and the like for the ECC ram usage on Ryzen? (Specifically with Linux & ZFS)

The most 'official' pronouncement that AMD ever made on the topic, is I think the following reddit AMA with AMD engineers: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_creators_of_athlon_radeon_and_other/def6vs2?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x Otherwise there's a dearth of information; at most you get a forum or reddit thread that devolves after a couple of comments into a quarrel between people who are clearly out of their depth, and people who know stuff but can't be bothered to explain anything to their less fortunate peers.

If you are going for an x570 then as far as can tell anything around the £200 mark and above are all good. If you are looking for linux friendly then I'd go for asrock. I do have my eye on the taichi for the future.

Do any benchmarks actually show a noticeable difference between a good x470 and a x570 with the same CPU and RAM? They didn't when I bought mine. Definitely not enough to justify the 100€ difference back then. I used some of that cash to get better RAM instead.

Just to close out this thread. I've decided to either get a 7 3700X or a 9 3900X, both of which are way more than I've currently got, so I'll just keep saving. the 3700X is, of course, amazing --- especially at 65W!

But then again, by the time I've saved that much, I'm within striking distance of the Hive Queen herself: the 3900X. Granted she comes in at 105W, but that's still --- wow --- still so, so cool given her power!

The kicker to all this is that the i7 4790 I'm currently using guzzles a whopping 85W! Yow!

Thanks to everybody who helped me out with guidance and insights; you folks are great! I'll try and remember to post one more time once I've actually made the purchase, sometime in the (hopefully, not too) distant future. :)

Well folks and friends, I put in my order for my new AMD CPU today! It cost me about the same as my first entire gaming computer build to buy it and a new AMD motherboard, but I believe it's worth it.

In the end I bought the mighty [Ryzen 9 3900X](https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07SXMZLP9/?coliid=I1P7DA84XYCHNW&colid=42AV5FZ0IO07&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it)! Back and forth, back and forth I danced between this and the righteous, much more efficient Ryzen 7 3700X. In the end, the angelic choir singing "Holy, holy, holy, 12 core, 24 thread, 70MB GameCache almighty, Aaaaaamen!" seduced me.

To house this heavenly tabernacle of divine power, I ordered a [Gigabyte X570 AORUS Elite](https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07SVRZGMX/?coliid=I2SSJABAWV65RG&colid=42AV5FZ0IO07&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it) motherboard.

So, that's it. Goodbye to my Intel i7 4950 and the old Asus mobo it's been living in, and hello to (what I hope will be) the last CPU I'll need for a long time. Thank you, again, to everyone that helped and guided me with this very big decision. Change, in any form, requires strength, so thank you, too, for sharing with me the strength of your experience.

And thank you, lastly, to Liam for this wonderful space for Linux gamers!

Last edited by Nanobang on 23 Feb 2020 at 4:57 pm UTC

Yep, went 3900x as well. Figured with compiling, rust development and some other stuff can make use of the extra cores plus higher max boost on a single core. Also went with the same motherboard. Seems to be working fine for me and like the quality of the board so far! Enjoy the mobo! Only thing I adjusted was the fan curve(you can adjust this in the bios, there is an F? key that takes you right to it), basically let it be a more gradually ramp up of speed so it isn't such a spin up when the temperature spikes.

Enjoy!